Month: June 2026

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!