Welcome To Hardwood Paroxysm
Plus, Murder Hornets!
paroxysm (noun)
/ˈper-ək-ˌsi-zəm/ or /ˈpa-rək-ˌsi-zəm/
1. A sudden, violent outburst of emotion or action: a paroxysm of joy
Your time is valuable, dear reader, so I won’t waste time with chit chat. The short story is I’m back to writing descriptive things about the NBA all the time in my typical maniac way.
I’ll tell you what this Substack is. I’ll be writing…
A blog with observations and analysis of NBA teams and players, their actions, and the news that arises
A newsletter where I’ll provide not only original thoughts but links to great work around Substack and the web, showcasing writers you might not know or have heard of
A little bit of slop from the league sources I keep tabs with, trade rumors and the stories that go underneath the highlights
Advice on NBA writing and views on the twisted carnage that is the NBA media landscape
The value of subscribing (preferably paid!) comes with this being a place to discover things about the NBA. My best analysis has always been showcasing things that exist under the surface of the league, whether it’s good writing by others, weird tics of teams and players, or some of the political dynamics that go on in the offices away from the floor.
The thing that looms largest on my mind with this Stack is value. You can find niche writers that provide high-level analysis (and I’ll certainly point to those). But my best contributions have always come from my inexhaustible approach to covering the league universally.
The NBA is not just a children’s game on television, a political drama, a fascinating web of metrics, or a cultural touchstone. It’s all those things, individually and at once, and you’re missing the strokes of an impressionist painting if you focus on a tiny piece.
To that end, you may not agree with everything written here, but you won’t suffer for lack of stuff to consume. I’m dedicated to you, dear reader, and I intend to make this a place you want to return to for as long as you love basketball, writing, or basketball writing.
And with that, I hope you’ll subscribe, I hope you’ll enjoy it, but most of all I hope you discover something new here.
Welcome (back) to the Paroxysm.
Let’s start with the Thunder and Murder Hornets.
Today’s edition of the main newsletter will be longer than it normally will to give you a sense of what I’m going for here.
I’m a little concerned the Thunder have actually become a hive mind.
Be honest. If I told you that Isaiah Joe, Aaron Wiggins, and Ajay Mitchell (where the hell did he come from? Apparently, he’s Belgian!) all shared consciousness, at least when they were on the floor, would you be shocked?
In a league where discipline and ego restraint are the two things in the least supply, OKC has managed to make the bones of the house from those things. The Thunder aren’t authoritarian in practice; the buck does not stop with Sam Presti.
There’s a give and take they’ve found. The players are supported on and off the court. The facilities are good, families are taken care of, and media access is limited. OKC may not be the town players want to spend their time in as millionaire athletes, but if you play there, you won’t have to deal with nonsense, and your needs will be taken care of.
The “take” is the same standard that applies to everyone. Every level of the organization has a high bar of professionalism. Trainers, ball boys, equipment managers, front office executives, coaches, and players must meet the standard. It’s a combination of accountability and inspiration that works.
The organization is successful. The team has been successful… to the limit of titles, which, of course, is all anyone cares about. “We have the most professional team” is not something you hang from the rafters (but the Heat would if they hadn’t won three titles).
But if you care about how a team goes about what it does, it’s hard not to be constantly impressed by OKC, and you see it when they play.
They can all shoot. They can all drive. They can all finish. OKC’s one of the few teams that you don’t take anything off the floor when you add someone. Their shooting is down this season but it’s hard to see them staying below 35% from 3 for the season given their shooting talent.
They can all guard the perimeter. They can all switch. They lead the league in steals and are second in blocks. No one’s ever in the wrong spot, no one’s ever breaking the offense, no one’s falling asleep on defense.
In preseason, I asked Mark Daigneault in the pregame presser about having players going from a rebuilding situation to an up-and-coming situation to now trying to contend. He talked about the organization’s philosophy of wanting players who are “comfortable in any circumstance.”
The same goes for how OKC plays.
Buncha hive mind mofos.
It’s a hive of bees, working together in service of the colony. They are proof that you can play a role and make the money and win, all at the same time. There’s no queen they’re under the direction of, unless it’s Presti, but even then Presti isn’t visible enough to be considered so.
The problem is the Murder Hornets.
The Oatmeal taught me about the Murder Hornets. They are bad. Wasps, in general, are the jerkfaces of the Insect Kingdom. They can kill 40 honeybees a minute.
Luka, in the playoffs last year, was a murder hornet, an individually dangerous creature with a lethality advantage, especially when paired with the players he had around him, and especially with those players shooting the way they did.
OKC relied on that same process-oriented approach vs. the Mavericks. “If we double the Murder Hornet and make the lesser murder hornets beat us, and we take open shots, we’ll come out ahead.” Except that PJ Washington stung them to death and the Thunder shooters all found their stingers ineffective.
In the cartoon above, it describes the unique defense mechanism the bees found to kill the hornets: they hug it to death. They surround the minor demon and vibrate at a frequency that raises the temperature to precisely two degrees higher than the Murder Hornet can stand.
That’s what OKC couldn’t figure out last year: what the right frequency to cook the Murder Hornet was.
That’s really all OKC needs to win in the playoffs with this group. They don’t need a trade for some random other big insect. They don’t need their own Murder Hornet. (Shai is at least Murder-Hornet-Adjacent.) They just need to find the right frequency
The difficulty with that being that you don’t really know what it is until you find it. You just have to keep vibing.
Let’s go!
Good to see you brother!