Over at Uni Watch, Paul Lukas has been posting some fun "uniform tweaks", new uniform concepts for (mostly baseball) teams. He has presented some basketball ones, of course, but since I created a ton of NBA & CBB uniform re-creations in MS Paint a long time ago, I thought I'd try my hand at some tweaks, redesigns, and "fauxbacks" (aka "a retro-ish uniform that is clearly meant to evoke a particular design from the past but does not quite duplicate that design faithfully, sometimes due to laziness or inattention to detail, sometimes intentionally") in an ongoing series here at the blog. Some of them will be bad, I admit that going in. But some of them will hopefully be cool, or at least different. And if you have any of your own, I'd love to post them as well, so hit me up with an e-mail and send me what you've got.

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Rising: Nuggets (W-LAC, W-@OKC, W-LAL), Spurs (W-@LAL, W-@SAC, L-@PHO)
Falling: Jazz (L-@LAL, W-OKC, L-@HOU), Celtics (L-HOU, W-CLE, L-@NYK, W-@TOR)

(Want to know how the BBR Rankings are calculated? Read this first... "MLE" = Maximum Likelihood Estimate.)

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Recently, it's come to my attention that the mere possibility of VC making the Hall of Fame apparently evokes an angry, violent, nauseous reaction on par with this. Then again, there's no doubting he's been one of the defining figures of the post-MJ era, for better or for worse. So what's the verdict? Hall or no Hall for Mr. Carter? Let's do this...

Vitals

Position: SG/SF
Height: 6-7 Weight: 215 lbs.
Born: January 26, 1977 in Daytona Beach, Florida
High School: Mainland in Daytona Beach, Florida
College: University of North Carolina
Draft: Selected by the Golden State Warriors in the 1st round (5th pick, 5th overall) of the 1998 NBA draft.

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As his prize for winning the 2010 Basketball-Reference NCAA Tournament Pool contest, reader Ian was able to request a post on a basketball-related subject of his choosing. The topic he went with:

"As for a subject of the blog, I'll go with my childhood hero, who I feel has long been unheralded by the masses, although I'll admit my bias. I'd love to see a blog dedicated to one Adrian Delano Dantley."

Great choice, Ian! Let's get our Player Audit on...

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This morning, Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey tweeted the following:

Season ending 2 soon but some hope-we are best tm ever without an all-star player

Henry Abbott then followed up with Morey, as Abbott (and I'm sure many others, including me) was unsure what Morey's criteria were. Morey responded:

[The Rockets are the] only team since ABA/NBA merger (1976) with over a .500 record without an All-Star playing over 100 minutes.

Abbott also wrote:

[Morey] went on to explain that by "All-Star" he meant anyone who had ever been an All-Star, not just a current one [...]

My first reaction to this was "Is Morey correct?" My second reaction? "Wait a second, I can easily check this." So I did...

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Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the final round of the WhatIfSports Most Dominant Playoff Tournament, featuring the 1993 Chicago Bulls, the 5th seed in Pool B, and the 2005 San Antonio Spurs, the #9 seed in Pool A. The Bulls got here by beating the dominant 1996 incarnation of themselves in a grueling 7-game series that pitted Jordan vs. Jordan, with the 29-year-old MJ coming out on top. On the other side of the bracket, the Spurs cruised past the 2009 Lakers, holding Kobe Bryant, Pau Gasol, & Lamar Odom to a combined 39 points in the 5th and deciding game of their semifinal series. So now, without further ado, it's time for these two great clubs to battle for the title of 2010 Most Dominant Playoff Tournament Champion...

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Listening to Bill Simmons talk to Chad Millman on the B.S. Report, they mentioned how a good play was to bet for a young team (like this year's Thunder) to come out and lay an egg in their first playoff game because they feel pressure and don't know how to handle it yet. They pointed to last year's Blazers-Rockets Game 1 as a situation where a young team came out at home, favored, with a crowd full of energy, and they fell flat, failing to cover the spread. So my first thought was, is this a real trend or just one of those "seems like it happens a lot" theories that don't hold up under close scrutiny?

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The other day I decided to check out the Most Improved Player (MIP) list on ESPN.com's NBA Awards Watch. Before visiting the page I figured that Kevin Durant would be at the top of the list, as Durant has made a stratospheric leap this season, going from at best an average player to one of the top five players in the NBA. Imagine my surprise when I saw Durant in the second spot on this list, behind Aaron Brooks of the Houston Rockets. In my mind I knew that this had to be wrong, that Durant's improvement was the most improbable performance of the season, but I needed a way to quantify it. The question is: How? Let's go to the data...

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Most Dominant Playoff Tournament: Round 4

Results from the Tournament's Final Four, courtesy of WhatIfSports (click on series links for game-by-game box scores):

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Note: This post was originally published at College Basketball Reference, S-R's brand-new College Hoops site, so when you're done reading, go over and check it out!

Prior to the 2010 tournament, many media pundits felt that Duke had the easiest bracket of any #1 seed, despite Kansas actually being the top overall seed in the field. If no upsets happened, Duke would have to go through AP #9 Villanova to reach the Final Four; by comparison, Kansas would have to go through #5 Ohio State, Syracuse would have to go through #7 K-State, and Kentucky would have to go through #6 West Virginia.

As the tournament progressed, the only upset that happened along Duke's path was #3 Baylor reaching the Regional Final instead of Villanova, who had been picked off by Saint Mary's (CA). This meant that instead of #9 'Nova, Duke actually only had to go through the 19th-ranked Bears to reach Indy. Once they reached the Final Four, they found #6 West Virginia waiting for them, and in the Championship Game the Blue Devils had to beat #11 Butler, whom they only topped by 2 when a pair of shots by Gordon Hayward each missed by mere inches. So you can see why some are reacting to Duke's crown today with criticism that they faced one of the easiest roads to a championship in NCAA history. But is this true? Was Duke's path to glory really devoid of potholes along the way? And if so, how does 2010 Duke compare to other past champions who had more grueling roads?

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