I am fascinated by who's getting overpaid in the basketball free-agent market, and who's getting underpaid. Five or ten years ago, the players being overpaid tended to be the big men: Juwan Howard, Erick Dampier, Adonal Foyle, etc. But now, young bigs like Darko Milicic and Drew Gooden are getting paid somewhat normal contracts. Eight million a year for a young starter at PF who was a former high lottery pick? Yes, nowadays those aren't bad deals. It does proves that the MAX ceiling is definitely too low; I think that if the market determined prices, we'd be looking at 24-32 million a year contract for the best players (4x the price of an average starter).

But look who's getting overpaid--Rashard Lewis? Vince Carter? The players now being overpaid are tall jump-shooting scorers with the occasional ability to go inside. The market is now over-valuing tall players who can make small-ball line-ups work. So why is this happening?

One reason for prices of big men to go down relative to jump-shooting forwards could be scarcity. Now that we can get big men from Europe, Australia, and Asia (Yao Ming, Andrew Bogut, etc.) as well as Africa (Mutombo, Bol, etc.), I think that there are more big men available than before. Thus, the prices are finally falling. However, tall jump-shooting forwards are becoming more scarce. The problem with this idea, though, is that Europe is filled with tall jump-shooting forwards.

Another reason is that small-ball has truly taken over; so instead of having a 6'9" PF and a 7'1 C in your line-up, you run out two 6'10" PF/C types instead who can run the floor. To me, I think this may be the reason. I haven't believed some of the small-ball hype in the past (none of the final four teams in the NBA playoffs played small-ball), but when it affects the way GM's spend money, then it must be true.

So what do you think? Why aren't GM's throwing money at any callow starter who stands 6'11" in his stocking feet?

I usually write a long, pretentious psychological analysis on each superstar. Because no one reads it and it puts even me to sleep, err, because I don't understand Derek Jeter at all, no such analysis today. (Free Darko was right; picture gathering does take forever!) He is hard to figure out. What do you remember Derek saying that was noteworthy or gave insight into his personality? Do you remember the last in-depth interview with him? I certainly don't. Therefore, I shall only use pictures of Jeter with fans and you can analyze him. I am a little surprised at how many of them there were; I thought it would be hard to find pictures of Derek. I am slightly surprised not to find more pictures of him with male fans rather than just female fans, but females are most likely to post such pictures to brag, anyway. (I should say that I left out most of the MANY pictures of female fans assualting Jeter cutouts and figurines. Scary. Cancel that order for MCBias figurines, pronto! No one's grabbing my plaster posterior!)
I am serious. Run Derek, before it's too late.


RUN!!!



Here's the rare female fan who was NOT grabbing a Jeter cutout.


Derek Jeter and Jessica Biel playing volleyball...and oh, is Derek cowering to avoid a spiked volleyball to the face? This was part of what I was excited about, sadly.


..

No more comments for now, except for a short open letter. Dear Google-addicted wanna-be girlfriends of Derek Jeter. He's dating the girl in photo 5, err, 8, um, all of them. May I suggest a sports blogger? Sincerely, MCBias.

Sports blogging has its own unwritten rules, like any community. But there are some commandments that I think bloggers should break early and often. Here's some laws of blogging I most like to break, and why. Oh yes, there will be a sequel, bank on that.

Law 1. You shall not say anything bad about posts from other sports bloggers, else the circle of mutual back-patting/ego-stroking will be broken. Where do I start with this? I forgot that the sports bloggosphere was ruled by a dictator and that dissent was punishable by death. Or you would think so, for all the fear and anger people display when anyone criticizes their blog or their favorite writer. And I always love the robotic nature of comments to blogs that just take one side of an issue: "Master Blogger has decided to choose Side A instead of Side B! Let us all agree with Master Blogger!" Disgusting.

And just because someone criticizes your blog doesn't mean they hate you. I met at least one of my best friends in blogging because they criticized my blog, or vice versa. Do you want to be a better blogger? Or do you want people to prop up your sagging ego? I guest-posted at The Starting Five, and Jordi took issue with the points I made. You know what? He was mostly right, and I'm glad he called me out. Otherwise, dumber readers might not ever figure out that what I was arguing might be flawed.

Law 2. You shall link to other blogs as often as possible and beg bigger blogs to link to you, so you can increase your hits. Let me be honest. When my small-blog pals link to me, I appreciate it. But it means, what, 10 more hits in my sitemeter? Same when I link to them; I do it every so often to show respect, but the two readers I bring them isn't going to make a big difference.
And when my big-blog pals link to me, sure, it means I get 800-1000 hits for the day (thanks to TheBigLead). But it means I get about ONE comment, because people who come here from a big blog already have tons of other blogs to read. Or, it means I get uninformed trolls (such as when I ran the Gilbert Arenas article and the Washington Post blog linked to it). Please, let go of your link fixation; you don't need the "gold star" from Deadspin as badly as you think you do.

Law 3. Your main goal shall be to increase hit count.
Covered here. I don't want many readers, I want good readers, people who look at more than one post when they visit and have something insightful to say.

Law 4. You are a marvelous, insightful blogger, and commenters should be fans. You shall not lower yourself by speaking to the commenters in the comment section or asking them for their opinions. Commenters are my main customers, so to speak. I'm not going to let them run my site, but I do want to know what they think. They can go anywhere they want, and they should know I want them here. Sports bloggers need to stop looking to some media outlet for validation (see Law 2) and start realizing that you first need to form a consistent core of commenters. Notice I didn't say fans (see Law 1), I said commenters. Look at how much the Nation of Islam Sportsblog has done with commenters; I'd rather read the comment section than the posts lately. (Um, hope that doesn't make me less righteous, NOIS.)

Law 5. You shall show people how up to date you are by posting only about today's news, even if you have nothing to add to the story. As I read more and more sports blogs, it gets to the point that I can only read one blog about a current event. Writers make similar jokes, have similar biased takes, and often don't have anything to say. Why? Because they're all reading the same AP copy or watching the same video to make their post! Not everything you post has to have happened today. I'd rather write a funny post on something that happened ten years ago than a boring post on today's events.

So, was this post inspirational enough to get you to break Law 1?

I wasn't going to post anything today...but then I made my Youtube run and found some new Elie Seckbach footage.
First, here is Jason Kapono being interviewed. The Silent Assassin himself talks about his shooting guru, Mike Miller, and Gilbert Arenas.

Second, here is Shay Doron being interviewed by Elie.

I'm switching Audio Visual day to Monday from Wednesday, because I finally realized that during the summer months, there are no big sporting events occurring during the weekend. So writing a recap column on Monday of the big weekend sports news is a wasted effort.

I decided to try my hand once more at making athlete videos. This one is dedicated to Darko Milicic for his free-agent troubles. After his agent went off on the Magic as if they had left Darko with a knife in his back in Disneyland, I kind of get the feeling that Darko's getting a little desperate. Maybe, just maybe, he's the one big man who won't get overpaid this summer. Forgive me if I'm not overcome by sadness on his behalf.

Music by LA Symphony, "The Money Song".