Spurspective - Game # 1, @ Memphis, 23DEC2020

I decided I might like to write about the team on a game-by-game basis as I wet my feet anew. And, well, hell, I just don't care as much about the other teams or their players. So it sounded like a potential idea to write about the other teams through the prism of the Spurs. Of course, getting to grips with the team I'm more attached to seems like Priority 1. ___________________________________________________________________________________

The Spurs' season opener took place in Memphis, as all the teams are (for the moment) playing back in their own arenas, albeit still empty of fans (again, for the moment). I'd spent the previous week or so briefing myself on the players and the storylines of this year's squad, and thus had come to many of the same conclusions as other Spurs fans:

A New Spurspective

A semiprofessional sports journalist friend of mine recently told me he was taking his talents to another website, and it was discussed that perhaps I would also be interested in throwing my pen in the ring. Although I did have my own sports column in a monthly newspaper at a tiny Christian college in Idaho 15 years ago, and although I do have interest in doing more writing than I've done for years (as any faithful reader of my half dozen prior posts knows), I'm not sure I have enough enthusiasm to throw my pen into the ring just yet. Desires aside, I don't know that I really have the talent or the determination to keep making contributions, particularly if it's not my living.

Of course, it does provide a potential avenue to keep me using this blog. And so I think I'll try to get something down here.

As a fan of the NBA's San Antonio Spurs, I am not proud of the fact that I pretty well tuned out the sport during "last season" (they only wrapped it the first bubbleball season up a couple months ago and have already started another abbreviated season to try to maintain the semblance of normalcy). Between the China/Daryl Morey story, and the disastrous responses by LeBron, Adam Silver, and many others in the NBA, and the league's decision to have a season in the face of a pandemic experience this country has never experienced, I was pretty well turned off. The truth was and always will be that the league will do whatever it can not to lose money...if they can spin their greed as providing a public service for the morale of the average American, they will.

Of course, at this point, they're going to have another season (gotta have that money!). And though their reasons for having a season in the face of danger and setting a shitty example for the public were dirty as sin, the bubble has been noted publicly as more successful than the attempts of any other contact sports league. And as I am getting bored with the same old stay-inside routine, as many Americans--and I think I've held out longer than the average person, as I'm more of a home-body than the average person--I'm bending to my baser desires of catching a basketball game.

Lost in the shuffle of the past year and change of China and COVID were my formerly beloved Spurs. 

Although I will never care as much as I did when Tim and Manu and Tony were suiting up, I still consider myself a fan and surely know more of their bench players than I do from any other team. All that in spite of the fact that they missed the playoffs, had a losing season, and won fewer than 37 games for the first time in 20 years or more. Of course, over the past few years, things have gone about as poorly in the luck/probability/randomness department as they could go for a franchise who is still doing an adequate and self-aware job (as opposed to, say, the Suns organization). Tim, Manu and Tony retired or spent a year in Charlotte before retiring, Aldridge got old, Murray got injured, the team was still picking low in the draft every year, and then the Kawhi situation, wherein the Spurs also lost Danny Green and got probably as much back as they could in DeRozan, who is of course a very good player but also makes it harder to see the writing on the wall.

So now I'm left with the the spectre of former glories behind me and the unknown silhouette of the present and future in front of me. If I'm going to continue calling myself a real fan of the sport, I have to make an effort to be watching it somewhere and somehow. If I'm going to remain a self-proclaimed Spurs fan, I really need to know not just the names but the direction of these players and this team. In short, I need to take a look for the first time since Kawhi left town. I'm excited and a little bit scared of what I'll find.

Fantasy Updates

The more time passes, the more I think this may be a personal journal where I'm posting too many of the little details about my life that no one would ever care about, and possibly just a little too much about myself. Fuck it, I'm doing it anway.

What is the status for my fantasy football teams? Well, we are about to get a draft date set for my old league with college buddies. Everyone says it, but it's true just how much harder it gets to schedule things with people as you get older, have a family, grow apart from your friends, etc. There's always a person or two who can't make the online draft, which is awful (I know, I've been that guy once or twice)...you have to either use the default rankings or choose your own rankings for players that you want. The latter could be fairly simple, if you choose, by just grabbing a couple of names that you think are red flags and burying them so it will be virtually impossible to get them, or you could do a lot of customization. But it seems something always looks wonky to those who made the draft.

What makes it worse in that league is that it's an auction draft, meaning instead of ranking players on what order you'd draft them in, you have to assign a monetary value to them, which is still pretty damn abstract. The ESPN AI that handles our league takes these opportunities to just bid up everyone like Dave on Storage Wars (obligatory "YUUUPPPPPPPP!"). It really hurts my heart when the rest of us who've made the draft have no interest in making the event drag out any longer, and oh boy does the AI drag it out (it takes at least a couple hours to do the whole draft, but after a dozen years that's actually pretty fast for us).

By the way, I won that league with my team, The Swedish Chiefs; being a fan of the KC Chiefs and The Muppets, it seemed like a nice idea. Only problem is that I'm not Swedish. Oh well. The commisioner gets a T-shirt for the winner every year and managed to persuade the company to put a Swedish Chef emoji on the back of it. It's perfect.

The other league, with more serious crew, doesn't seem that serious about the league this year. We're all getting older, of course, but the draft has to happen soon. We are into our second year of a keeper rule system, which means this is the first time we're actually keeping anything, and I haven't seen a response from a half dozen of the members still. Makes it kinda hard to plan a strategy when you have no fucking clue what players are even eligible to be taken, but I guess that's how it goes.

By the way, I won that league too. I don't care that I wrote this already, I'm writing it again until someone knocks me off the throne. And damnit, I had a bunch of burritos for lunch, so I'm planning on being there for a while.

In the latter league, we play for money. I set up a Venmo just to pay into that, and finished top two the last two seasons, so haven't been monitoring it. Hope the money's still there. My team is related but not the same--I just named it The Chefs after the classic Snickers ad (The Great Googly Mooglys is the obvious next team name choice, but I don't think I can use that many characters).

Another Attempt at Finding Something that Sticks

One last idea is a running diary and breakdown of one of my fantasy football leagues. Keeping tabs on the draft, free agency/waiver wire/trade transactions, seeing who the best manager is, etc. 

I am in two leagues, like an awful lot of you I'm sure. One is a league I've been in every year since 2005 or 2006, I can never remember, with a bunch of buddies from college. I like being in touch with them, but I'm not sure how much football they watch. That said, it took me until last season to win the championship.

The other league is with a group of guys from high school--most of them went to the same state college, and they invited me into the league one year. Well, I fucked up. Two leagues at a time was too much for me then, or I was just plain lazy, and they asked me to resign my position as that season wound down (2007 I believe). I got back in a few years ago, and managed to win that league last year too! 2/2 ain't bad, and these guys do seem to know their sport and are more into the league in general, which increases interest and/or fun for pretty much everyone.

It's an awful lot of data, but I might try to pull that off. Could be a handy dandy tool. And if I can keep it up during the 2020 season that might not even make it, I should be able to do it once things calm down in a year or two, right?

Formula 1derwall

 Or some other play on words that is equally terrible...

Another idea I had recently was putting my results down in a spreadsheet (it's always another spreadsheet with me) of a driver career in a Formula 1 racing game. I've done this a million times, it seems, with various games, but with the F1 series I thought I had a solution to make the data more concrete, in depth and accessible.

Someone had built a utility tool for the program that can import/receive car telemetry for your car and the AI cars in these games, with enough foresight to be able to really show the information for the whole race and get a virtual picture of what happened. If you're unfamiliar with telemetry, it looks like this:

Where the various lines might indicate speed, throttle pressure, brake pressure, gear, steering input, etc. for a lap or a collection of laps. In this case either the red or the blues lines are a "reference" lap that serves as a control, and the other color is a recent lap that they are analyzing it next to.

Unfortunately, I can't seem to make the program receive all my telemetry, only bits and pieces of it, which makes it virtually useless. Another idea down the drain.

Foot Notes

I think of this blog regularly, but I've had problems with self-confidence for most of my life and as a result can't think of any idea to write about here without immediately thinking "that's no good, no one will want to read that" or "that's not funny enough" (and damnit, none of it is very funny, though I think I can be funny in conversation). So you see almost nothing here, over a year after starting this up.

As someone who turned 33 earlier this summer, I am not proud of the fact that I still spend too much time playing video games. Well, shit, my job is only 40 hours a week (though I just clawed back the ability to work 5 hours of OT/week, which will help the wallet). I don't enjoy work enough to take on a second job. I have no children. I live with my girlfriend and love her dearly, and I really like her cat that is with us too...but I just don't have any other friends in this town I've been in for three and a half years. I want to get into woodworking, and have been building my tool collection, but it can be an expensive hobby and I have to do it on the back patio, as we have no garage/shop/basement. This makes every project a pain in the ass that has to be moved inside and outside a dozen times. So video games remain a great distraction and timesink.

One idea that I got off the ground very briefly a year or two ago (has it been that long?) was playing an old copy of Madden on the PC and simulating the results. On PC you could export the statistics, which would enable me (a novice Excel nerd) the opportunity to fiddle with the exported data and try to make it presentable. I enlisted a buddy to control a second team, so that it wouldn't just be me me tinkering away, and we could discuss strategy and talk trash and share desktop video of the Super Bowl when it was played every season.

The theoretical product of much of this was intended to be a hard copy newsletter entitled Foot Notes that I would mail to him, like gaming zines of old, and if it went well I could always enlist more people to increase my readership. It would include statistics of the current season, historic data, parodies or comparisons to what really happened back then, news reporting of the goings-on of the feaux-league, and so on. In reality, I got one issue out, and some sort of Windows Update made the game unplayable (it was the 2004 version of the game, running on a Windows 7 machine). The project was quickly tabled. Seems to be about how most of my other interests die.

Four months is long enough to provide an update, isn't it? Just some quick hits, I think:

• The diet? Stopped a couple months ago. Pretty sure I've put it all back on. Just in time to go to a wedding, too.
• The replacement for the Bug? Had to take it in to have the exhaust remounted and a new resonator installed.
• Still finding new things to play and waste my time with. The current thing I'm trying to sort out is how to run Madden 2004 on a Windows 7 machine. If I can do that (and I'm thinking I can't, but I'm still trying) I would like to run an online league as commissioner and have lots of people in it. But it seems like such a pipe dream.
• Still haven't painted again, but I did start watching Bob again. I really would like to make a hobby out of painting but Lord knows if I'll ever be any good at it.

One thing that changed in the past four months is that I am taking advantage of my employer's tuition reimbursement plan to get an Associate's Degree. I should actually be doing my homework right now, but it can wait until tomorrow.

Another thing possibly in my future is a podcast. A buddy of mine and I have kicked the idea around for years, and he was recently a guest on another podcast. He has been diligent about his own writing lately, and I'm hoping to be roughly as diligent as he is. We shall see.