Our memories are unreliable historians.

This is why Philadelphia area resident (And we asume frequent Philadunkia.com visitor) M. Night Shyamalan is a tragic figure.  The putridity of his last three movies has overwhelmed remembrance of the legitimately good, maybe great, stuff he did earlier in his career.  He’s an idiot, we now say reflexively, dismissively, as though he were never anything but.

It’s like the way a painful breakup renders you not just unwilling, but in some ways unable to fondly remember the better times: the canoe trip, trying to put together a desk, or that time you rented Signs.  Post-facto, when you stumble into one of these memories you meant to stash in some out of the way hippocampal groove, rather than enjoy it you mine it for signs of dysfunction, the fall that’s to come.  This mining distorts the memory and in doing so not only robs a piece of personal history of it’s proper due, but actually rewrites that history.  This is how Lady in the Water, by the sheer gravity of its terribleness, has ruined Unbreakable.

And it’s how Elton Brand’s last two seasons, by the sheer gravity of their terribleness, have started to ruin Elton Brand.

This is a bummer not just because he’s a nice guy who’s fallen on hard times (Ok, he’s made well over $100 million to play sports, not that hard), but because his first eight years of professional basketball were extraordinary.  And regardless of how the story ends, they deserve to be remembered accordingly.

These were my thoughts Saturday at Converse’s launch party for Brand’s new EB3 signature basketball shoe (available exclusively at JCPenney!) where I was waiting my turn to get at his ear.  When I got it I asked him about his fall from the top, what he’s doing to get back, and what’s happening with Evan Turner. After we went our separate ways, he gave 100 pairs of his sneakers away to some inner-city kids who were waiting on the court downstairs. Like I said, he’s a nice guy.

Q and A after the J.

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I first became acquainted with Dave Berri in a back-issue of the New Yorker at a dentist’s office.  I was flipping though pages, pretending to read so I could avoid eye-contact with strangers when I found myself looking at a large photo of Allen Iverson.  My brain stirred.  I deduced from the photo, and the words “book review,” that the article it accompanied was a review of a book that apparently had something to do with Allen Iverson.

So I read.  Berri and a few cohorts, the article told me, had developed an algorithm that explained, using only box-score statistics, how many actual wins an NBAer produced for his team.  The piece fixated on one of the models more controversial claims: That Allen Iverson – League MVP, eleven time All-Star, four time scoring champ, first overall draft pick, and protagonist of 90 percent of my 10^th grade biology notebook doodles – just wasn’t very good.  I was outraged.  The audacity, I thought.  Who the hell does this guy think he is?

A trip to Barnes and Noble and 195 pages later I found out – a guy much smarter about sports than me or any of the guys with their hand on the lever of my teams. I wasn’t alone on that thought. Wages was sufficiently successful to warrant a paperback addition and a sequel of sorts: Stumbling on Wins, which was released earlier this year.

Dave, who maintains a blog that’s essential reading and writes about sports for the Huffington Post when he’s not teaching econ at Southern Utah University, agreed to share with us some of his thoughts on the Sixers, the NBA, the state of sports economics, and why he’s happier in academia than in an NBA front office.  After the jump is part one of multiple part series featuring Berri’s thoughts of the 76ers.

 
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Mo Speights has had an interesting career arc.

He showed All-Star potential flashes his rookie season (his PER was so high that February that it called into question the validity of PER as a performance metric) and then faded pretty badly down the stretch (not uncommon when someone used to doing something 35 times is suddenly supposed to do it 82). 

He then came out of the gates hot his sophomore year before partially tearing his left medial collateral ligament in game ten (He was averaging a super-efficient 13 points and 6.4 rebounds at that point, sported a 0.215 WP48, and looked poised to make “the leap”), and when he returned never quite re-found his swing (He finished with a WP48 in the negative, mostly because he went from shooting 64 percent at the rim to 55.8 percent and started to attempt 20 footers –which in his defense went in more often than you would expect them to, though not necessarily often enough to justify taking them).  At best, he’s moving sideways.

But despite his tough year, the Sixers, as evidenced by their trade of Dalembert, are clearly counting on him to contribute.  Is that unreasonable?  Maybe not.  He’s young, and if he’s healthy – which he assures us he is - Speights has a chance to be a very productive basketball player.  If the 7-6 are going to get even within shouting distance of the playoffs (so Iguodala can yell “Please take me with you” to the Heat) they’re going to need a big season from the Big Mo.

Last night the big guy in question was generous enough to put aside some time, tolerate an incredibly lousy connection, and talk with Philadunkia from Las Vegas, where he’s hard at work training for the upcoming season.  Hopefully what happens in Vegas doesn’t stay in Vegas.

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