The legacy of the 2009 NBA Finals.

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Of all the Kobe Bryant-Phil Jackson titles, this one is especially special.

But not because it’s Kobe’s first without Shaq. No, this title is special because it locks up Phil Jackson’s legacy.

Phil Jackson now has more titles than any other coach in NBA history, even Red Auerbach, but has rarely gotten any respect for them. After all, people say, he just so happened to be the coach who won six titles with Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen, then won three more with Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant. Lucking into two all-time great, title-winning pairings shouldn’t be the criteria that gets you seen as great.

Well, this year, Phil Jackson proved he really is that great a coach.

This wasn’t a Jackson/Pippen or O’Neal/Bryant situation. Jackson had Bryant, but he came into the 2005-06 season without much else. Those years proved that Jackson and Bryant were in fact human; they would have to earn a fourth title together. You can attribute the Lakers’ success to shrewd front-office decisions, but it was Jackson that turned Bryant into the leader he always wanted to be, and Jackson that created the environment that allowed the team to gel and succeed.

The jury’s still out on whether Jackson is the greatest coach of all time, but he’s locked up his spot in the top five to ten. If you don’t think Jackson had something to do with the Lakers’ win, you’re effectively saying that coaches never have anything to do with successful basketball teams. After all, didn’t Auerbach have Bill Russell for much of his career?

Now, maybe that’s the case. But here are the last 25 Finals winning coaches, from most recent to least recent: Jackson, Doc Rivers, Gregg Popovich, Pat Riley, Popovich, Larry Brown, Popovich, Jackson, Jackson, Jackson, Popovich, Jackson, Jackson, Jackson, Rudy Tomjanovich, Tomjanovich, Jackson, Jackson, Jackson, Chuck Daly, Daly, Riley, Riley, K.C. Jones, Riley. The only possible duds (or even non-Hall-of-Famers) of that bunch are Rivers and Jones, and Rivers had three great players working for him (and arguably, Jones did too) and Jones comes close to being the oldest name on the list.

It seems apparent that even great players can’t get to the Finals without a good coach by their side, especially with how egocentric NBA superstars tend to be. If Phil Jackson is the luckiest coach in NBA history, there should now be no doubt he created some of his own luck. He deserves to be on the same level as Red Auerbach and the other great coaches. That can no longer be disputed.

I finally get to pick a fight with an established webcomicker! Because slamming Dresden Codak wasn’t as fun.

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(From 8-Bit Theater. Click for full-sized inevitable hopelessness. Which is a good way of describing 8BT itself, actually.)

So, it’s been long enough. After a brief stint with doing actual webcomic reviews, I got bogged down in all sorts of other stuff, and so I haven’t been doing actual webcomic posts for a while. And it’s high time I sat down and got back into the thick of things. Especially given how close I’ve been coming to putting something off to the point of eternal regret.

Because I never got around to reviewing 8-Bit Theater.

That may well be my eternal shame as a webcomics reviewer. In all my posting about identity crises and sports ratings and April Fool’s jokes and global warming series and missing sports graphics and stressful classes and personal neuroses and complaints about Draft Image Upload (very very close to becoming irrelevant by the way) and overload of side projects and other obsessions, I never got around to reviewing 8-Bit Theater.

I don’t mean to say it’s the greatest webcomic in the history of the universe. I don’t even like 8-Bit Theater. But after I used Komix to subscribe to 8BT with an eye towards eventually writing a review early this year, and seeing it move to a new system and something vaguely resembling an actual RSS feed while Komix’ proprietor was on vacation, and putting off writing the review for one distraction after another, I’m not going to let 8-Bit Theater, which ranks high among the ranks of the Tier 1 comics, pass into oblivion without my having reviewed it.

What’s more, because I’m catching it as it makes its big finish towards the end, I may be getting an unrepresentative sample. One thing that struck me as I was reading it day-by-day originally is that it seems to leave off one plot thread and start up a new story so fast you’re wondering how we got from there to here. When Black Mage says in a recent strip that “this whole goddamn adventure has been nothing but pointless build ups to pay offs that never happen“, most people can’t help but think there’s an element of truth to it. But as I start to re-read it I can’t help but wonder if this is actually cross-cutting between different groups and plotlines that makes sense in context. Still, it can come off as complete nonsense to the uninitiated. Even within a plot, there’s a lot of hopping around back and forth between different stati quibus, and keeping track of what’s going on can be especially difficult when reading it one page at a time.

So, what else? Well, um, 8BT is interesting in how it structures its updates. It uses the one-page-at-a-time approach of Girl Genius and Gunnerkrigg Court and doesn’t really ever stretch it out like Order of the Stick, yet it’s better than the first two at making each update stand out in its own right.

And.

Um.

Yeah.

8BT reminds me of xkcd in a way in that there’s not much I can say about it. Reviewing the updates I originally followed “live” in an archive binge leaves me without much to say either. In fact 8BT leaves me questioning my own ability to go on with my webcomic reviews, just because I’m having trouble properly analyzing it, and that may say a lot about 8BT in and of itself. The characters almost seem to be interchangable cyphers for the most part, without much in the way of distinguishing them or making us care much about what’s going on, which makes it all the worse that it can be a little hard to keep track of what’s going on even when you read it all at once. (With the possible exception of Black Mage, and I swear and hope to God I’m not just saying this to echo what Robert A. Howard said recently, which I just read as I write most of this.)

Oddly, 8BT may have actually been a bit funnier in its very early strips, and maybe a bit more distinguished in its characterizations. Some of its jokes are actually funny, and the strip managed to balance a gag-a-day format with a continuing story, though it did have a habit of making the sort of joke way too endemic of sprite comics: “Look! I can’t draw and sprites have limitations so here’s an explanatory caption to show what this is supposed to be!” And everything tended to be all over the page with side jokes all over. As for characters, Black Mage was the evil one, Fighter the dumb one, Red Mage the munchkin, and Thief… well, here’s where the trouble began, probably. Thief was basically a storehouse of all the jerk-y traits the other three didn’t have. He’s supposed to be greedy and hoarding gold, but that doesn’t really tell you much. They were all fairly one-dimensional (as characters and visually).

It’s easy to see why Red Mage and Thief got mixed up, since they were basically “someone who wants more stuff” and “someone who wants more gold”; Fighter out-and-out decayed, becoming less and less of a complete buffoonish dumb idiot and starting to show slightly more intelligence whenever Brian Clevinger needed a line that didn’t make sense for the other three to say for whatever reason. Then occasionally trying to run too far the other way to compensate. So they all became, basically, “we’re jerks and Black Mage is pure evil”. Even Fighter became too consumed by his stupidity to be an effective counterpoint to the others’ jerkness, and leaned more towards the other Light Warriors than, say, White Mage in those instances when he snapped out of it. One wonders if Clevinger made him “he’s really a good guy – but he’s friends with pure evil because he’s too stupid to realize otherwise! Get it? It’s funny!” in a last-ditch effort to maintain the distinctions, the same reason Red Mage developed an odd cross-dressing fetish (which just made Thief look even more generic).

In fact, let’s save you the trouble of actually having to read 8BT yourself, as here’s a pretty good summary of the strip:

8btparody

I guarantee you that strip is more funny than almost all of 8-Bit Theater, and probably a lot better as well.

In my full-fledged Darths and Droids review I said it was no insult to call 8-Bit Theater a poor man’s Order of the Stick. I see now I was wayyyy too kind. 8BT isn’t even as good or compelling as Bob and George, which may be partly the result of having characters that should by all rights be the villains as the protagonists to the extent that you hate them more than rooting for them. Not even Ethan from Ctrl+Alt+Del is as bad as these guys! OOTS‘ Belkar is, but you root for him more than you root for even Fighter! Of course, maybe the real problem is that the former has Lucas and Lilah while the latter has the rest of the OOTS to balance them out, while the closest thing to balance the Light Warriors have, White Mage, hates them as much as anyone else and only pops in and out. Another possibility: Belkar is funny when he’s doing evil things while the Light Warriors are funny when bad things happen to them. (To be honest, probably 90% of the actually funny jokes in 8BT are just Fighter being stupid.)

I’m not sure why people attack CAD so much or why John Solomon went after B&G when 8BT is far more deserving of the vitriol. I want to make clear: this isn’t an anti-sprite-comic review. I read and enjoy Bob and George (which, having ended, is ineligible for a review) and I don’t even see sprite comics as a crutch for an inability to draw, as Dave Anez and Clevinger have mad Photoshop skillz to tweak their sprites the way they want to. The problem is that in Clevinger’s case, he seems to have put too many skill ranks in those and not enough in “being funny” or “having a decent story”, and Anez has a few in at least the former. Like CAD did for video game comics, 8BT started a trend (well, furthered the one started by B&G, much like CAD accelerated the trend started by Penny Arcade) of bad sprite comics by people who only see a way to get into comics without having a lick of art skillz, or even a reason to get into comics. Unlike CAD, I can’t discern Clevinger’s secret to his success, and my leading hypothesis is a bit distressing: geeks like the kind of non-sequitur nonsense Clevinger specializes in. If more CAD strips were like the Chef Brian strips it might be as beloved as xkcd.

On the other hand, if I find out 8BT in any way inspired The Order of the Stick, then all is forgiven. Though I’ll still rib Clevinger for Rich Burlew showing him how it’s done.

Sorry, @RaysIndex, but you’re no better than the other roids speculators.

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I’m sorry, Mr. “Professor”. But you’re reading way too much into Jon Heyman’s 2007 “does Sosa belong in the Hall?” piece if you think it makes him a hypocrite now for calling out people who baselessly speculate whether this guy or that guy is using steroids.

You have to keep in mind that Heyman did not start the speculation that Sammy Sosa had used steroids, especially after his disasterous testimony on Capitol Hill. In fact, I think his piece could be read as a defense of Sosa against people who want to keep him out of the Hall against baseless speculation.

Steroids speculation is making everyone crazy. But one of them is not Jon Heyman. It’s the nameless proprietor of the Rays Index.

If the blogosphere is going to be the mainstream media of the future, it needs to be able to look critically on itself and catch itself when it errs.

Expand the Pac-10? Uh… no.

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Really? You think Utah is too good for the Mountain West? That’s your real problem, isn’t it?

Sorry, the reason the Pac-10 is NOT expanding anytime soon, no matter what you may want to happen, isn’t just to maintain the truthfulness of the “10” part, unlike the Big Eleven. Right now, the Pac is divided into five nice and neat geographic rivalries. Adding Utah and Boise State (the next logical football addition) wouldn’t maintain that pattern.

And frankly, as much as I respect the mid-majors, I really think Utah, Boise State, or any other addition from the Mountain West or WAC would be Cal-Oregon-Oregon State-Arizona-State-on-a-good-day level in the Pac-10, not USC level. USC and the good SEC/Big 12 teams are perennially just that good. (Keep in mind, USC beat Utah 16-0 on the road in the Golden Bowl Octofinals.)
Quit worrying about the Pac-10’s lack of respect and start worrying about your real problem – the Mountain West’s lack of respect and its need to expand with Boise State and maybe Hawaii, Fresno State, or Nevada. Who knows, maybe someday the Pac-10 will be wowed with the prospect of conference championship money and bring on Utah and BYU (both fairly good teams in both football and basketball). But as some of the commenters on this opinion piece suggest, getting more appropriate bowl tie-ins and less reliance on FSN is probably going to have to come first.

(This would not be a full-fledged blog post if I wasn’t on Twitter. I might not have even heard of it if it weren’t for Twitter, but that’s not the point.)

Idle musings on America’s most watched shows.

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Okay, let’s see if I have this right.

Ignore for a second that the Sports Business Daily has made an article available free if only briefly. This (courtesy Fang’s Bites) is a list of the highest-rated programs so far this year. The only programs to get more than 24.8 million viewers are the Oscars and episodes of American Idol.

(Does anyone know of any other programs to get into that range that come later in the year that aren’t sports?)

So, let’s take the Super Bowl’s rating of 42.0, divide it by its number of viewers (98,732,000), then multiply by the lowest number of viewers on the list to establish the cutoff, and we get a rating of 10.5.

Wait… the lowest-rated sports event on the list is the Ravens-Titans playoff game. Which got a 15.4 rating. Ravens-Dolphins should have also gotten on the list at 15.0, as should have Cardinals-Panthers, Falcons-Cardinals, the Rose Bowl, the college basketball championship game, and depending on relative positioning, the Super Bowl Pregame Show.

Okay, let’s try the conference championship games. Try the AFC Title Game. That last place episode of Idol should have gotten a 13.4. That still doesn’t account for the three NFL Playoff games I mentioned. The NFC title game? By those standards, the lowest rating should be 14.1. Still doesn’t account for Ravens-Dolphins.

Okay, let’s zip down to Ravens-Titans. Well, this makes more sense: a 15 even, evidently with more viewers than Ravens-Dolphins. Still, evidently rating/viewers is not a constant and there’s a bit more that goes into the formulae… which could be a problem if I want to work with that sort of thing.

(Although at the very bottom it says the ratings are Live + Same Day. Are those not the same numbers as the final ratings? How useful is that?)

More on the greatest player of all time debate.

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So earlier today I heard Michael Wilbon claim on PTI you have to put Federer ahead of Sampras because the tiebreaker is that Federer won the French and Sampras didn’t.

Um, NO. Sampras got the same number of Grand Slams as Federer against better competition, and you can’t begrudge him never winning the French because of that. ESPECIALLY since the only reason Federer won the French is because Nadal crapped out.

Get it? Got it? Good.

Let’s bring this guy down to earth.

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I’m sorry, Mr. Perrotta.

There IS debate as to whether Roger Federer is the greatest player of all time. You don’t get to cop out by saying “well, you can’t compare players of different eras”. You CAN say Federer played against inferior opposition for most of his career and never won the French when he had to get past Nadal.

You CAN say Sampras, or Agassi, or McEnroe, or Conners, or Borg, or even Laver and some guys I’ve never heard of were better because they may not have been as dominating, but they proved it against opposition that was as good as they were.

Top 10? At this point, yes. But I vehemently object to anyone who suggests there’s no debate that Federer is the greatest player of all time.

Let’s look at the big picture.

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First, in order to keep Extra Innings the cable companies swung a deal that gave MLB Network wide distribution, not just on the Sports Entertainment Pack.

Then, Comcast and the NFL spontaneously settled their differences out of the blue, and Comcast agreed to give the NFL Network wide distribution as well. At the same time, Comcast also finally reached an agreement with ESPNU, and that’ll involve wide distribution as well.

Now, in the past week, Comcast has engaged in similar distribution-broadening with the NHL Network, and now NBATV. (Although the NBATV deal was reported on as early as March.)

That doesn’t even mention the end of the impasse between Comcast and Big Ten Network last year; outside the Big Ten footprint it was placed on the Sports Entertainment Pack.

So I have to ask: Is Comcast giving up on its Sports Entertainment Pack?

What’s next? Will CBS College Sports or the FCS networks get bumped up? What about the Tennis Channel? Will new channels like GOL TV get added to make up for the losses? Is ESPN Classic getting bumped down, as was rumored? Could I even have the opportunity to get the mtn. outside that conference’s footprint?
(I’m certainly not complaining about the sudden jolt in options, and the ability to watch all the cool new stuff, especially on NFLN and ESPNU.)

The ideal Firefox RSS plugin. Also, why Firefox may be driving me back to IE8.

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Everybody loves Firefox. It’s the best web browser in the history of history. Especially compared with IE, which sucks so badly the only reason anyone uses it at all is because it comes with Windows and the great unwashed don’t know any better. It’s the worst web browser in the history of history.

But for as much as IE’s recent browser releases may have aped Firefox in the same way its Windows releases since 95 have aped Mac, in aping Firefox IE7 may have leapfrogged it in the area of RSS feeds, at least for novices. Microsoft, incredibly, went from “no RSS support at all” to “better than Firefox, at least without plugins”.

(Depending on your point of view, IE8 may have done the same thing in other areas.)

In my review of Sluggy Freelance, I found a blog post from 2006 wondering when RSS’ “killer app” would come along, and suggested it may have turned out to be IE7. Now I think I can safely add, “And not just because most people don’t use Firefox.” FF’s RSS reading model is the idea of “live bookmarks”. Each RSS feed is essentially treated as a special type of folder amongst your bookmarks; each individual entry is a bookmark within that folder. It’s a nice metaphor, but I think it kind of misses the point of RSS, especially when FF has no native way to easily see when there are new items. You have to install plugins for that. (Perhaps FF’s model was designed for sites that completely clear out their RSS feeds on a regular basis because they have such a high density of posts.)

IE, on the other hand, gets RSS. Feeds are placed on a separate “feeds” panel, but otherwise can be organized in much the same way as ordinary favorites. Feeds you’ve saved are regularly checked (as often as 15 minutes if you set it that way, although annoyingly some sites arbitrarily set feed times for less often and IE treats those as the minimum instead), and if there are new items, the feeds turn bold. When you open a feed it opens a sort of web page displaying every item in the feed (if there are new items it displays only the new items) along with their descriptions.

I think that if Firefox had a plugin that showed a simple alert whenever your feeds were updated, perhaps by making them bold or something to set them apart from feeds with no new items, and carried that bolding to the folder level (so if a folder contained feeds with new items it would turn bold as well, again aping IE but something that neither the Boox or LiveClick plugins do), something like that would probably spark a larger wave of people deserting IE for Firefox. Ideally such a plugin would work from within the existing Live Bookmarks system, just to set a limit so people wouldn’t have to wade into the wide, wild world of independent RSS readers, as well as to prevent confusion and later frustration when subscribing to a new feed, and to ease feed input. The best plugin I’ve seen for someone transitioning from IE is probably the Feed Sidebar, which does a pretty good job of capturing the benefits of the Firefox model of feeds in a form familiar to IE users, but I would like the ability to sort feeds into folders that alert in the same way as individual feeds, or at least tweak the order feeds update and have some control over what order feeds are listed. I don’t know if that would be possible without leaving the Live Bookmark system, however.

In any case those issues aren’t as big of dealbreakers as I originally thought, and I probably would be using the Feed Sidebar long-term for my RSS-checking needs… if I were sticking with Firefox at all. But I’m not. You know how, to hear from many Firefox partisans, “oh, once you try Firefox you’ll never go back to IE!”? Well, I’m running screaming back to IE. Even after the issues with IE that led me to leave in the first place.

Here’s the thing. When Firefox partisans tell you how much faster it is than IE they’re not telling you the whole story. There are two components to speed of a web browser. There’s the speed with which it surfs the Internet… and there’s the speed it takes to run. And Firefox – I don’t know if this is just because of plugins (every RSS reader I tried at least partially makes Firefox freeze temporarily while checking feeds) but sometimes it will slow down for no apparent reason – is a huge resource hog. I think it might be using something like 300 MB memory regularly, depending on how you interpret the Task Manager, something IE only achieved when it was really reaeeaaalllly taxed. My computer was basic in 2006, so Firefox is as slow as molasses. Maybe one day I’ll install Firefox on my desktop once I get a real job and a real Internet connection I can hook it up to, but for now I’m re-setting up IE8 as my default web browser the instant I post this post.

Now, of course, I still have some issues with IE8, so: any Chrome or Opera users out there? I’m looking for a web browser that will operate reasonably well in Windows XP on a 1.7Ghz Pentium processor with 504 MB RAM. (I sometimes have 10-20 tabs open in a single window with pages loaded but mostly not being used.) Preferably, I’d like something that browses the web faster than IE, but actually running faster than IE would be a big plus as well. (IE has had no shortage of random freezes of its own, but FF randomly freezes several times a day.) I’d also like an IE8/FF-style favorites bar, but could go without several FF features I like because this is almost unusable. Nice but not required: an FTP system that works better than Windows’ built-in one. I think I have one or two other issues with IE8, probably holdovers from IE7, but damned if I can think of them right now.

I may take Chrome out for a spin as soon as next weekend unless I hear that it’s not suited to my computer or browsing habits.