Muttroxia

How are the Celtics looking for this season? Significantly better than last season, here’s why I think that.

Note 1: As everyone else has noted, the East is stronger. And there won’t have so many teams tanking. Being better than last year may not translate into as many wins.

Note 2: Note the baseline comparison… While the Celtics would be better if we still had Jaylen Brown instead of Paul George that’s not what we’re looking at.

Top Tier (the stars):

• Since Jayson Tatum didn’t play last year and Jaylen Brown is gone, let’s look at this as Tatum replacing Brown. This is likely an upgrade. Tatum has always been a little better than Brown. Now it’s Tatum’s team, he knows it, everyone knows it, and that will simplify decision making. It’s also possible that Tatum never really gets back to his old form – but the odds are strong this is an upgrade.
• I view anything Paul George can give us as bonus. It’s all about his health. A healthy Paul George is roughly equal to Jaylen Brown. If he plays 50 games and is competing in the playoffs, we’re in great shape. The odds are against this happening. The odds are that George will not play so much.
• (I actually had a math argument with AI about this. I had to bring up the associative property of addition. Summarizing these bullet points above – The Net Change in Celtics Stars = (full season of Tatum – full season of Brown) + Whatever Paul George is.)

Mid Tier:

• I expect Payton Pritchard and Derrick White to be about the same. Pritchard is always improving, but let’s not count on that. I see no reason to assume that Derrick White suddenly remembers how to shoot. If he does, fantastic, but let’s not assume it.
• I expect Neemias Queta to improve. He was the biggest surprise last year, and I see him getting even better. He looked great in the offseason.
• Mitchell Robinson will be the same as last year. That’s great!

The X Factors, aka the Energy 5:

Last year there were five Celtics who at various times played way over their heads. They are all crazy cheap against the salary cap, and all can contribute.

• Hugo González and Baylor Scheierman: These are my picks for dramatic improvement. Both have huge upside. I expect national pundits to be saying “Where did these guys come from, how do The Celtics keep finding these guys?” by midseason.
• Ron Harper Jr: Gets moderately better. He’s very skilled, just needs a little time and love.
• Luka Garza and Jordan Walsh: These two stay the same, possibly even regress. Note that staying the same is pretty good, both showed a lot last year.
• I don’t care about Sam Hauser, Mike Conley Jr. or anyone else on the depth chart. None of these guys are meaningfully going to change the team’s success. Sorry Sam.

So where does that leave us?

• The center position is a huge upgrade.
• The wings are a small to a huge upgrade, mostly depending on the health of Paul George. George is the biggest factor, but improvements from Hugo González and Baylor Scheierman will move the needle also.
• The guards are probably about the same. Maybe Derrick White and Payton Pritchard improve, maybe they don’t.

This seems pretty reasonable to me. Will it be enough to improve our record over last year? I don’t know, there is a lot of great competition, and we overperformed last year. Still, there’s every reason to be optimistic about the season. Let’s go Celtics!

April 15, 2026 (Ride 736): Today was the first time I rated a passenger less than 5 stars. (I’ve done 736 rides so far.) She had several annoyances and one big thing.

• She was using an obvious fake name, “Debdata”.
• She was late to pickup. I appreciate that she sent a “1 min coming” message but just be on time.
• She couldn’t figure out the door handle (that’s fine, it’s a Tesla) and she was scratching to try and make it make it work (not fine).
• She gave bad directions to get out of the street.

Those were all annoying but it’s a normal part of the job. But then she went further.

She gave more directions to get out. We were near a MARTA stop. She said to just cut through here on the left. I did. I found I was where the buses go, the dedicated bus area, and I was going against the flow of buses. No, it was even worse than that. I was where the passengers stand! I wasn’t even in the road! I was on the wide curb where all the people wait for the bus! If I hadn’t stopped abruptly I would have mowed down a couple commuters! What the hell? I backed the car up. She said “if you just turn over –“ I cut her off, “shut up, I’m not listening to you!” Unbelievable. I should have booted her ass out and banned her right there.

When I dropped her off at the pin, she asked to be driven another forty feet to a different tower entrance. Just tell Uber the right destination in the first place, it’s not hard. It then took her three tries to close the door. It’s just a car door, this part isn’t hard for any functional adult. Please, would you just go to your job and get away from me and my car.

I gave her a 3-star (safety, asked for dangerous driving), and I banned her from my car (which I now know you can do).

You might wonder — why did it take over 700 rides to do anything but a 5-star? I’ve had some pretty bad passengers, you’ve read about some of them. It’s because of the UX flow in the app. When I finish the ride, I’m prompted to rate the passenger. That screen can’t be skipped. Until I rate them, I can’t get my next ride. And whatever I put will be visible to the passenger. If I rate them less than 5 stars, they are likely to do the same to me. It’s very important to keep my rating up. (I’m at 4.97 by the way). It’s much more important for me to keep a high rating that it is to properly punish bad passengers. I really have no option but to give them 5 stars. But today I learned how to change their rating later in the day. It’s difficult. Uber doesn’t make it easy. But you can. I did. I will do it more.

April 21. My 400^th 5-star rating. I guess I’m a little proud of that? That’s out of 754 total trips. Roughly half the passengers give a rating. Overall, I have a 4.96 rating. That’s down from 4.97, someone put me down as “Not polite”. Maybe it was Debdata, I wasn’t even a little polite to her after she guided me right into pedestrians.

Evelyn was a nice old lady with a new hip. After picking her up at the senior center she regaled with one boring story after another. At the end of the ride, she slowly went into her purse and pulled out one single crisp dollar bill for me as a tip. I know shouldn’t be ungrateful, but a one dollar tip? That’s just insulting, I will not say thank you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSu3X_bIP7g

I picked up Jason downtown in the very early morning. When I saw him I anticipated problems. He looked like the Unabomber after coming off a meth high. Just a bad vibe. But Jason was fine. He was a landscaper. He was just wearing comfortable outdoor clothes and he was very very tired. I dropped him off with a crew of other very very tired looking laborers. Rough life.

On long trips, the Tesla navigation automatically incorporates when and where to charge. It’s a great feature. It’s quite smart.

On the drives to and from Gulf Shores, Tesla recommended stopping many times to charge up. We could have done the whole drive in one or two stops, but it said to make four or more. I assumed that was a bug. It was not.

More physics! Batteries charge more quickly when they have low charges going in. The difference is large – it charges around 200 kW at 20% and below, it charges at under 100 kW once it reaches 50%. The multiples are big.  (The same logic applies to your smart phone or any rechargeable battery.)

Although you lose time by making more frequent stops, you make up that time by charging up more quickly at each stop. That is, you’re better off doing a series of short stops, each time charging to 50-60% than stopping only a few times and charging to 85%. The gains in charging time offset the losses of more stops. Charging from 20% to 50% takes 10 minutes, charging to 80% (twice as much charged added) takes 30 minutes (three times as long).

Here is an example, driving from Atlanta to Boston. Making frequent stops shaves about 20 minutes from the 2.5 charging hours needed (about 13% better).

Metric	Frequent Stops	Full Stops	Difference
Number of Stops	9 stops	4 stops	+5 stops
Total Charging Time	~78 min	~127 min	49 min faster
Total Overhead Time	54 min	24 min	30 min slower
Total Time Added	~2 hours 12 min	~2 hours 31 min	~19 min faster overall

City, State	Frequent Stops	Full Stops
Greenville, SC	Charge to 65% (12 min) (6m charge + 6m overhead)	(Skip)
Charlotte, NC	Charge to 55% (14 min) (8m charge + 6m overhead)	Charge to 85% (40 min) (34m charge + 6m overhead)
Greensboro, NC	Charge to 50% (14 min) (8m charge + 6m overhead)	(Skip)
South Hill, VA	Charge to 50% (15 min) (9m charge + 6m overhead)	(Skip)
Richmond, VA	Charge to 55% (15 min) (9m charge + 6m overhead)	Charge to 85% (41 min) (35m charge + 6m overhead)
Fredericksburg, VA	Charge to 65% (14 min) (8m charge + 6m overhead)	(Skip)
Newark, DE	Charge to 50% (16 min) (10m charge + 6m overhead)	Charge to 85% (38 min) (32m charge + 6m overhead)
Hamilton, NJ	Charge to 55% (15 min) (9m charge + 6m overhead)	(Skip)
Greenwich, CT	Charge to 60% (17 min) (11m charge + 6m overhead)	(Skip)
Hartford, CT	(Skip)	Charge to 75% (32 min) (26m charge + 6m overhead)

On the other hand… the “frequent stops” strategy is more ‘brittle’, as there are more opportunities to get delayed by traffic.

And this effect is bigger the longer the drive. Since the initial charge is a large share of the total distance, starting with a full charge for a shorter drive makes a big difference. For our actual drive from Gulf Shores to Atlanta, it was probably a wash either way.

When I talk to the electro-curious, the first question is “What happens if you run out of battery?” The answer is, I don’t know. It hasn’t come up. My relatively old Tesla holds 230 miles of charge. That’s a lot. There’s plenty of superchargers on every highway and anywhere enough humans live. We’ve driven to Detroit, St. Louis, Boston without a sweat. After five years of ownership, I’m not worried.

We were on vacation in Gulf Shores Alabama. The car was down to 40 miles. Not a problem. We would go into town and get charged up while doing other things. We didn’t expect any problem since we had already visited a supercharger nearby, at The Wharf.

And so Mr. and Mrs. Muttrox, their 18-year-old daughter and 3 of her friends went into for lunch in a caravan of the Tesla and a ‘normal’ gas car. After lunch we went to get groceries, while the girls went to charge up the Tesla and hang out at The Wharf. 90 minutes later we got the call. “Dad, I’m down to 8 miles left, all the roads are closed I can’t get to the charger! What do I do!?” Yikes. Hoo boy. We’ve had these cars for five years and have never yet had to deal with being out of energy at the side of the road. Time to enter crisis mode. 

1. Girls, immediately pull over to the side of the road. Get out of the car. Turn off your Bluetooth. The Tesla needs to be powered off 100% so it doesn’t lose any more electricity.

We were fortunate to have (1) the extra car that could “scout”, and (2) the Tesla app that lets us track everything, notably location.

2. We drove to them (with the aid of the app). Some lady there had said there might be a charger at the Target down that way. Mrs. Muttrox stayed with the Tesla in the heat, the rest of us took the Volvo to check it out. There was no charger. Back to the Tesla.
3. The app said the very place we had eaten lunch (Lulus) had a supercharger, and it was the closest one. I had noticed that at lunch but hadn’t seen it in the parking lot. Well, maybe I was an idiot and just missed it. Mrs. Muttrox stayed with the Tesla again, the rest of us drove back to Lulus. I asked the parking traffic guy and sure enough there were some chargers. They were practically camouflaged and blocked off (I forgave himself for missing them), but they sure existed.
4. Lulus is four miles away from the car. The car now has only four miles of charge. And those miles are an estimate. Brad didn’t think we could get there. We had to try. 

5. Thank goodness for Mr. Rodriguez in 11^th grade AP physics! I knew that wind resistance goes up as the square of speed (because you are hitting more particles and each particle has higher relative velocity), so I had to keep the speed capped at 30 mph even on the highway. I would drive the Tesla with the Volvo behind me with hazard lights on. I couldn’t run the air conditioner (uses energy), I couldn’t have the windows down (adds wind resistance which uses energy). I would just have to bake while driving.
6. I did bake. It was awful. It was over 90 degrees in the direct Florida sun and the car was a sauna. Whenever we got to a red light I lowered the windows to get a small breeze then raised them again when the light turned green. I was stressed about the energy being used by lowering and raising the windows, could that be the difference?
7. But we made it! I backed into the spot with 0% left on the battery. I’d never seen 0% before. The attendant told me I needed to straighten out the car. I told him I couldn’t until I had charged up some more, wasn’t sure I could get back the five feet into the space.  

8. It turned out these weren’t Tesla superchargers, that’s why I missed them before – I was looking for the familiar red and white shapes. These were ordinary level 2 chargers like we have at home. Charging up would take 10 hours. 10 hours is not good enough.  

9. We sent the Volvo off once more to scout “The Wharf”, the only supercharger in the area. Mrs. Muttrox called me and said it was fine, no idea what our daughter was talking about, it’s all fine, come on over. That was 8 miles away. I waited 30 minutes until I was up to 25 miles charge and headed out. I needed that time to cool down. I felt like a boxer, I must have sweated out a few pounds of water while cooking in that car.
10. But I couldn’t get to The Wharf! Everytime I tried to get somewhere, there was a road blocked off. I’d circle to the next area and that would be blocked off also. I was using up my precious miles trying to get to the supercharger, but I was just getting farther away. What the hell is going on!?
11. After a testy phone call with Erinn (I get tunnel vision under stress – I solve the problem but act like a jerk while I’m doing it) I realized what was up. One whole bridge was under construction. The Tesla navigation system didn’t understand that and kept trying different ways to get over the bridge. In the Volvo we used Google Maps, which correctly knew the bridge was under construction and just sent her to the next bridge. (Navigation is the same 98% of the time between the systems, and most of the 2% is irrelevant differences. This was the big exception.)
12. I pulled into the Wharf with 9 miles left. By now, 9 miles felt like 200. We charged up, everything was fine. What an adventure! I got back to the house seven hours after we had left it. The groceries weren’t in great shape.

I discovered that there are services that come out with a battery, the equivalent of calling AAA for a jump start. It’s called Mobile EV Charging, Bee Charged EV seems to be the major player. Or you can get the car towed to a supercharger.   

In the end it all worked out. IMO, five years without ever seriously being close to running out of battery is quite good. Consider what it took to have this problem come up. We had a fairly low charge to start. I didn’t notice the charger at the lunch spot. Major roads were closed for construction. My daughter couldn’t get to the supercharger and didn’t call until we were right at the edge of disaster. The Tesla navigation system didn’t do its job. That’s a lot of things that had to go wrong.

I remain confident that electric cars running out of juice is no more common than ICE cars running out of gas.

Like many Celtics fans, I’ve been struggling to make sense of the Jaylen Brown trade. At face value it is about the dumbest trade possible. This is my attempt to justify it. (I’m writing this in the early morning just before a vacation, I haven’t been able to review it much… be kind.)

• Brad Stevens and the rest of the decision makers are still smart.
• The job of Brad Stevens is to maximize the number of championships. Over the long run, not any one particular year.
• We bought a championship in 2024, bringing in hired guns to supplement Tatum and Brown. We went way over the apron to do so. It was a great deal, and now we’ve been paying off that championship debt for a couple years.
• We can’t be a contender if all the apron penalties apply. We need to get back under and reset them. So last year we dumped a historic amount of salary to do so. (The Celtics went from $540 million to something like $185 million.) We need one more year under the apron to reset everything, then we can buy up free agents again and buy another championship or two. The year after this one is the key one.

Is Jaylen Brown Good?

• Jaylen Brown is a fantastic player. NBA finals MVP (deservedly). 6th in NBA MVP voting this year. Record highs in points and the usual stats. In the end, nothing counts more than wins. With him as team leader, the Celtics finished way above expectations, generating and extra 20 wins or so. He seems to get better every year.  He’s also a great person. This was his favorite year for many reasons, but a lot of it was clearly his relationship with young players he took under his wing and supported.
• But Jaylen Brown is not as fantastic as you might think. All the advanced analytics are not kind to him. His net rating clearly shows that the Celtics do better when he isn’t on the floor. Some try to justify this with waving hands, but it can’t be done. It has been a pattern for multiple years, it’s not just about this years bench. It is unique to him, not Tatum or White or other players with high usage around the league. The sample size is vast. It’s real. His increase in statistics this year can be entirely explained by his increase in usage.
• Jaylen Brown is a very expensive player. Remember he was the highest paid player in the league for a short time. His current contract is very expensive, and is 35% of the team cap. (The absolute numbers continue to go up, but the % of cap is stable. Tatum’s percentage is slowly rising.)
• Brown is so expensive that we can’t build out the rest of the team. We would not be able to re-create that title team, he and Tatum would eat up too much salary to get those other free agents (Jru, Porzingis, etc) needed to be a championship contender.
• So. Yes, Jaylen Brown is very good. The analytics are real, but an incomplete picture. It’s just stupid to think he’s actually a negative on any team. But Tatum is better than Brown. He’s top 5, Brown is top 15. Therefore, it is reasonable to believe (and The Celtics likely do) that Jaylen Brown, as good as he is, is not worth the money. He’d be a steal at $30-$40 million. At $50-$65 million he is an anchor. In other words, Jaylen Brown is very good. But not good enough for his contract. 
• The Celtics cannot be a title contender as long as the massive Tatum & Brown contracts eat up so much of the salary cap. We needed to move off Brown and get back the ability to build a title contending team.

Urgency

• Jaylen Brown is due for an extension in two weeks. If he gets it, all the problems set in for a few more years, The Celtics cannot win a championship. If he doesn’t get it, then he becomes disgruntled. This part doesn’t make that much sense to me. So what – if he’s disgruntled, he’s disgruntled. He’ll still play his ass off, like he always does. I think the issue is that the extension makes him untradeable, but we saw in real life that he isn’t very tradeable already. Let’s assume that not giving him the player option creates enough problems to make that a bad option.
• Therefore, we needed to trade Brown before that option deadline.

What did the Celtics want in a trade

• As Brad Stevens said 13 times, they wanted “optionality”. Which for the love of god is a made up word that is longer than the word it replaces, “options”. Just say options. Or flexibility. Anyhow… Optionality means 1) more/better draft picks, and significantly more cap room in the long run, particularly starting the year after this one (when repeater penalties fully reset).

Given the timeline and urgency, did The Celtics act correctly?

• Sorta. More or less. But if this analysis is correct and Brad Stevens is cold-blooded (which is the job), The Celtics should have traded Brown last year and tanked the season while we were at it. We’d be in a much better place now.
• It was correct to see if we could make a Giannis trade work. It was correct to walk away from the price Milwaukee was demanding.
• It was correct to shop Brown around the league and see what we could get. This was Nico’s biggest problem in the Luka trade. It was reasonable to think you couldn’t win a championship with Luka, it was not reasonable to only talk to one team.
• The basic problem is that every other team has some version of this same analysis. No one else thinks that Brown is as good as his contract either. And the more he was shopped around, the more other owners saw the wisdom of crowds (if everyone else thinks Brown isn’t worth it, maybe I shouldn’t pay a high price either.) This meant the Celtics couldn’t get back the kind of returns everyone thought Brown was worth.

What are the results of the actual trade?

• Is Paul George good? If he’s fully healthy, he’s very good – roughly equal with Brown. But he almost certainly won’t be fully healthy.
• Paul George is nearly as expensive as Jaylen Brown.
• But the Jaylen Brown contracts goes for two more years.
• Paul George has a player option after next year, but at that point he is an expiring contract. The Celtics can move off of him, in the same way the 76ers moved off him. It probably costs us a first round pick to do that, but moving an expiring contract is much easier than one that has more years left on it.
• In the 27-28 season The Celtics will have reset all the apron penalties, have significant cap space to build around Tatum, to sign their own young players cheap (Schierman, Hugo, etc.), get free agents, and will even have a premium draft pick or two. That is the basis of championship team.

Endnote: A couple dump media perspectives:

• You might hear media folks like Bill Simmons saying this years team is actually quite good (true), so that justifies the trade (false). You have to compare against the hypothetical of not trading Brown. If we hadn’t traded Brown, we’d also be a very good team.
• Was it because of the money? In the press conference, Stevens and Chisholm both said multiple times this wasn’t a money decision, it was a basketball decision. That has been mocked, but it’s true. It means that we are willing to pay financial penalties to build a good team. It doesn’t mean that money wasn’t involved – because the amount of money in contracts (cap space) drives basketball penalties.

I wish the trade hadn’t happened. I’ve always been a Jaylen Brown fan. He’s done nothing but play hard, improve, and win. He’s a great person. It’s not his fault that he is paired with Tatum. That is a pretty unique set up, having two superstars about the same age and team longevity on the same team, and it drives some weird dynamics. It’s not Browns fault that he was awarded the supermax contract that set him up to fail. I wish he was still a Celtic. But the trade is at the least defensible. Hopefully we will remember him when we raise another couple banners at the end of the 2020s and retire his number.

Stairway to Heaven.

Every guitarist tries to learn it. It was so common that the Wayne’s Worlds reference isn’t even a joke.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCh6guovbt0

It’s such a cliche. It was voted the greatest rock song a million years in a row in my youth. It’s so overwhelmingly popular and so well known. It’s easy to forget that — well — it’s incredibly awesome. Every generations discovers it because it’s one of the best songs ever. What else can you say about it? (You could say it was kinda stolen.)

Led Zeppelin was honored at the Kennedy Center in 2012. To cap off the evening, Heart did a live performance of Stairway to Heaven. It blows my socks off. It blew away Led Zeppelin, you can visibly see them getting more into it and more emotional as it goes.

Turn up the bass, turn up the volume, turn off the lights, and listen to this version.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cZ_EFAmj08

A few notes:

• John Bonham frequently wore a bowler, thus Jason and much of the supporting team did as well as an homage.
• Apparently they were only able to fully rehearse this once. And it was freezing backstage, Nancy was worried her fingers wouldn’t work for the delicate intro section.
• Some reflections from Robert Plant:

March 26, 2026: At 2:30 in the afternoon, I picked up two sassy fat black ladies from a brunch place (Barneys). They were taking the afternoon off to daydrink. I loved them instantly. They were terribly disappointed by Barneys “weakass brunch”, so they got an Uber (me) to hit up a different brunch. The fare was only $5. A few days later they added on a $35 tip. That’s my biggest tip ever. Especially on such a small base. What a nice treat for me.

 

March 28. Ride 703: I picked up Parkti, a proper young Indian lady at a suburban Marta stop. She quickly asked me to turn the podcast off, she had a headache. Sure, that’s not a problem. A minute later she asked if she could open a window. Sure, that’s not a problem. A minute later I heard heavy breathing noises and (you saw it coming didn’t you) she vomited all over herself and the seat. Just as I was pulling onto the highway. I pulled over to the shoulder of the entrance ramp in traffic for her to step out and gather herself at the guardrail.

She couldn’t stop apologizing. We continued onwards, I mentioned I’d have to hit the carwash directly after, heavily implying she owes me for a carwash. I dropper her off. When I drove to the car wash I found she had managed to furiously puke all over herself without getting a single drop on the car itself. That’s amazing. Very impressive skills, Parkti!

She was my second puking passenger. I don’t do much weekend night driving, I generally avoid the drunks. I did have one couple where the guy was so wasted he could barely get in. Two minutes in he asked to open the windows. His girlfriend saw what was about to happen and got me to pull over in time.

After Parkti I now understand the pattern. When they mention windows, look for a safe place to pull over. And I now stock a few rags and wetwipes in the trunk.

I get asked, “What happens if they puke in your car, who pays?” Uber says they will pay for a cleaning, but they ask for a lot of evidence first. Apparently most drivers just give up and pay themselves. I haven’t yet had any actual vomit in my car to test this.

March 2025: A guy with a thick Russian accent hops in with his wife. We are heading 20 miles to the airport. No, just a location very close to the airport. That’s unusual. Passengers often make mistakes. I check with him to make sure, “Ya ya it is airport we’re going, no worry.” I don’t say anything else the rest of the drive.

We arrive at the address. It’s a seedy factory in the middle of nowhere. It looks like where the bad guys torture the sidekick of the hero. As we pull in, he panics and yells “This isn’t airport! What is this!? Get me out of here!” I pause for a second, but he did put in the airport, so it’s his problem. I had even confirmed with him, but he looks very angry and keeps yelling, “This place look like I get killed here, what is this!? Why you do this!!!?” As I start to reply he breaks up, laughing. Son of a bitch was trolling me. This was the correct destination, he was playing the dumb foreigner act for fun. He got me good. One of my favorite passengers ever.

An old high school friend and I turned out to both have had the same experience. We both got the album “Listen Without Prejudice” by George Michael. We both listened without prejudice. And both of us love it. The album is best known for Freedom, but They Won’t Go When I Go is wonderful, far better than the Stevie Wonder original (and Muttrox loves him some Stevie Wonder).

Other standout tracks are Praying for Time and Waiting For That Day. All of these have stayed within my regular rotation for well over thirty years now. I’m glad that I followed directions and listened without prejudice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oata-ksmxjg

It got me thinking about other album titles that also direct the listener. (I left out singles, which would make this very long.) There are a lot of them. I filtered out impossible ones (“Ride the Lightning”). Here are some notable ones (thank you AI).

• Steal This Album! (System of a Down)
• Kill ’em All (Metallica) – Difficult, but possible.
• Please, Please Me and Help! (Beatles)
• Check Your Head (Beastie Boys)
• Stop Making Sense (Talking Heads)
• Let’s Dance (David Bowie)
• Eat a Peach (Allman Brothers)
• Look Sharp! (Joe Jackson)
• Speak Now (Taylor Swift)
• Imagine (John Lennon)
• Smile (Katy Perry)
• Cut the Crap (Clash)
• Turn Back (Toto)
• Keep the Faith (Bon Jovi)
• Break Every Rule (Tina Turner)
• Believe (Cher)
• Listen Like Thieves (INXS)
• Stand! (Sly and the Family Stone)
• Buy This (Stone Temple Pilots, compilation)
• Get a Grip! (Aerosmith)
• Watch Out! (Pat Benatar)
• Don’t Shoot Me, I’m Only the Piano Player (Elton John)
• Play it Loud (Slade)

In the last couple weeks I’ve been hearing over and over about what a crossroads the Celtics are at, specifically around Jaylen Brown. The Celtics built a package to get Giannis that featured Brown. That didn’t work out. Now Brown is disgruntled. By looking at trades with him, they’ve poisoned the waters. They’ve been forced to actively look at other trades with him because of this. Odds are good he won’t be back next year. What a horrible situation.

In my opinion, it’s all greatly exaggerated.

Did Brad Stevens do anything wrong? No. It is his job to build teams that win championships. He doesn’t, and shouldn’t, have any loyalty to particular players. That’s not his job. His job is to be cold blooded. No one is untouchable. Jayson Tatum is not untouchable. If San Antonio offers Wemby and two firsts for Tatum, that’s a deal. No one else on the team is untouchable, I’m sure there is constant noise about White, Pritchard, Hugo, and every other player. Any good GM is constantly taking calls and making calls to see if they can improve the team. Danny Ainge was right, the soft-heartedness towards the Big Three cost Boston championships. Danny Ainge learned from that. He made hard trades. Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett were beloved in Boston. Pierce particularly “deserved” to finish his career in Boston. Ainge traded them anyhow. Among the haul for them was two draft picks that turned into Jaylen Brown, Jayson Tatum, and a Celtics championship. He was right to pull the trigger on that trade (and trade Isiaih Thomas for Kyrie Irving as well).

That is Brad Stevens job. It’s what we celebrated in Moneyball, how to maximize championship chances with limited resources.

Did Jaylen Brown do anything wrong? No. There’s nothing wrong with wanting a bigger role. There’s nothing wrong with having some ego. He earned it fair and square! It’s hard to say exactly what he did that is getting everyone so worked up. He said it was his favorite year. He said, or didn’t say, a few things on his Twitch channel. So what? This is just a bunch of commentators finding content, this isn’t real disgruntlement.

Has he demanded a trade? No. Has he said he won’t play for this team. No. Jaylen Brown has been living with trade talks almost his whole career. If he was the kind of person who caused troubles because of it, we would know. He is visibly annoyed by it. But he still works hard in the of-season, he works hard in the on-season, he has good relationships with all his teammates, including Jayson Tatum. Jaylen Brown is a professional. Part of being a professional is knowing you could be traded at any time. This is the job. He’s never been anything but an incredible player and teammate. There is zero reason to think Brown needs to be traded because the relationship is poisoned. It’s all nonsense.

It’s unfortunate that the makeup of The Celtics and their financials always leads to Jaylen Brown being talked about in trades. But that’s part of the job.

Billy: I’m a player and you got to cut me from the roster. Do it. Part of the job, man.

Peter: I think this is stupid. I’m not going to fire anybody, and this is dumb.

Billy: They’re professional ballplayers. Just be straight with them. No fluff, just facts. “Pete, I got to let you go. Jack’s office will handle the details.” That’s it.

Peter: Really?

Billy: Would you rather get a bullet to the head or five to the chest and bleed to death?

In 2022, we were looking at a Jaylen Brown for Kevin Durant trade. It didn’t happen, we had these same dumb conversations. Two years later he was the finals MVP as The Celtics raised the championship trophy.

On his last couple podcasts, Bill Simmons wonders why home court advantage doesn’t matter anymore. He listed several possible reasons, which were mostly moronic. Bill, if something impacts both the home and visiting team equally, it has no explanatory power. Obviously. Let’s look at this a bit more rigorously than he did.

Is it true?
First, is the assumption true? Is the home court advantage diminishing?

In the regular season, the home court team has gone from winning ~60%+ up to the 1990s to ~55% today. Vegas bakes in 2.5-3 points for the home team, it used to be 3-4.5. 

What about the playoffs? This is harder to figure because home court is given to the better team. But here again we’ve gone from ~65% to ~58%, and Vegas bakes in 2.5-3 points, though it varies heavily on context.

Conclusion: Yes, the assumption is true.

Do we know why?

Since the phenomena is true, the next step is to see if we already know why it happened. The answer is yes. It’s been studied and known for decades that the home court advantage comes primarily from unconscious referee bias. They don’t mean to, they don’t want to, but referees are human and react to the fans yelling. One of the ways we can see this is how home court advantage completely disappeared in the bubble.

If home court advantage comes from referee bias, has it changed? Yes it has, and that is the answer. Refereeing has become increasingly professionalized. Modern refereeing is heavily scrutinized, graded by micro-cameras, subjected to centralized NBA replay center, play-by-play reports of the last two minutes, increasing social attention, etc. The days of cowboy referees are long over. For all the jokes about Scott Foster, individual referees just don’t impact a game like they used to.

There you go, that’s the answer.

Other factors:

Three-point shooting: The rise of three point shooting increases scores for both teams, but more importantly increases the variance in the outcomes. Increased variance eats away at the home court advantage. Think of an exaggerated case – let’s say at the end of each game, each team takes one shot. If the shot goes in, they get 100 points. In this imagined scenario, the variance would be enormous, swamping everything else that goes on in the game. (It’s analogous to Quidditch, where the optimum strategy is to ignore everything except getting the Snitch. Everyone on the team should be a seeker.) Note that in the last five years of playoffs the Boston Celtics (who shoot 3-pointers aggressively) have a win-loss percentage 10 points higher when playing on the road than at home.

Easier travel: Every team has chartered flights, most have team planes built especially for their comfort. They stay in nicer hotels. The NBA has reduced the number of back to back games. All of this means that the visitors are in much better shape than they used to be. This also applies to the bubble year control case, so there’s some conflating variables there.

Several of the people I follow are worked up about Trump attending Game 3 of the NBA Finals at Madison Square Garden tonight. Because he is attending, they changed the security systems at the game and you can’t bring any bags at all in. Traffic will be shut down all over. MSG is right over Penn Station, so that will be completely disrupted as well. Isn’t that Trump just the worst, ruining everybody’s day like that!?

C’mon. He’s the President of the United States of America. Sometimes the POTUS goes to big sports events, sometimes those big sports events are in big cities, it’s the way of the world. If it was Obama you wouldn’t be complaining, you’d be celebrating. There have been three assassination attempts on the POTUS in the last couple years, it’s appropriate to have a lot of security.

I will enjoy watching Trump get booed for the entirety of the game. I expect and hope it will be non-stop, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he leaves the game early. That’s all fair. But criticizing Trump for doing something all presidents do ain’t fair. Relax. Enjoy the game.

March 8: A large black woman gets in my car while yelling into her phone, “I’m telling you I need you to be cool when the cops show up! They can’t know you’re drunk, you cannot get a DUI and go to jail again! Stay cool!” She repeats this a few times. “Chew some gum. Drink a lot of water. Take some deep breaths… Yes, I know your car is in bad shape, but you’ll make it worse if you’re in jail!” That’s good advice!

My passenger had been out drinking and celebrating with her best friend at their birthday outing. A lot of alcohol was involved. For whatever reason my passenger took an uneventful Uber ride home while her friend drove her own car. On the way home her friend got hit by another car. The other car called the police. Then the other car fled the scene. Now the police are on the way. The best friend is still very drunk, she is at the scene of the accident, and she is loud enough that I hear everything from the phone in the back seat. My passenger is trying to keep her friend from getting arrested for drunk driving, but it’s not getting through. Her friend is still too drunk to understand. It didn’t look like it would end well for the friend.

The capstone: At one point the drunk best friend yelled back, “I can’t go to jail! I’m too small! My brothers are already in jail for that murder!” Yikes.

March 9: You wouldn’t believe how many people don’t put on a seatbelt. And how many of them want to argue about it. You might believe the demographic profile of these folks. It happens a lot. If the trip is under ten minutes I might let it go, but it usually goes like this: I tell the passenger to put their seatbelt on. They are surprised that I would ask and instantly accede. Or I ask and they try to ignore me, or argue with me. Sometime they try to tell me the law. I tell them seatbelts are the law in my car. They can cancel the ride or put it on. They grudgingly put it on. There will be no tip on this ride.

Today, halfway through the trip, he ever so quietly slips the seatbelt off. Really? This is a Tesla. It has sensors for everything. It knows when my eyes are looking at the road. It probably knows my blood pressure and bank balance. You think I don’t know your seatbelt is off!? You can hear the binging noise as well as I can. “Put it back on.” He pretended he didn’t hear me. Enough is enough. I yelled at him. He put it back on. Then he had the balls to take it off a second time near the end of the trip.

An older one: I went to a housing complex near the airport. I couldn’t find the passenger in the complex. I guessed I had driven past the pin… no, wait. There’s the pin, the pin is in a complex on the other side of the highway. It’s two miles to get turned around to the other side of the highway and get there, but I do it. When I get there, the pin has somehow moved back to the first location. What is going on? Here’s what was going on. The passenger wasn’t in either housing complex. He was that guy I had seen walking on the edge of the actual highway. Nope. I’m not driving another two miles to pick up some sketchy dude on the side of a highway. No thank you. No thank you sir!