In the dead of the wet and dreary winter months, a sudden flurry of last-minute mega-trades, conjured by the sage GM architects (and in some cases, heartless demolition men) just in time before the 2/21 Thursday deadline, unpexpectedly injected some excitement into the post-All-Stars, pre-playoffs stretch of the NBA season, a.k.a. "the super snooze-days". One deal in particular that caught the united fury of the beat writers and pundits arcoss the heartland is the Phoenix-Miami transaction: Miami sent the hall-of-fame-bound center Shaquille O'Neal to Phoenix for the multi-dimensional forward Shawn Marion. Without a doubt, this transfer makes financial sense for Miami, who can shed the hefty payload of an aging and often injured center moping through a hopelessly lost season despite the heroics of Dwane Wade. On the other hand, critics, including ESPN's Hollinger who rated the Shaq-Marion deal as D- for Phoenix, argued that Shaq is a muscular but slow dinasaur, and an exceptionally poor fit for the high flying Phoenix offense, especially when Shaq has clearly entered the twillight of his illustrious career. To counter conventional wisdom, I am here to argue for basketball sense for the unfairly ostracized Suns.
First, the Suns had no chance to win the West this year keeping the same roster. The Lakers had just landed Pau Gasol in an astonishingly unequal trade, Utah acquired Korver to finally resolve their outside shooting problems, and the Spurs are still the champions and have further fortified their front court with Kurt Thomas. Marion's ineffectiveness during the playoffs, when the game often slowed to a grinding half-court game, is well documented and is the cause of on-going locker room dissent. Shaq is a proud veteran who has repeatedly expressed desire for a fifth ring before retirement; he would be a strong locker room presence tolerating none of the bickering. Moreover, Amare Stoudamire is notoriously poor on defense (partly to avoid unnecessary fouls), and as a result opposing big men like San Antonio's Tim Duncan and Utah's Carlos Boozer frequently scored at will during stretches in playoffs. Shaq at least presents a big wide body with six fouls to stop the opposing front court attack.
Second, the window of opportunities for the Suns is closing fast. The chief-of-staff point guard Steve Nash is 34 and slightly built, with Grant Hill 35 and Raja Bell 31. The heart and soul of the firing squad is clearly the workhorse Nash, and the team will soon begin its decline as its leader slows physically with age, especially when the Suns adopt a run-and-gun offense. The duration of Shaq's contract and Shaq's internal clock are roughly on the same timetable as the Suns' elders, allowing the Suns' front office to rebuild quickly in a few years if the combustion experiment fails.
Finally, Shaq's arrival permits the squad to finally returns to their natural positions in a half-court set. Stoudamire slides back to Power Forward from Center, Grand Hill, who plays the same position as Marion, slides back to Small Forward from Power Forward, with Bell and Nash in the back court. Effectiveness of the half-court offense will be a crucial element in the slow-down playoff.
The slow-footedness of O'Neal in the Suns' fast-break offsense is over-exaggerated; rarely do you see a 5-on-5 break anyway. Suns have enough gunners--Stoudamire, Hill, Nash and Barbosa--that Shaq does not have to score double digits to be effective. Of course, I am not clamoring the Suns as the new favorites in the ultra-competitive West, but the Shaq-Marion trade did present an attractive calculated risk for the Suns, given their present shortcomings, for immediate success in the short term. Go figure, or do you think you can do better?
2008年2月23日土曜日
2008年2月11日月曜日
sympathy for the devil
It seems that after Super Tuesday, when Barrack Obama competed neck-to-neck against the previously heavily favored Hillary Clinton, every columnist and public figure, including Oprah, Ted Kennedy and will.i.am of Black Eye Peas, is ready to join the euphoric Obamamania and dance to the rhetorics of the newly crowned Elvis. America loves an underdog, and there will be no bigger underdog story than a black man winning the presidential election in a country with a bitter, tainted history of slavery and racial segregation. Obama's convincing victories in Louisiana, Nebraska, Washington and the Virgin Islands on Saturday added momentum to the ever-growing bandwagon. It is Obama, every place, every time, everybody. As one pundit put it, it is "Jesus Christ, JFK and MLK" all rolled into one and starring in YouTube with a million hits per day. Aha, so there is a God afterall.
At the same time, Clinton bashing has become an accepted national sport, where the more vicious the commentary, the more readers and airtime it receives. Hillary is "mean-spirited", "win-at-all-cost", and dubbed "Billary" with her sometimes overly spirited ex-President husband. NYTimes columnist Frank Rich decried "how nastily the Clintons will fight, whatever the collateral damage to the Democratic Party", labeling her campaign "desperate" and "an imploding Potemkin village". Note this is happening while Obama is seemingly beyond reproach, where every word from his mouth is silky and every touch golden. The sudden casting of shadows of evil darkness and of heavenly light reminds me vaguely of a movie I have seen before: was it Rocky Balboa rising out of the slums in Philadelphia against heavyweight champion Apollo Creed, or was it Gene Hackman led Hickory High basketball team from rural Indiana town triumphing over the big city heavy favorite in state final? It is funny how memory fades with age.
If one takes a cold shower and then a step back and look at the difference in policies between Obama and Clinton, on health care, on strategies in Iraq, on economy, on immigration, on veteran benefits, it will become obvious that the difference between them are relatively small. (Personally, I will be ecstatic with either one over anything the Republicans can throw up after 8 years of GWB stupidity.) The big difference comes when one examine their resumes: Obama is a one-term senator from Illinois, while Clinton, who had admitted made her share of well intended but unforeseeable mistakes both as First Lady and as NY state senator, has been unequivocally pushing under-the-cover issues like women's rights and proper health care for children and the less fortunate for decades. While it is perfectly acceptable to buy into Obama's numbing repetitions of "yes, we can" and "change we can believe", it is unfair and "un-American" to witch-hunt Clinton for being what she is not. What will become of the American conscience a year from now, after unapolegetically bashing Clinton to death simply because she has been trying to do good for too long? Come on, people, smarten up and play ball. Fairly this time.
At the same time, Clinton bashing has become an accepted national sport, where the more vicious the commentary, the more readers and airtime it receives. Hillary is "mean-spirited", "win-at-all-cost", and dubbed "Billary" with her sometimes overly spirited ex-President husband. NYTimes columnist Frank Rich decried "how nastily the Clintons will fight, whatever the collateral damage to the Democratic Party", labeling her campaign "desperate" and "an imploding Potemkin village". Note this is happening while Obama is seemingly beyond reproach, where every word from his mouth is silky and every touch golden. The sudden casting of shadows of evil darkness and of heavenly light reminds me vaguely of a movie I have seen before: was it Rocky Balboa rising out of the slums in Philadelphia against heavyweight champion Apollo Creed, or was it Gene Hackman led Hickory High basketball team from rural Indiana town triumphing over the big city heavy favorite in state final? It is funny how memory fades with age.
If one takes a cold shower and then a step back and look at the difference in policies between Obama and Clinton, on health care, on strategies in Iraq, on economy, on immigration, on veteran benefits, it will become obvious that the difference between them are relatively small. (Personally, I will be ecstatic with either one over anything the Republicans can throw up after 8 years of GWB stupidity.) The big difference comes when one examine their resumes: Obama is a one-term senator from Illinois, while Clinton, who had admitted made her share of well intended but unforeseeable mistakes both as First Lady and as NY state senator, has been unequivocally pushing under-the-cover issues like women's rights and proper health care for children and the less fortunate for decades. While it is perfectly acceptable to buy into Obama's numbing repetitions of "yes, we can" and "change we can believe", it is unfair and "un-American" to witch-hunt Clinton for being what she is not. What will become of the American conscience a year from now, after unapolegetically bashing Clinton to death simply because she has been trying to do good for too long? Come on, people, smarten up and play ball. Fairly this time.
2008年2月6日水曜日
airmac: easy for novice, difficult for wannabes
Due to an emergency ADSL modem equipment update, I was forced to reconfigure the home network, including the well used and loved AirMac Express (a.k.a. AirPort Express in the US). This convenient, little jack-of-all-trades device can act as a wireless router (with DHCP capability), extends the range of an existing WLAN network, wirelessly connects printers or other USB devices, and plays music wirelessly to stand-alone stereo using AirTunes. If there is no panacea for wireless ills, this comes pretty close. We have been happily connecting the device wirelessly to our family laptop to play music on our home Onkyo stereo for a few years now.
After setting up the new yahoo BB ADSL modem (w/ DHCP capability disabled) and Buffalo WLAN (with a new SSID name and security limiting access to devices with registered MAC addresses), I proceeded to reconfigure the AirMac Express (AE). Yet using the apple downloaded software, Airport Admin Utility and Airport Setup Assistant, I was unable to discover AE on the network. After a frustrating hour and a hard reset, I discovered AE on the network, but was now unable to complete the handshake procedure, encountering the very undescriptive "unknown error -6753". At this stage, I was stuck for hours. Is it the Windows XP Firewall blocking UDP flows? Maybe it is the sshd or other daemons that is consuming required network resources and/or port numbers? Maybe it is software and firmware incompatibility?
Finally, I realized the problem: I have set my TCP/IP setting for the wireless interface on my computer to a local-area fixed IP adddress (for Port Forwarding purposes, a topic for another entry another day), so when my computer tried to log onto AE network, AE was not able to assign it a new IP address in the address pool it has available. Now if the Apple literature would have stated explicitly that a computer needs to be logged onto the AE running DHCP, the oversight would have been obvious. But the literature is rail thin and the software scant, making the debugging process extremely difficult. Of course, if I were a novice, I would have never used a local-area fixed IP address for the WLAN interface in the first place. This, in fact, exmplifies a golden and damned design philosophy behind Apple Products for years: make all products sexy and eternally simple to use, but for the advanced users, leave few footprints for customization and fine-tuning. So the moral here is simple: if you want to use Apple products, be a novice, or be a master of your domain, more than any references you can find in on-line forums. Otherwise, you will join me in welcoming the morning sun with brandy red eyes and a throbbing head.
After setting up the new yahoo BB ADSL modem (w/ DHCP capability disabled) and Buffalo WLAN (with a new SSID name and security limiting access to devices with registered MAC addresses), I proceeded to reconfigure the AirMac Express (AE). Yet using the apple downloaded software, Airport Admin Utility and Airport Setup Assistant, I was unable to discover AE on the network. After a frustrating hour and a hard reset, I discovered AE on the network, but was now unable to complete the handshake procedure, encountering the very undescriptive "unknown error -6753". At this stage, I was stuck for hours. Is it the Windows XP Firewall blocking UDP flows? Maybe it is the sshd or other daemons that is consuming required network resources and/or port numbers? Maybe it is software and firmware incompatibility?
Finally, I realized the problem: I have set my TCP/IP setting for the wireless interface on my computer to a local-area fixed IP adddress (for Port Forwarding purposes, a topic for another entry another day), so when my computer tried to log onto AE network, AE was not able to assign it a new IP address in the address pool it has available. Now if the Apple literature would have stated explicitly that a computer needs to be logged onto the AE running DHCP, the oversight would have been obvious. But the literature is rail thin and the software scant, making the debugging process extremely difficult. Of course, if I were a novice, I would have never used a local-area fixed IP address for the WLAN interface in the first place. This, in fact, exmplifies a golden and damned design philosophy behind Apple Products for years: make all products sexy and eternally simple to use, but for the advanced users, leave few footprints for customization and fine-tuning. So the moral here is simple: if you want to use Apple products, be a novice, or be a master of your domain, more than any references you can find in on-line forums. Otherwise, you will join me in welcoming the morning sun with brandy red eyes and a throbbing head.
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