Andrew Unterberger

Andrew Unterberger is a chemically-dependent League Pass and Billboard chart user living in Astoria, New York. When not writing for The Basketball Jones, he is likely either attempting to master the keyboard part to Billy Joel's "Big Shot" on Rock Band 3, watching Observe and Report on cable, or obsessively refreshing his TBJ columns hoping for new comments. In between, he also writes about America's Team, the Philadelphia 76ers, for The700Level.com. He is currently available for weddings and Bar Mitzvahs, provided that you supply the necessary karaoke equipment and/or magician props.

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When reports surfaced a couple days ago that rapper/mogul/all-everything-everything dude Jay-Z had sold his ownership stake in the Brooklyn Nets, I was absolutely shocked. Yes, I know he didn’t actually own that much of the team — though I would have guessed it was something like 3-5 percent of it, not like, way way less than 1 percent — but for him to jump ship after less than a full season since he ostensibly had a large part in moving the team across state lines and into his backyard, and when the Nets were still doing OK as a basketball team … it just seemed so anti-climactic for him to cut bait right before the playoffs.

But more than the surprise of him doing it at all was the lack of fanfare with which he appeared to do it. No big press release, no tearful press conference, no tweets or website posts, just an Adrian Wojanrowski report without an official comment. And for what? The chance for his Roc Naton company to represent NBA talent in the upcoming draft? Was that really such a critical next step in the life of a man with a net worth of about half a billion dollars that he was willing to shed his stake in a team he’d invested years (if not necessarily millions) in bringing back to national prominence, as if it was just a minor formality, just like filing the proper paperwork?

This seemed particularly insane to me on Tuesday, as I went to see my Sixers take on the Nets at Barclays Center. As usual at Barclays, there was never more than a fifteen-minute period without some sort of Jay-Z-related song getting played. “Public Service Announcement” alone appeared in different contexts at least three times. In addition to that, and the rest of the supposedly partly-Jigga-curated playlist for the evening, and the uniforms he supposedly helped design (and definitely unveiled), and the 40/40 Club located within the building, there was even a Jay-Z banner hanging in the rafters for the eight sold-out shows he played to open the building, like it took Billy Joel and Elton John decades to get at Madison Square Garden. Mikhail Prokhorov may own the team, but Jay-Z surely owns the building. (Ed. note: He also literally owns part of the building.)

What’s more, Hov always seemed to take a considerable amount of pride in the Nets, and in particular his bringing them to Brooklyn. He wore his own Nets jersey onstage at Barclays. The Zadie Smith profile on Jigga for the New York Times was called “The House That Hova Built,” even though the article only made passing references to anything basketball or Brooklyn-related. In his most famous verse of the 2010′s, Jay bragged about “moving the Nets to BK” and scoffed at the idea of the Nets going 0-82 (something that was disturbingly close to a possibility in ’09-’10) being a problem. (“And anyway, the worse the Nets do, the easier it’ll be for Jay to move them to Brooklyn. This man cannot lose!” comments the RapGenius interpretation of the lyric.) This was not just some silent partner, this is a guy whose largely unassailable public identity was now almost inextricable from the basketball team he owned .067 percent of.

So what happened? Did Jay-Z note the team’s relatively low playoff ceiling, uninspiring and uncharismatic roster, and seemingly permanently spoken-for cap space and decide to cut his losses? Was it strictly a dollars and cents decision, with the cash-money opportunities of entering into the sports agency game too considerable to remain attached to the Nets for sentimentality’s sake? And does Jay think that this really is all just a formality, and that he can continue on being the unofficial spokesperson for the Nets even after he’s divested himself from the team financially, in sort of a business/sports equivalent to “I really hope we can still be friends?” We can’t know for sure, since Jay-Z’s not even talking about it.

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Carmelo Anthony made some headlines the other day by overtaking Kevin Durant in the scoring race by fractions of a point, in the same game where his Knicks stole an important road victory from Durant’s Thunder in OKC. But over the NBA three-day weekend, he also overtook another superstar for a less-recognized, but arguably even more interesting honor: That of the best-selling jersey in the NBA. Melo’s No. 7 for the Knicks overtook LeBron James’ No. 6 for the Heat for top honors, up from the No. 4 spot he held the year before.

Jersey sales rankings are an interesting thing in sports, since it’s the closest thing most leagues have to something resembling, say, a Billboard singles chart — something that comes close to measuring pure popularity, without making any attempt at an objective ranking of player skill or whatever. There are other factors at play besides how popular the player is, sure — how popular the team is plays a big part, and for the more discerning jersey shoppers, there might be aesthetic concerns with the color schemes and logos, and possibly semiotic concerns with the signifiers of the player and team represented. But other factors aside, if there’s a better way to measure player popularity in the NBA, I dunno what it is.

So what does it mean that Melo took over from LeBron? Well, first off, it’s worth pointing out that LeBron was not actually No. 1 in jersey sales at the end of last year’s regular season. As a matter of fact, he was all the way down at No. 4, possibly a result of his dip in popularity after losing in the 2011 Finals, and with the initial surge of sales from when he switched teams in the 2010 offseason having died down. It says something about the year LeBron is having (and the postseason/Olympics he had as well) that he had climbed up to No. 1 at all, showing that without the distractions of his choker reputation and the fallout from “The Decision,” LeBron’s play has been stellar enough (and his PR efforts smooth enough) to allow him to be an arguable candidate for the league’s Most Popular Player honors once more.

But now LeBron has fallen to Carmelo, and I think the reasons are two-fold. One, this has been the best season of Anthony’s career — both in an individual sense (highest PER ever, possibly his first scoring title) and in the team sense, as he’s on pace to at least challenge the 54-28 record his Nuggets team had in 2008-’09, and even then the recently arrived Chauncey Billups got the lion’s share of the credit. There’s a sense of pride in Carmelo and the Knicks — especially in New York, obviously — that always had to be tempered with “yes, but…” type qualifiers about Melo’s bonafides as a team player, his ability to win, etc. This is arguably Melo’s first year of unreserved true superstardom, and it makes sense that his jersey sales would reflect that.

And the less sweeping, narrative-oriented (but equally important) factor is the team Melo plays for. In the last five years, even the lean ones, the Knicks have always had a player in the top 15 of jersey sales, with such non-stars as David Lee, Jeremy Lin and even Nate Robinson making the cut in different years. Anthony is surely a big enough name to spur jersey sales no matter where he plays for, but without the Big Apple backdrop, it’s unlikely he’d be able to challenge superstars like LeBron and Kevin Durant. (Even during that make-good 2009 season in Denver, ‘Melo only finished No. 15 in jersey sales, an insulting seven spots below NateRob.)

It’s far too little, too late for Melo (or anyone else) to pass LeBron in the MVP race, but this seems like a fair consolation prize. Plus, it’s a tight jersey. I love the Knicks orange-and-blue, and No. 7 feels much more solid a number for Anthony than his old No. 15. (Not to mention the number’s history in classic New York sports, of which George Costanza would undoubtedly approve.) Maybe I’ll pick one up myself next time I’m at MSG. Or I would if the combination of Knicks tickets and a Carmelo jersey wouldn’t cost me about a fifth of my yearly income. Approximately.

Anyway, some other things I found mildly interesting from this year’s Top 15, which you can see in full here:

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Renowned internet quiz site Sporcle has recently begun its countdown (countup, I suppose) to one billion games played, with a constantly advancing counter on their home page, currently somewhere in the 996 million range. Of those 996 million, I’d estimate that up to 50,000 of those plays (and possibly even more) have come from me. I played over days and nights at work when I was killing time in between assignments, distractions when I was watching something on TV that I was only half paying attention to, really just about any down time I’ve had in front of a computer, which, unsurprisingly, describes a very considerable percentage of my waking hours. Really, I’m just thankful I didn’t discover the site until my first year out of college, or I’d probably still be procrastinating on my finals studying a half-decade later.

As a basketball junkie, a good deal of my Sporcle time over the years has naturally been devoted to playing NBA-related quizzes. And over that time, the site has not only tested my basketball trivia acumen, but also served as kind of an informal history teacher, filling in the gaps in my basketball education, reminding me of things I’d forgotten (and far more that I never knew). For those unfamiliar with the site, Sporcle trivia doesn’t work in the basic question-and-answer format — rather, most quizzes give you a broad-ish category (like, say, players who averaged 10 rebounds a game in the ’90s) and ask you to list every answer that fits those qualifications, often with hints to give a little bit of context to the possible answers (like, say, the team the player did it for or the year they did it in). Though some of the quizzes can be very specific, a lot of them are basically tantamount to “name all the good basketball players you can think of.” Those are my favorites, and the ones that have taught me the most.

Sure, you can’t learn everything about the history of basketball by trying to guess every player who led the league in scoring for a day in 1991-92. But you take enough of these types of quizzes, you start recognizing names and details that slipped through some of the shallower narratives of the sport. You start being able to make educated guesses about players on the terrible Pacers or Kings teams from the ’80s, and you start being able to name the second and third-best players on the title-winning George Mikan and Bob Pettit teams of the ’50s. There comes a point where you actually get frustrated with yourself for not being able to name Bill Melchionni and John Williamson as retired Nets numbers from the team’s ABA glory days.

So as the historic games-played benchmark for Sporcle approaches, I figured it would be as appropriate a tribute to this legendary timesuck of internetness as any to recount some of the lessons and facts I’ve gleaned from playing countless Sporcle NBA quizzes over the years. And if you’re reading, Sporcle user sultanofswing, much respect. Your user-contributed quizzes on all sports are a constant source of obscure, esoteric inspiration.

1. Latrell Sprewell made All-NBA first team in his sophomore season.
Filling out All-NBA first team Sporcle quizzes is usually a cakewalk, even if they don’t give you the teams for the players. After all, it’s basically just the superstars that make it to first team, and there’s a great deal of repetition among those who have (your Kobes, MJs, etc.) But for reasons that have still never been fully explained to me, Warriors forward Latrell Sprewell actually made an All-NBA first team in just his second season — a season in which he averaged 21 a game on 43 percent shooting, and had a PER of just 15.9. It’s certainly not one you’d tend to make an educated guess on — even if you had the team name, you’d probably guess Mullin or Webber before you’d think of Spree — but it’s so bizarre in its seeming randomness that you’re not likely to forget it after missing it on a quiz or two, either.

2. Hal Greer holds a bunch of all-time Sixers records.
For a franchise that has had some of the most legendary, iconic players in league history put on their uniform, you might not come up with Hal Greer — a 10 time All-Star and Hall of Famer, but certainly not a league-defining presence on par with Erving, Barkley, Chamberlain or Iverson — for their all-time leader in scoring or games played. But indeed, Greer, who never split time with another team and/or other league like those four names previously mentioned, does hold those distinctions for Philly, and I’ve learned to guess his name for most Sixer-related quiz categories, even though I still mix him up with Gail Goodrich from time to time for no real reason. Dolph Schayes, another Sixer dating back to the Syracuse Nationals days, is also a good go-to for historical Sixers answers.

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With the possible exceptions of Jeff Green’s continued onslaught in Boston and the Bulls winning a huge game in Brooklyn last night with half their team missing — literally, it seemed, as they only played six guys for the great majority of the game — nothing in basketball this week has been arresting as the scoring of Carmelo Anthony. 90 points over two games is monumental regardless of context or circumstance, but the fact that it came in two huge wins against Eastern Conference foes to boost their late-season surge to a double-digit streak — while also doubling as one of the gosh-darned prettiest shooting displays you’ll ever see on a basketball court — makes it easily one of the most memorable single-player runs of the entire regular season, and of Carmelo Anthony’s eventful 10-year hoops career.

There are other people far more qualified than me to break down how Carmelo did it, what he was doing right and what the defense was doing wrong, whether his scoring outburst is a good or bad thing for the Knicks in the long term, and so on. But I did want to take a moment to shout out one specifically pleasing aspect of Melo’s two-game dominance: the brilliant way he secured his 90 combined points with an even 50 and 40, respectively.

I like numbers. Most sports fans do, I reckon, but I don’t want to just assume that everyone is as infatuated with watching players work their way to essentially meaningless statistical plateaus as I am, nor that they feel as satisfied when the players actually get there. But this is one of the things I’ve always loved about Kobe Bryant — the way he starts hoisting threes when he’s got 37 in a game with 90 seconds to go, or starts forcing passes in situations he’d normally shoot when he’s one assist away for a triple-double. He gets it. Call it selfish, call it OCD, call it pointless and stupid. I call it box score artistry, and you’ll never be able to tell me that 40 doesn’t look nicer at the end of a stat line than 39.

And now I know: Carmelo Anthony gets it too.

Anthony’s 50 points on Monday against the Heat was an absolute thing of beauty, in the flow of the team’s offense and always on time. Few shots were forced, and the two assists Melo ended up with belies what a good job he did passing out of double teams, though his teammates failed to do their part to cash them in. Really, the only downright lousy shot he took was his last. With the game already decided and Melo’s point total at 48 with less than a half-minute to go, he got the ball with only about five seconds to go and did this:

This wasn’t in the flow of the offense. This wasn’t a catch-and-shoot beyond the arc, or a one-dribble-and-up step-back over a defender on the wing. It was an awkward, on the move pull-up jumper from the top of the arc (maybe the one location in the halfcourt not considerable as a Carmelo Anthony sweet spot) with acclaimed Heat wing defender Shane Battier doing the hand-in-his-face thing. But it was the last chance Melo would get to hit the half-century mark, and he knew it, so he went for it. And with the game already well in hand (largely by his own doing), no one could fault him for doing so. Lo and behold, like 17 of the 25 other shots Melo took that night, it went in, and an exact 50 was achieved, much to my personal satisfaction.

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As the 2012-13 regular season wraps up, there’s no weirder, more disorienting team to watch right now than the Boston Celtics. The Celtics have been odd ducks all season, patching together winning and losing streaks with no obvious internal logic or correlation to one another, cycling through lineups and featured players at a rate that only last year’s Knicks could really match in recent hoops history. The C’s of recent weeks went next-level with this, however. In Monday’s game against the Timberwolves, they played a 10-man rotation that only overlapped two players (Avery Bradley and Brandon Bass) with the 10-man rotation they played in a win over the Miami Heat exactly a year before, while losing in Minnesota for the first time since Kevin Garnett was shuttled between the two teams.

Now, a lot of this is obviously due to injuries. The Celtics’ Big Three have all missed time this season, with Rajon Rondo out half the season and counting with a torn ACL, KG sidelined indefinitely with ankle inflammation, and even the generally durable Paul Pierce missing Monday’s game with a sore ankle. And there was definitely a conscious effort to retool the team some last summer, making them younger, tougher and (in most cases) more athletic. To that extent, it makes sense that the roster would look markedly different than the classic KG-era Celtics rosters that we’re used to.

Still, that only goes half of the way to explaining the cognitive dissonance one feels watching the Celtics now — watching Jason Terry, Terrence Williams and Jordan Crawford all come off the same bench, watching games with Brandon Bass and Shavlik Randolph as the primary centers, watching the Celtics score 100 points and still lose, as they have in three of their last nine games. It’s not just a depleted Boston roster, it’s one with a completely different style and ethos, far closer to the run-and-gun small ball system employed by the late-’00s Warriors than the defensive-minded, half-court-oriented look of the late-’00s Celtics. It seems less like a team struggling through injuries than one that decided to rebuild completely without telling anybody. And at the heart of it all is Jeff Green.

Jeff Green entered this season as something of the forgotten man in the Celtics lineup, and possibly the whole NBA. Or at least, he would have been, if he hadn’t signed a four-year, $36 million contract with Boston that many instantly concluded was not close to commiserate with his likely production, a burden of anticipated-failure that hung over him as he followed up a promising preseason with a very slow start to the regular season, going FG-less in the season debut against Miami and then averaging an underwhelming 8.7 points and 2.5 rebounds on just 42 percent shooting (29 percent from deep) in November. The numbers improved little in December and January, and it quickly seemed like Green’s extension would be an albatross for Boston.

But have you seen Green’s splits coming off the bench (which he did for the majority of the season while Boston was healthier) and starting (as he’s done recently with so many regulars out)? If not, you really, really should:

Reserve: 64 Games, 10.9 PPG, 3.4 RPG, 1.2 APG, 44% FG, 33% 3PT
Starter: 10 Games, 21.5 PPG, 5.9 RPG, 3.6 APG, 55% FG, 52% 3PT

That’s not just the difference between a decent player and a good one, that’s the difference between a fringe rotation player and a borderline superstar. Reserve Jeff Green is overpaid and overhyped, Starter Jeff Green is on the shortlist of the league’s biggest bargains. It’s an absolutely staggering dichotomy, one made even more astounding by Green’s minutes-per-game splits, which show that not only does he score more when he plays more, he also scores more efficiently — shooting 39 percent when he plays 10-19 minutes, 46 percent when plays 20-29, 47 percent when he plays 30-39, and an astounding 52 percent when he plays 40 or more (in a sample size of just five games, too small to draw any real conclusions, but big enough to remain intriguing).

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Those who have lived through NBA postseasons of the recent past will never be able to hear Jamie Foxx’s “Winner” or Linkin Park’s “Burn It Down” without reflexively shuddering and probably twitching a little bit, the songs having been overplayed through endless NBA on TNT commercials to a point that even the Black Eyed Peas could never dream of. It’s not the songs’ fault — though TNT brass never seems to choose songs that are all that good, perhaps realizing getting an actual quality song for their purposes would ultimately be pointless — but some time between the first and second round of the playoffs, they start to trigger reactions of nausea and/or deep depression, until you start watching in fear of the song popping up next.

With the playoffs just around the corner, it’s probably time to acquaint ourselves with the songs most likely to be chosen for such honors this year, if for no other reason than to steel ourselves to their melodic strains, in the hopes of building up an immunity of some sort by the time that TNT attempts to endlessly poison us with one of them. Here are some of the songs I believe to be the most likely candidates, trying not to overlap too much with my alternate All-Star Weekend anthem suggestions, and no, none of them are Ace Hood’s “Bugatti,” as preferable a choice as that would undoubtedly be.

Fall Out Boy, “My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark (Light ‘Em Up)”

TNT is already using this song in previews for the new The Rock-starring reality competition series “The Hero,” though I’m not sure if that makes it more or less likely they’ll use it again for the playoffs. Anyway, “My Songs” has the same kind of anthemic, fist-pumping chorus and big, arena-ready production as Linkin Park’s unavoidable theme for last year’s playoffs, and even shares the same incendiary lyrical themes. “Light ‘em up, up, up” even sounds like it could be written as a theme song for Kobe Bryant or Kevin Durant. TNT has even given the song a vote of confidence before as a qualified NBA soundtracker, when Fall Out Boy performed the song at All-Star Saturday Night a few months back.

Zedd feat. Foxes, “Clarity”

Will the crowd-pleasing music directors at TNT programming embrace EDM? (Usher’s “More,” used recklessly and relentlessly to promote the 2010 All-Star Game, only half counts.) If so, they could do a lot worse than with Russian-German DJ Zedd’s soon-to-crossover house anthem “Clarity,” a fairly righteous floor-filler that the Knicks have used to pretty good effect in promotion of their own broadcasts over at MSG Network. Krewella’s similar “Alive” could also potentially work here, though that song kinda sucks — which arguably makes it a more likely candidate than “Clarity,” unfortunately.

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As many storylines as there will be going on this postseason, between the Heat’s title defense, OKC’s efforts to get over the hump, potential last stands for the veteran likes of the Spurs and Knicks and bids for a shot at the throne from previously second-tier teams like the Clippers, Nuggets and Pacers, there’s one semi-crucial ingredient missing from the playoff picture: The young, exciting team making their postseason debut, who gives you a sort of glimpse of the future. The teams that could’ve fit that qualification — mostly the Timberwolves, Wizards, Hornets or Cavaliers — all succumbed to overwhelming injury at one point or another throughout the season, leaving the postseason picture an assemblage of mostly known quantities.

Of the 16 teams expected to be around this postseason, only Golden State comes close to the Young Exciting Team archetype, a franchise absent from the postseason for the last six years built mostly around players in their 20s. But there’s kind of a sense of a reached ceiling with that squad. Nobody seems to be expecting that this is GSW’s first step towards ascension to contender status, as they may have with, say, Derrick Rose’s first playoffs with the Bulls four years ago or Kevin Durant’s first with the Thunder a year later.

So if you’re looking for new faces to add some extra oomph to this postseason, you’re going to have to squint a little harder to find them. Still, they’re there between the cracks, and here are the 10 that I’m most looking forward to, in roughly descending order:

10. Jimmy Butler, Chicago Bulls.
A mid-season League Pass favorite, Jimmy Butler definitely has the chance for a breakout postseason. I could easily see him having one game in a series against the Heat or Knicks where he makes noise for his late-game defense on LeBron or Carmelo, and maybe throws in a highlight dunk or two to go with it. And the way the Bulls have been dropping like exhausted flies recently, Butler may be getting far more of an opportunity to make an impact these playoffs then he or anyone else could’ve imagined in the preseason.

9. Ed Davis, Memphis Grizzlies.
Assuming the Grizz get healthy enough in time, Ed probably won’t get a ton of minutes this postseason — stuck behind Zach Randolph and even Darrell Arthur, he’s only cracked 20 minutes once in the last eight games he’s played — but I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s one game where he makes some big shots in the fourth quarter and ends up playing down the stretch. Coming off the best statistical year of his career (and one that seems to validate his lottery-pick status), and with one season to go after this one until he hits restricted free agency, he could make himself some real money with a strong postseason — and make himself a very valuable trade chip for Memphis.

8. Jordan Crawford, Boston Celtics.
Nick Young set the bar with the Clippers last postseason for late-game explosions by bench heat check guys who came up with the Washington Wizards and it’s not hard to see Crawford being the next in line in that legacy. That’s certainly what the Celtics were hoping for when they traded for him, right? Just one super-hot quarter that ends up winning them a game they otherwise wouldn’t have won. That’s about all you can ask of Jordan Crawford, and there’s a pretty decent chance he gives it to the C’s this postseason.

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Andrew Unterberger

Recent Posts

The Pick-and-Pop: Does Jay-Z still care about the Nets?

Posted by Andrew Unterberger under Brooklyn Nets, Music, Pick-and-Pop on Apr 12, 2013

Pick-and-Pop: Carmelo over LeBron, and other items of interest from the latest NBA jersey sales rankings

Posted by Andrew Unterberger under Miami Heat, New York Knicks, Pick-and-Pop on Apr 10, 2013

Pick-and-Pop: 10 trivia lessons learned from too many NBA quizzes on Sporcle

Posted by Andrew Unterberger under Pick-and-Pop on Apr 08, 2013

Pick-and-Pop: A brief salute to Carmelo Anthony and his respect for round scoring numbers

Posted by Andrew Unterberger under New York Knicks, Pick-and-Pop on Apr 05, 2013

Enigma in Green: A look at the most fascinating player of the end of the season

Posted by Andrew Unterberger under Boston Celtics on Apr 03, 2013

The Pick-and-Pop: What’s gonna be the NBA on TNT playoffs song this year?

Posted by Andrew Unterberger under Music, Pick-and-Pop on Apr 01, 2013

Pick-and-Pop: 10 upcoming individual postseason debuts worth getting excited about

Posted by Andrew Unterberger under 2013 NBA Playoffs, Pick-and-Pop on Mar 27, 2013

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