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Tuesday, July 6. 2004
The best owner in sports, period 
| | If you want a Cluetrain Model CEO, I offer Mark Cuban as Exhibit A through Z. The man gets the clues, huge time; and he delivers them, by the trainload, on his blog, whenever he feels like it. Right or wrong, he puts it all out there, filtered by nothing other than his own fingers. |
| | In the process he's blowing up sportswriting, agent relations, and a pile of other conventions, and almost nobody in the mainstream media are talking about it — not that I can find, anyway. While sportswriters, for example, pulpitize speculatively from the outside about what This Team or That Player are up to, Mark is an owner who tells you exactly what's up. As Scoble puts it, Mark flies his dirty laundry like a flag. Or all his laundry, apparently. The man is, if nothing else, disclosing. In torrents. |
| | On top of the media, I don't have the greatest relationship with his agent. I¹m not a big fan of his and he knows it. There have been multiple times where we have expressed an interest in players of his, and he has placed them other places without even talking to us first. I¹m not sure how or why we got to this point, but last summer was a perfect example. We asked him about Olowakandi, and he told us he didn¹t think he would be available for the mid-level exception. Next thing you know, he signs for the mid-level exception with the TWolves... |
| | We asked Steve's agent to get us information on how much money he was looking for. Not unexpectedly, rather than giving us "his price", he faxed us a presentation that really set the tone for what we were up against. These presentations, which agents love to do, would get laughed at in any normal business environment. They show all kinds of numbers and stats reflecting a player¹s performance. What makes them unusable from our perspective is, as you would expect from a player¹s agent, it only shows the numbers that reflect the player¹s performance positively. It¹s not an honest assessment at all. What makes these presentations dangerous is that they always only include salary comparisons that only include players whose salaries are at the top of the pay scale.The performance comparisons included Chauncey Billups, Sam Cassell, Jason Williams, Gary Peyton, Tony Parker and Rafer Alston among other point guards, but the salary "comps" only included those point guards who were maxed out or very close — Jason Kidd, Baron Davis, Mike Bibby, etc. What makes these things dangerous is that the agents show them to the players and use them to set the players' contract expectations. |
| | It¹s easy to find stats that make Steve Nash look good. There are a ton of them. It¹s easy to see the intangibles that make Steve Nash valuable. What is difficult is to make honest assessments about where the team is and where it is going and how Steve or any player fits into a championship. |
| | On the intangibles side, Steve is a great guy to have in the locker room. He gets along with everyone. He isn't going to give a locker room speech. He isn't going to get in anyone's face. He isn¹t going to get into other people's business. He is definitely what I would call a quiet leader. He leads by example. He is the kind of guy anyone in any business would want to go to war with. He gives 120 pct and all of his teammates see that. |
| | So on the intangible side, Steve is incredibly valuable. |
| | It's also that kamikaze spirit and approach to the game that is Steve's greatest weakness. The most improbable stat from Steve Nash is how few games he has missed in the last few years. I have seen the pain he goes through before, during and after games, yet he still manages to trot out there and play at an incredibly high level. To protect Steve, Nellie has tried to limit Steve's minutes to 33 to 35 per game, with the goal of getting that number lower and lower every year. It¹s why we drafted Devin Harris. It's why we would draft a point guard at all. We have Marquis Daniels as our backup point. Yet we still felt that we needed to have another point guard on the roster. We wanted to have someone who could come in and play this year, plus be trained by Steve as our point guard of the future. This would allow us to use Steve more effectively and reduce his chance of injury. Our feeling was that we were fortunate that Steve had been so injury free. That it was only a matter of time before his style of play caught up with him. |
| | I'll stop there. It goes on. And on. For 4,400 words. And that's just Part One. |
| | Dig: Here we have a journal that reads like a deposition, yet constitutes the most in-depth and compelling sportswriting, anywhere, today. Amazing. |
Anonymization
| | We've opened up comments to anonymous contributors over at IT Garage. That gives folks who aren't allowed to talk about their DIY-IT work a convenient place to say something. |
One more reason to hate the word "solution"
| | Got pointed to Tom Munnecke's blog, by Tom, in a brilliant email he wrote to a list I'm on. Without his permission, but with faith that what he says is also somehow said in longer form on his blog, I'm lifting his first paragaph: |
| | Our understanding of security is shaped by anti-terrorism. Our understanding of "peace" is shaped by war. Our educational standards are shaped by avoiding failure ("no child left behind"). Our health care system is shaped by disease. This framing creates Problem Industrial Complexes which thrive on the growth or existence, not the reduction, of the problem. We lack the language or the systems approaches to take action without a "problem definition." |
Nine 2 go
Bringing to one the number of Democratic candidates capable of exciting a crowd
Where's my saddle?
And the living is easy
| | Jeez, it's July 6 already. The Summer is going too fast. |
| | I wonder if the blueberries are ripe yet in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, where I spent my summers as a kid. In those days the Pine Barren region stretched to the edges of Barnegat Bay. Where we lived is now the town of Brick. Back then it was Brick Township. The woods in which I grazed on blueberries and huckleberries (which comprised the forest floor) are now almost entirely paved. |
| | Back then it was a rural paradise. |
| | That's a pitch pine behind my mom in this picture here. Here we are (and here again) at "The Shack" a tiny summer place in nearby Cedarwood Park that my grandparents built in the 1930s. Amazingly, it's still there. |
| | Sadly, the "Wanigan" — a house comprised mostly of found windows, old boards and cinder blocks (as you can see here), which my father built with my Uncle Archie in 1949 (when I was two), was razed not long after we sold it in 1962. My grandmother and great aunt Florence's houses, not far away, followed a few years later. Those woods, which I knew so intimately that I hardly ever lost a game of hide and seek, have been replaced by the buildings and parking lots in the middle of this aerial photo. |
| | Pictured in the link at the top of the last paragraph are my cousins Ron and Sue Apgar, plus my sister Jan and myself in a wheelbarrow with our dog Sparky, whom I got as an 8th birthday gift when he was a puppy. Three years later, on Labor Day weekend, our last before returning home for the next school year, Sparky was killed by a car. Three years earlier our prior dog, Kim, met the same fate. Their graves, along with Poco the parakeet, are somewhere under all that pavement. Considering that those were the worst things that ever happened there, life was about as perfect as it comes. |
| | I used to go with my father to Wells Mills in the early '60s, when he'd go deer hunting there. He had a friend who was a friend with the owners. At the time there was just an abandoned farm there, on the lake, and a few barely-used roads through the woods. This was thirty years before it became an Ocean County park. |
| | Anyway, it's amazing how long one can go without losing an appetite for fresh blueberries. Even three decades and three thousand miles away. |
| | Bonus Link: I last wrote about our paradise on August 20 of last year. I later found that Mom passed away around the time I was writing that post. Still seems like yesterday. |
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