In 2007, my friend Matthew Cornelius and I started an NBA blog.

Seemed like a harmless enough idea. I was getting ready to marry Paroxi-wife, and I needed a hobby that didn’t involve Shiner. She said I really needed to invest myself in something I liked, something to give me a creative outlet that didn’t result in me standing on top of a bar room table singing “I Got a Woman” by Ray Charles. Badly.

I’d always loved the NBA, been fascinated with it, followed it, and written at a few places on it. We thought it would be fun to post on how widely insane the NBA game is, how much fun it is, about all the players whose potential was still untapped. Mostly, we wanted to post about Ron Artest.

(And boy, Crazy Pills, did we. )

Three years later, the short of it is, I’m making “the jump” as it’s called.

I am very excited to announce that I’m joining CBSSports.com as a full-time NBA blogger for NBA Facts and Rumors.I actually started last week. Sorry about that, would have told you, but with free agency, things got hectic and I… I know. I’m sorry. I’ll never hurt you like that again, internet .

As a heads up, I’m still writing over at ProBasketballTalk.com and for AOL FanHouse.

And oh, yes, the Paroxysm is still open for business. Made in America, sold worldwide.

That’s the gist, but if you’re really curious, you can click through for more details and an obscenely long list of thank you’s.

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USA basketball is synonymous with athletic advantage. Regardless of which players have comprised the roster or the team’s performance in any given competition, the Americans have always had the physical abilities to strike with more size, force, and velocity than their opponents. Talent and capability have never stood in Team USA’s way, with most of their failures easily attributable to poor scouting, coaching, preparation, or roster construction. It’s a brilliant, and natural, place to be for the patron nation of basketball.

Team USA’s 2010 incarnation may be a bit atypical in that regard. While the team is sure to be as agile as ever, there could end up being something of a (relative) hole in the middle. The giant, bruising, physically dominating center is something of an American tradition; from Shaquille O’Neal to Alonzo Mourning to Tim Duncan to Dwight Howard, the center position has basically been owned and operated by the United States of America. With Dwight Howard doubtful to compete in the FIBA World Championships however, this year’s team appears set for a downgrade in their physical primacy at the 5 as well as their overall talent at the position.

We’ve known for quite some time that some of USA Basketball’s biggest names would forgo the Championships due to their lack of interest, injury, or other summer pursuits. LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, and Chris Bosh have free agency to consider, and without them involved, Dwight Howard and Carmelo Anthony don’t seem all that interested in playing. However, if we extend the James-Wade-Bosh trend to all of the other 2010 free agents, Team USA’s roster troubles begin to take shape.

There were three true bigs on the 2008 Olympic roster: Howard, Bosh, and Carlos Boozer. Dwight, as I mentioned before, will probably be a no-show. Bosh and Boozer, as we all know, are two of the summer’s biggest free agents, and while their contracts will likely be resolved by the time Team USA goes Voltron, there’s both historical precedent and contemporary indication that the summer’s free agents would simply rather sit this one out. Chalk it up to making a good impression with their new employers or whatever you’d like, but it looks increasingly unlikely that we’ll see either Bosh or Boozer play for America at the ‘Ships.

Okay, no big. Jerry Colangelo has assembled an extensive program of young, committed players for just this reason. When one (or three) of them back out or can’t play, there are others waiting in the wings for the opportunity to shine on an international stage. However, a look at the other centers included on Team USA’s active roster reveals just three names: Brook Lopez, Al Jefferson, and Kendrick Perkins. The latter is ruled out due to injury, which leaves the fate of Team USA’s center position (on paper, anyway) in the hands of Lopez and Jefferson. Forgive me for being less than enthused.

I appreciate Al and Brook greatly, but neither seems like a great fit at this point. In 2008, it was Team USA’s defense that made them the most impressive team of the bunch, and while much of that was Kobe, LeBron, and Wade causing absolute hell on the perimeter, Dwight did his part as well. With most international teams subscribing to a style featuring more ball and player movement than typical NBA offenses, an aware and mobile center with real defensive skill is perhaps even more important than usual. Defensive focus and execution will be absolutely critical, and considering that Team USA will already be forfeiting a serious advantage with LeBron and co. staying stateside, can the Americans really afford to have Brook Lopez as their great hope in the middle?

Another option is to play a power forward at center, which could actually work out just fine. Mike Krzyzewski showed a willingness to go small in various situations in 2008, whether that meant playing a Chris Paul-Deron Williams backcourt, starting Carmelo Anthony at power forward, or playing Michael Redd, Tayshaun Prince, and Carlos Boozer as the 3-4-5 off the bench. Theoretically, Team USA could get away with playing a power forward as the team’s full-time center, provided they could contribute to USA’s game plan on both ends. It sounds good, but another trip to the well comes up with an equally dry result. The following are the power forwards listed on Team USA’s roster: Chris Bosh, Amar’e Stoudemire, Carlos Boozer, LaMarcus Aldridge, David Lee, and Kevin Love. Bosh, Stoudemire, Boozer, and Lee are all free agents, so we can add Aldridge and Love to our candidates for USA’s starting center. Lovely.

Of the bunch, Lopez is likely the most effective defender, but Aldridge could be better suited to defend international 5s. Either way, Coach K will simply have to make do. The 2010 dropouts are causing crunches at every position, and while the players in reserve are still quite talented, they’re flawed enough to make the World Championships awfully interesting.

So here we are. It’s been joked about and threatened on the internet, in the papers and around the league for a while.

Darko Milicic has been such a disappointment in this league that he’s been a running joke for seven seasons now. That’s right; he’s been running longer than The Office, 30 Rock, and is three seasons away from being a longer running comedy than Seinfeld.

Now a lot of that is unfair scrutiny on Darko Milicic and he really shouldn’t be the ire of ridicule amongst basketball fans. It’s not his fault he was taken second in a draft that put him ahead of Carmelo Anthony, Dwyane Wade, Chris Bosh, Chris Kaman, David West, Boris Diaw, Travis Outlaw, Kirk Hinrich, TJ Ford, Leandro Barbosa, Kendrick Perkins and Josh Howard. It’s not his fault that as an unproven and relatively unknown prospect he didn’t fall to the second round like Rashard Lewis and Maciej Lampe. None of that is his fault and he shouldn’t be criticized for something Joe Dumars reached on.

Just like with this new contract with the Timberwolves. He’s signing a four-year, $20 million deal to probably be the starting center for the Wolves. It’s not his fault he was offered this insane contract. It’s not his fault David Kahn’s comically incompetent stylings have lead to Darko Milicic’s agent doing back flips and pinching himself to make sure this isn’t a dream.

Darko isn’t a bad player and I’m not opposed to him being on the Wolves. He’s also not a good player and not someone I want getting an almost fully guaranteed four-year commitment. People don’t even like agreeing to a two-year plan to get a new cell phone and the Wolves have doubled that with Darko. The money isn’t bad either; it’s just unnecessary.

Here’s what they’ll try to sell you on with Darko: he’s the defensive presence the Wolves have needed inside. Here’s the problem with that sales pitch: it’s a load of crap.

In his time with the Wolves last season, Darko was ranked 420^th in the NBA in Points Per Possession given up defensively (according to Synergy Sports). 420^th!!!! If all of the teams in the NBA had a full 15-man roster then there would be 450 players. And that means only 30 guys would be worse than Darko at defense. In the post, he was a lot better at a ranking of 215^th. I’m sorry but that doesn’t exactly scream progress to me.

I like the fact that the Wolves are bringing Nikola Pekovic over from Europe. He’s shown some decent promise by putting up big scoring numbers for such a young big man. The problem is that the importing of Pekovic and the re-signing of Darko Milicic is what David Kahn had to do to justify trading away Al Jefferson. While Al Jefferson isn’t exactly the messiah in post player form, he’s certainly much better than the two options being brought in to replace him.

Some will argue that Al Jefferson being replaced by Darko is an upgrade on defense. But looking back at Synergy Sports, Al Jefferson ranked 278^th in overall defense and 187^th in post defense. He’s not exactly making Bill Russell watch his legacy here but at the same time, he was better than Darko defensively. So how can that be an upgrade?

The Milicic move is just an example of faking progress and it’s something that bad decision-makers do in the NBA. They give guys unnecessary contracts and pitch them as reclamation projects on the verge of boosting a franchise when in reality it’s just a way to distract people from focusing on the two horrible drafts you’ve executed in your one year on the job. Darko Milicic is an okay player. He’s not an answer or a cure-all for a team. He’s not a guy I would eat up precious cap space with for four years, ESPECIALLY when there is a new collective bargaining agreement coming in a year and everybody assumes the cap flexibility is going to get a lot tighter.

And this is where we are with the Wolves. There is not an ounce of foresight in the decision-making that goes on. A year ago, we were pitched two point guards with back-to-back picks in the first six picks of the draft. Overall, there were five guards (four of them point guards) selected. Kevin Love and Al Jefferson went through trade value assassinations over the last few months and instead of bringing in the proper dominant big man or defensive presence to balance out their weaknesses, the team decided to take four small forwards in the draft and elicit numerous five-year plan jokes over the past week. Now, they’re carving out an increasingly precious amount of cap space for a guy that doesn’t defend better than what they have, is worse offensively and was on the verge of going back to Europe because nobody wanted to play with him.

The worst part about it is Kevin Pritchard is just sitting out there, waiting for a job offer to be tossed his way. Putting him in the same division of the team that fired him would guarantee you getting the most genius and diabolical team building we’ve seen in a long time. Instead, we’re left with a guy who flips D-League franchises like they’re used cars, alienates every single coworker and colleague he has and then performs personnel moves that are so abhorrent that they can only be correctly classified as espionage.

I’m not mad at Darko one bit. He was offered way more money and way more years than he’s worth or proven to deserve and he took the contract. We’d all do the exact same thing. I’m mad at the smug face with incompetent motives and execution that is single-handedly keeping a two-second clip from a sci-fi movie that came out nearly 30 years ago preserved like it’s saturated in formaldehyde.

This move likely means the trading of Al Jefferson, whose trade value was ultimately shattered over the past two weeks when David Kahn shopped him around for anybody and everybody that has ever picked up a basketball before. He’s found a way to shoot himself in the foot with these upcoming trade negotiations before he even picked up the gun. I don’t know why any of this surprises me anymore. Actually, the sad thing is that it doesn’t. You expect to be defeated before anything even happens. It’s depressing. It’s life as a David Kahn Refugee.

Now if you’ll excuse me…

Last week, I looked at the relationship between max vertical height and rebounding.  In the comments section, the brilliant readers offered up suggestions to expand on this topic. Let’s see what we can do.

One of the quibbles with the piece was my choice to look at max vertical height instead of say, weight or standing reach. Well, thanks to Draft Express, I can run those as well.  Keep in mind, the measurements were taken at the draft and likely have changed slightly (weight).

Let’s start from the ground up.  If we run a multivariate regression that predicts total rebound percentage in the NBA with height and weight as our predictor variables, what do we find? Those two pieces of information do a pretty good job of predicting rebounding performance– the adjusted R² = .6584 and both factors were statistically significant at a p <.05 level).  DeJuan Blair may stand six-feet seven-inches tall but he packs about 270 pounds, so he’s a refrigerator down low.  DeMar Derozan, by comparison, is as tall as Blair but about 60 pounds lighter and grabs about a third of Blair’s share of rebounds.  On the flipside, height gives players an obvious advantage as well (R = .756).  Interestingly enough, weight had the strongest correlation of any tested variable (R = .772).

This makes sense and shouldn’t surprise anyone.  It’s tough to find a short stick grabbing boards left and right.  But what if we add another variable to the mix? Let’s replace height as a predictor variable with standing reach instead, as some have called for. The logic being, that necks don’t grab rebounds– hands do.  So, does standing reach and weight predict rebounding rates better than raw height and weight?  Turns out it doesn’t, at least not by this method.  The adjusted R² slides down to .647 which is lower than the predictive strength of raw height and weight. The correlation between rebounding and height is .756 whereas with standing reach it is .739.

So, the next thing I wanted to do was see if wingspan is a significant predictor of rebounding once we control for height and weight.  Surprisingly, it isn’t at the p < .05 level (p=0.52) while height and weight remained significant.  The adjusted R² was .6576 which tells us that the model’s goodness of fit didn’t improve after adding wingspan as a predictor variable.  Hmm.

I’m having some trouble explaining that finding. You’d think that wingspan would definitely help to explain a player’s rebounding in the NBA but that doesn’t seem to be the case.  Sure, it certainly helps to have longer arms but on the whole it doesn’t seem to be of great tangible benefit in rebounding.  Need examples? Javale McGee has the tallest reach of any of the 241 players in the study (he can actually come within 7 inches of touching the rim standing up) and yet he’s merely an average rebounding center. He and Chris Kaman share the same height but Kaman’s wingspan is 6 inches shorter than McGee’s.  Who’s the better rebounder?  The heavier Kaman.  You’d think McGee would put that 7’6″ wingspan to better use on the boards.

Oh, and Patrick O’Bryant.