Category Archives: in many ways the work of a critic is easy

Players may need coaches and colleges less than we think

Correct response of Division I head coaches and the NCAA to this graphic: Uh-oh.

Proper response of Division I head coaches and the NCAA to this graphic: Uh-oh.

The evergreen topic of the NBA’s age limit has popped up again in the news, as it is wont to do every couple of years. Whenever this discussion recurs, it’s informed and to a certain extent framed by two implicit assumptions:

1. Player development is a gift waiting to be bestowed by wise college coaches if only blue-chip Division I programs can get the nation’s best young prospects in-house for a season or, even better, two.

2. College ball and the NBA together comprise a closed-loop pipeline that elite players will always have to navigate, international prospects and the occasional Brandon Jennings notwithstanding.  Continue reading →

Longform from Sinatra to “Snow Fall”

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April 1966: "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold."

April 1966: “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.”

Last week Twitter buzzed with praise for Tim Layden’s highly praiseworthy Sports Illustrated longform piece on thoroughbred trainer Jeff Lukas, who was critically injured in 1993 when he was run down by one of his horses. Purely as a piece of writing Layden’s piece can be placed comfortably alongside the best of SI’s illustrious longform past. (A past that, to its credit, SI has made easily available with a marvelous searchable archive.)

The timing of Layden’s feat makes it all the more impressive, for at the moment longform is in danger of being suffocated by esteem. A new longform piece in 2013 signals not only a moral imperative for the reader to be duly impressed, but also a rare and precious opportunity for eager web developers to trick the thing out with every mouse-over gimmick that can possibly make your laptop slow down and wheeze. It is unclear whether the genre can survive either the moral imperative or the technological excess unscathed. Yet somehow Layden transcended his post-“Snow Fall” moment, a moment that, to be sure, is not entirely or perhaps even substantially the fault of “Snow Fall” itself. Continue reading →