Wonderful Elegance! No Good at All!

Dear Mr. Morey,

My plan was to watch last night’s two huge, meaningless, self-congratulatory spectacles, and then write you a letter about which NBA All-Stars and Oscar nominees I believe to be overvalued, since I know from reading your Twitter messages that you’re a movie fan and since assessing value is one of your specialties. After all, you're the NBA’s version of Billy Beane (by reputation, at least). I planned to devote space to discussing Aaron Sorkin in particular. In 2011 you wrote about Moneyball for Grantland—though you hadn't yet seen the movie, an unfortunate approach—and the year before, on Twitter, you weighed in on The Social Network, praising Rooney Mara and Andrew Garfield, but disliking the movie overall: "1D characters & should celebrate hard work & smart execution more." (No other GM in NBA history has ever used a phrase like “1D characters.” Another reason I’m glad you run my favorite team.) I was going to say that Sorkin’s work is extremely overvalued, that he makes good drama at the expense of reality, which is questionable since he writes about real people. From there I'd talk about the other Best Picture nominees I believed to be overvalued, even ones that I enjoyed. But first I wanted to see how the night actually unfolded. And now that both the game and the awards are over, with nothing very interesting occurring during the game and two movies I haven’t seen winning most of the awards (The Artist and Hugo), I realize I shouldn’t have gotten so worked up. I'd promise myself that I won’t watch either event next year, except I always do that, and anyway, the All-Star Game’s in Houston next year. Still, after spending way too much time thinking about which movies didn’t deserve any accolades, I’m reminded of something the great Houstonian Donald Barthelme writes at the end of his story "The Party": "Is it really important to know that this movie is fine, and that one terrible, and to talk intelligently about the difference? Wonderful elegance! No good at all!"

The Beautiful Game

Dear Ricky Rubio,

First of all, I'm not gonna worry about the language barrier here. You speak decent English, judging from this strange clip I saw on YouTube where you get interviewed by Drew Gooden (?) on what appears to be the set of a fake news show while wearing some sort of sweater that only a Euro could pull off. And anyway, the subject I wanna talk to you about knows no language barriers. I'm talking about delight, Ricky. Or we might refer to a related term: beauty. You know as well as anyone that the most consistently delightful, purely beautiful action in basketball is a nice pass. When people fall back on that old metaphor of basketball-as-jazz, they're not thinking of dunks or blocks or Carmelo holding the ball for almost the entire shot clock and then taking a jumper. They're thinking of nice passes. There’s nothing better than a nice pass, nothing more delightful than watching a great PG improvise beauty. And ever since news came across the Atlantic about a Spanish kid playing pro ball in Europe at the age when we get driver's licenses in the States, we'd heard that you, my friend, were a purveyor of nice passes.

I'll admit, though, that I was skeptical about you. You decided to stay in Spain after you got drafted, and you hadn't been impressive in the Olympics--no double digits in scoring or assists, not even once--and then you had more unimpressive numbers in the Spanish League last year, averaging well under double digits in both categories. I understood that you were still just a kid, with room to grow, but how could you be a special player in the NBA if you couldn't even be a special player in Spain? It didn't seem possible. It isn't possible, really. Let me speak to you in soccer terms. Your situation would be like a decent bench player in the MLS--you know the MLS?--moving to Europe and dominating the Premier League. Or La Liga, if you prefer. Or let's just say the Champions League. Anyway, that would never, ever happen, correct?