Am I the only one who feels like the “Shane Battier is underrated-to-Shane Battier is overrated” transition happens like once every four or five years? I remember these discussions making the rounds a while ago, and I vaguely seem to remember having them when he was drafted (though I could be imagining that to make my point, I can’t tell)… all I know is that when I read the piece a few weeks ago (or whenever it was) about him, the first thing I thought was, “wait, am I reading an archive piece and didn’t realize it?”

I really thought we’d already covered the whole “Battier’s good in ways you can’t really quantify but that doesn’t make him a great player, it just makes him what he is–a good player” thing a long time ago… and yet somehow the recent piece made Morey seem like some sort of genius, and that before his crazy proprietary statistical analysis, nobody’d figured out that Battier could play help defense and wasn’t a jackass in the locker room.

Or maybe I’m just crazy. It’s been known to happen.

Great observation about Artest though. That guy almost single handedly keeps opponents in so many games with his horrendous shooting and his insistence on continuing to fire away. He’s like Kobe in a cold slump taken to the nth degree with his ball domination and asinine shots. And yet, when Artest takes the ball to the hole or gets it down low he’s nearly impossible to stop. I wonder how many coaches have torn their hair out trying to get him to just take better shots.

You’re right that this has been the best series of the playoffs though. I’d actually put New Orleans-Denver higher on the “entertaining scale”, but these Houston-Portland games have really been phenomenal. Barkley was right last night when he said if Portland ever gets a post game they’re going to be scary. For that to happen though, Greg Oden has got to learn not only how to score in the post, but how to stay away from his bizarre desire to bump just about everyone out on the perimeter. Save those fouls for the defense in the paint, G.O.