February 12, 1934: Bill Russell was born. No one did more to ensure his team’s success & win championships. Russell won 11 NBA titles, 2 NCAA titles, and Olympic gold with his elite defense, athleticism, versatility, passing, rebounding, leadership, intelligence, clutch play, etc.
Here are some highlights of Russell and here are his career stats. 1) WINNING (Part 1): The Celtics were ho-hum right before Russell joined the team, pretty bad right after he retired, and even worse when he missed games during his career, but when he was there they were the most dominant title-winning franchise in sports history, which proves how ludicrous the “He was simply the best player on a loaded team” comment is. DETAILS: a) Boston won 2 total playoff series in the 10 seasons before Russell arrived, and both were short best-of-3 series (‘53, ‘55), b) Boston went 34-48 and missed the playoffs in ‘70 right after winning the title in Russell’s final season, and c) when he missed games during his career, the Celtics were 10-18 (.357), and 18 of those 28 missed games were against teams with losing records, so there was no excuse for a “loaded” squad to be so bad. When Russell missed 3 or more games in a row --meaning his teammates really had to adjust & couldn’t just “get up” for one game without their leader-- the Celtics were a pitiful 1-12. They were horrible without him. There is NO evidence the Celtics were any good when Russell wasn’t on the floor, rather a ton of evidence to the contrary. 2) WINNING (Part 2): It's been commonly reported that Russell was 21-0 in winner-take-all games, but that’s incorrect …. he was 22-0. If Russell's team played even with an opponent throughout a series or got to the same place in a tournament, Russell's team was ALWAYS going to pull it out in the end.
At USF, his '55 team was 5-0 in the tourney on the way to the title.
At USF, his '56 team was 4-0 in the tourney on the way to the title.
In the '56 Olympics, the US squad was 2-0 when it came to the winner-take-all Final 4 for gold after the group stage.
In the NBA, the Celtics were famously 10-0 in Games 7's throughout his career.
In the '66 playoffs, the Celtics won Game 5 in the best-of-5 series with Cincinnati (link).
3) WINNING (Part 3): The Celtics didn’t win the title only 2 times during Russell’s 13-year career, and both were (very likely) due to difficulties experienced by Russell.
In 1958, the Hawks topped Boston 4-2 in the Finals (winning by 2, 3, 2, & 1 points), during which Russell missed 2 games and played at far less than 100% with a horribly sprained ankle when he was available in the series. It’s safe to say Boston would have won that title with a healthy Russell.
In 1967, the aging Celtics, fresh off of 8 straight championships, lost to the loaded and younger Sixers in the ECF. This was the first year Russell was Boston’s player-coach, which is significant since he faced horrendously stressful & over-the-top racism as the first black coach in major US pro sports history. He played so much and so intensely (43.3 min/gm in the playoffs) that he often forgot to sub players which hurt his team. The next season, the Celtics were older & considered “done”, but he added a bench coach to handle subs, and they beat the favored defending champion Sixers in the playoffs, and then won the title. Then the “seriously, they’re done now” 1968-69 Celtics clawed their way into the Finals & beat the loaded West-Wilt-Baylor Lakers 4-3 in Russell’s final season. Two giant asterisks have to go beside the only two championships Boston didn’t win during Russell’s career.
4) WINNING (Part 4): Russell went to college at the University of San Francisco which had just suffered through 3 straight losing seasons before he joined the varsity team. He lead an unranked USF team to 2 consecutive NCAA titles during his junior and senior seasons, going 57-1 along the way, and he could have won a title all 3 seasons he played at USF if not for losing teammate K.C. Jones one game into their sophomore season; they smashed the #17 team 51-33 in game 1 with Jones who was hospitalized that night with a burst appendix, but Russell still lead them to a 14-7 record before going on to those 2 titles. Even at the college level, he could lead players who weren’t supposed to win to the ultimate heights; it wasn’t just in Boston. Also, he was the leading scorer, rebounder, and defender on the 1956 gold medal winning US Olympic team, which had an average margin of victory of +53, the highest ever (’92 Dream Team was +44). 5) CLUTCH: I already mentioned how dominant Russell’s teams were when it was all on the line, but I’ll add that his list of clutch games, series, and moments is ridiculously long, plus his ppg, rpg, and apg averages all rose in the playoffs. I’ll simply point out that he had the greatest Game 7 performance of all-time in the 1962 Finals, scoring 30 points & grabbing 40 rebounds to win the title in a super-tight Game 7. If you didn’t know, the NBA Finals MVP award is officially called the Bill Russell NBA Finals MVP Award. 6) INTELLIGENCE: Part of what made Russell so unbelievable in big games and moments was that his IQ and level of manipulating opponents is unparalleled historically. On defense, he’d often intentionally “just miss” blocking a particular star player’s shots earlier in a contest, but late in the game when the opponent was lulled into thinking they could get a certain shot off over Russell that night, he’d extend the extra inch and come up with clutch blocks & defensive plays they weren't expecting. I’ve never heard of another player doing stuff like this. The stories about his IQ are legendary & numerous; here are some clips about his hoops IQ. At least watch the 3rd one on that list ("Some more mindgames") to see a short interview with him talking about manipulation of a star opponent in a way I’ve never heard another player articulate; he truly was thinking on a whole different level to create advantages for his team. 7) VERSATILITY: Bill Russell was so versatile on the floor because he trained and played all 5 positions on offense. The only other players in history who could maybe do this are Maurice Stokes and Giannis Antetokounmpo, but Russell’s results were quite different, plus immediate & sustained. His value to the Celtics’ offense is WAY underrated, especially on the fast break where he arguably had a bigger influence than Steve Nash did for the Suns’ fast break due to how well he could start, run, and finish it. 8) PASSING & OFFENSIVE INFLUENCE: Speaking of his versatility on the fast break, Bill Russell was a great passer, both in the half-court & full-court, and put up insane assist numbers for a center, especially in the playoffs (averaged >5 apg in the playoffs during 7 different seasons, far more times than any other center). John Havlicek, in his 1977 autobiography, said the following about Russell's effect on Boston's offense when specifically discussing their first post-Russell season ('70):
"You couldn't begin to count the ways we missed [him]. People think about him in terms of defense and rebounding, but he had been the key to our offense. He made the best pass more than anyone I have ever played with. That mattered to people like Nelson, Howell, Siegfried, Sanders, and myself. None of us were one on one players ... Russell made us better offensive players. His ability as a passer, pick-setter, and general surmiser of offense has always been over-looked.”
I’ll add that Bill Russell finished 4th in MVP voting with an 18% vote share in 1969, his final season (‘69 MVP voting). I believe this is the best MVP finish by any player in their final season. 9) MORE ABOUT HIS OFFENSE: Fans often knock Russell for not being a high scorer. He played on a team that spread around the scoring, so very few Celtics ever had big scoring numbers, and he often had the best FG% on the team. Russell was top-5 in FG% in the league 4 times, while more recent dominant-scoring centers Hakeem Olajuwon, David Robinson, and Patrick Ewing all did it once. Russell understood what individual sacrifices to make and how to improve his teammates so they collectively would be winners, which is why he won the 1962 MVP (voting) over Wilt Chamberlain (his epic 50 ppg & 26 rpg season) and Oscar Robertson (his epic triple-double season). By the way, Russell holds the record for the most consecutive MVP awards (3), most consecutive top-2 MVP finishes (6), and has the 2nd most MVP’s of all-time (5). It was clear that Russell’s approach was far more valuable to his team’s success than that of other superstars with monster stats. 10) DEFENSIVE IMPACT: There is no hyperbole in saying Russell was unquestionably the most impactful defensive player ever. The Celtics consistently & regularly had the #1 defense in the NBA throughout his career, yet they were FAR worse before he joined the team, and they immediately dropped in the ‘70 season right after he retired. Here are Boston’s annual rankings in Defensive Rating, starting in the ‘54 season: 8, 8, 6, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 1, 8 (the highlighted parts represent Russell’s career). He had an overwhelmingly positive influence on the entire team’s defense to a degree we’ve never seen from any other player. 11) ATHLETICISM: Watching film of Russell, it’s clear he was extremely fast and active, elite even by today’s standards. He also possessed Olympic-level leaping ability (7th ranked high jumper in the world in 1956). For the record, he was measured as 6-ft-9-and-⅝ without shoes, taller than both Dwight Howard and Alonzo Mourning. This incredible athleticism is what allowed his defense to be a cross between Tim Duncan & Kevin Garnett, covering everything everywhere with phenomenal explosiveness, plus impeccable timing & decision-making. 12) LEADERSHIP: Bill Russell had the best combination of elite on-court impact on team synergy plus elite locker-room unity & positivity. Very few guys are even in the discussion of having this type of elite combo: Tim Duncan, Jerry West, Larry Bird …. not many more, especially when you also consider a player’s impact on his team’s defensive synergy.
[This is a long one, there is a TLDR at the bottom] (This isn't just a story of revenge. This is a story of how revenge hurts both parties) To this day, a good revenge story gives me a warm bubbly feeling inside. I believe it comes from this college experience years ago when I got revenge on my cheating girlfriend and it felt GOOD. I know I'm not suppose to enjoy it but I can't deny how satisfying it feels. Its probably one of my favorite feelings in the world even though I'm ashamed to admit it. So I decided to write my first post about this because I don't tell the story often. It is so extensive and honestly just makes me look bad. I'm going to try my best to not paint a picture where my X looks as bad as possible and me as innocent as possible. I want to write this accurately as I can, even if it makes me look bad. [Bit of context and back story] At the time of this story, I played division 1 NCAA basketball at a school so I traveled a lot (weekly in different cities and states) and my entire life revolved around this. During the events of this story I was in the early stages of a horrible drug and alcohol habit. Years after this story I ended up getting sober and joined a program whos name you can find at the front of almost any phonebook. I am sure many people reading this are also sober and will understand how we addicts/alcoholics can be. This story is an effort to explain a character defect that manifested from the events in this story that lead me down a very dark path, however, I don't mean this story to come off in a "self pity" kind of way. Lastly, I was always a good kid, I was never "troubled". My upbringing was very difficult but I was able to keep an overall kindness in my spirit to other people and almost always "did the right thing" or "took the high road". When it came to dating, I knew people cheated in relationships but at the time of this story I always chalked it up to other people "not doing things the way I did". I never really thought it would happen to me.. I always thought that because I was a "5 star boyfriend" and my "amazing choice" in women, infidelity would never be a part of my dating journey. I was a naïve. I really thought highly of myself and also had a real arrogance like any guy in his early 20s I guess. [The Build Up] I was in my Jr year in University I had been single for about a year after me and my high school gf finally broke up after 3 years. I checked that relationship off as my "learning experience" and I now knew what to look for in my next girlfriend. The next woman I chose to have a relationship with I would most likely marry and start my future with. (I know I was young and dumb and thought I knew everything LOL) I had my eye on this girl at my school [we will call her Lisa]. I saw Lisa around the collegiate athletic facility (the university teams training grounds, and locker rooms). Lisa ran for the track team and was damn good. The various athletic teams often had parties and I knew that the first one I saw her at I would introduce myself and try to chat her up a bit and see where it led. Soon enough I see Lisa at one of these parties and we pass each other on the stairs. We make eye contact and she smiled at me. I sparked a conversation with her and after going back and forth a bit we exchange numbers. We begin the classic American style of flirting where we constantly just hint things back and forth indirectly. We slowly progressed the relationship in this manner for weeks. Sending texts back and forth hinting that we were interested in each other but also playing it cool to not let the other person know we had a crush on them. At the time, she was on a break with her current boyfriend who was a popular player on the football team. She ended up leaving him completely to date me. This shoulda been a red flag obviously but remember, I had severe hubris. At the time her leaving him to date me just gave me a superiority complex. I was playing good in sport and if she was willing to leave this guy for me then she will never leave me for another guy. Lmao I was a fucking idiot. I cant express how much I was into Lisa. I was addictively attracted to her and had that weird feeling of "I cant believe my crush is actually into me to". I really was so drowned and blinded by my crush on her I missed so many red flags but our relationship began progressing really fast. Because of this I didn't really do a proper inventory on why I liked her so much. [Fast forward like 8 months later.] We are together officially. Lisa has her own athlete's dorm room but I was a couple years older than her and was working during the summers full time and part time during school / season and had my own apartment near campus and Lisa was basically living with me. She even would stay there when I was out of town which was like 3 or 4 days of every week because we were in season and the team was flying all over the country. Me and Lisa were deeply in love regardless. At the end of the season I had planned two massive back to back parties. One was for my teammate's birthday (Friday night) and then my birthday (Saturday night). They just happened to be one day after the other and luckily landed on a Friday and Saturday night. Me and Lisa got drunk Friday night and had some unprotected sex. Lisa kept a period-tracking calendar app on her phone. She was asleep and I drunkenly remembered she always marked down in her calendar when we had unprotected sex so she knew if she should be worried if she missed her period. She missed her period often because she was an athlete. My inebriated brain thought she should put it in her calendar now because we would forget the next day since we were so fucked up. So I woke her up and said "can you put in that calendar that we had unprotected sex". At this point it was like 5am and we were that 5am kinda drunk where you're mostly just tired. She unlocked her phone and opened the app and before she could even do it she fell back asleep. So I took the phone while it was still unlocked and proceeded to try and figure out how to put it in her calendar myself. [side note] Through our entire relationship, Lisa went through my computer and phone constantly. She was very insecure and always had her suspicions. I didn't care that she was doing this all the time. She never found anything because I never did shady shit, ever. Again, looking back at this its an obvious red flag I missed. Remember I thought this girl would never cheat on me. So this wasn't one of those stories where I went through her phone looking for something and subsequently finding it. In this case I was innocently trying to navigate this damn period calendar while I was drunk and I was not suspicious at all. When I looked at the period-calendar app on Lisa's phone, I saw all kinds of little markers on different days of each month. Each marker was a different color so I opened one to see what the color coding meant. I saw that red was obviously symbolling her period and then there was also black markers that showed when she had unprotected sex. ........This is when my heart sank into my stomach...... This fucking calendar was PEPPERED with black markers. It looked like a checker board with only a hand full of red pieces left and ALL the fucking black ones..... There was black markers on dates that I was in a different city playing basketball.... I proceeded to open all of black markers going back for our entire relationship. We did not have unprotected sex very often. MAYBE once or twice a month. She had written the names of the guys she had unprotected sex with in the notes section of the black markers. There was a total of 4 guys through out the entirety of our relationship that she allowed to penetrate her raw. Some months there was almost a dozens of those fucking black markers. Sometimes there was TWO in one day! Looking back on this I wonder if there were more unlisted men that I didn't see because she clearly only kept track of the guys and times she had UNPROTECTED sex. In almost every story I hear of infidelity, it involves the discovery of text messages, being informed by a friend, or the classic coming home early and catching your partner red handed. I, on the other hand, discovered a fucking well documented LEDGER of almost every time she cheated and had unprotected sex. Amongst the 4 guys I discovered, one of them was her X that she originally left to date me. Cheating on me with him was a common occurrence. There was some other unkown guy she was also clearly sleeping with him regularly. The last 2 fellas looked to be just a one time thing but again like I said these markers were just the times she had sex without a condom. So who knows what the true story was there. I sobered up real quick. I proceeded to look through Lisa's texts and calls and found nothing. However, at the time Android phones had a folder where you can see deleted texts but not the contents of the messages. She had THOUSANDS of deleted texts and calls but I couldn't see what they said but I saw the numbers and did a quick Facebook search and matched one with her X in addition to something like half a dozen other random dudes. The worst part was I found TWO of my teammates... one guy I was actually pretty close with. I just put the phone down after a few minutes. The evidence was overwhelming. The more it seemed to look at the phone the more my insides began to hurt. I felt so defeated. I cant fully describe the feeling but I'm sure anyone reading this that caught a significant other cheating knows what I'm talking about. I felt so stupid for trusting her and having no suspicions of her. I couldn't stop thinking about how I regretted all the times that I had an "opportunity" to cheat and remained faithful to Lisa. I felt like and idiot for not cheating her when I could have. My loyalty felt like a waste. I know it sounds ridiculous and irrelevant to the fact that she was unfaithful. I think I obsessed over that because if I had cheated as well I wouldn't have hurt so much in that moment. All I could think about was about how much I was hurt. I would do anything to not feel the pain and embarrassment anymore. [Question] Am I the only one who thought this way after catching their partner cheating? I'm curious about this. I proceeded to leave my apartment and go for a long walk. I had never felt the emotions that were coming up and didn't know how to process them. My ego felt like it was literally dismantled in front of me. I wasn't sure what to do and I was too embarrassed to tell anyone. My sadness quickly turned to anger. I knew I was gunna get my revenge I just didn't know how yet. I was SEETHING with rage and wanted make sure she never recovered from this. My roommate/teammate and best friend at the who was sleeping on the couch in my living room [we will call him Bono] (an eastern European kid who stood 7 foot tall and was as Russian in demeanor as it you can imagine. He also had an equally ridiculous RL name hence: Bono) well, Bono called me shortly after I started my walk. I answered and he asked where I was. I asked him to keep this between us, and told him what happened. He stays on the phone and goes into my room and I hear him in his Russian accent yell at her "yo bitch, you cheated on OP?" Then I faintly hear her inaudibly say something in the background and him yelling at her to get out of the apartment. After hearing some scuffling Bono gets back on the line and says "yo! she gone, come back and lets talk" I head back home and me and Bono go over what had happened. Things don't get sappy because we are both complete alpha males who both come from cultures where "men don't cry" and neither of us really knew what to say or do in this situation. He makes his best attempt to comfort me and says: "tonight is your birthday, we gunna get fucked up and find you some sluts. Fuck her! I never liked her anyway" .... oh ya, this day was my birthday... forgot about that part ... Me and Bono go out for breakfast. I am still a little drunk. My phone is blowing up with calls and texts from Lisa. I tell her I saw everything on her phone and I cant stand to speak with her or look at her. She keeps trying to convince me to let her come to my birthday party and I make it clear I don't want her there. She clearly was concerned about exactly what Bono suggested to me earlier when me and him chatted. Lisa's entire reputation and popularity revolved around the fact that she was dating me. I think most people didn't like her in the first place but put up with her because we were together. She knew that if I acted single at my birthday party and she didn't show up everyone would know something was askew. I think Lisa was more worried about being embarrassed than our relationship. I don't remember much of what happened that night. But one of my friends sent me a little package for my birthday from California filled with some really good weed, hash, moonrocks, some pills and "the devil's dandruff" and I proceeded to do a glorious swan dive into an intoxicated oblivion. All I remember is sitting on my chair at the pregame for my party. There was two girls sitting on the arms of the chair and I still have a photo of that moment and I remember it vividly. We were preparing to head out. I had a few tables downtown at a popular nightclub. The booze and drugs were the only thing that made me feel normal. I had my sun glasses on and clearly had that happy loaded grin on my face. The longer you look at the photo of me on that chair, you can tell I'm hiding a huge amount of hurt. Sitting on that chair, the cocktail of drugs start to take effect. This was the first time I ever used substances not to "party" but to feel better. To make me feel normal. I remember thinking: "I want to feel this way for the rest of my life. I am never going to hurt like that ever again. With drugs, I have control and no one can hurt me again." Oh how ironic that turns out to be years down the line. I told my teammates and friends that me and Lisa were done when they asked why she wasn't at the party. I didn't tell them why though. I also didn't show them that I was affected by it in anyway and just played it cool. I tried to focus everyone on the party ahead of us. [The Revenge] So this is one of those revenge stories where it was only half planned. I knew I wanted to get revenge on Lisa for hurting me so much. But I kind of just improvised as opportunities came up. My original kind spirit had died at my birthday on that chair. All my morals went out the window. I never cheated in relationships therefore I believed I would never get cheated on. I realize now how dumb that is but that's what I thought at the time. I didn't care what collateral damage I caused as long as my mission to hurt Lisa as much as possible was accomplished. So continued every day of my life with this new selfish mindset. I was sitting at my computer later that next week skimming Facebook when I saw the profile of one of her track teammates on my feed. That's when I had my first vengeful idea. I decided I was going to attempt to get her teammates to bite the bait that I was about to cast out into the water. Though, I didn't have proof she hooked up with my teammates, she was clearly trying to hide conversations between them. So I was going to see how many people who are close to here I could "passionately hug". Luckily I had more options than she had when cheating on me. A women's track team is much larger than a men's basketball team. Also much better looking ;) Lisa's teammate I originally spotted on my Facebook had a boyfriend but I thought: "clearly everyone cheats, lets see if its true". I proceed to do the little flirty social media dance with her. You know, the one where I like a couple of her photos, she likes a couple of mine back. I shoot her a message and BAM! shes at my house in my bed about a week later. I proceed to do something similar to other teammates of hers. All on her 4x4 relay team coincidentally. 2 of the 3 girls I "passionately hugged" had boyfriends and subsequently cheated on them with me which gave me some real mixed emotions. It stroked my broken ego and also made me bitter and sad. Giving me one of those "women aint shit! none of them are loyal" attitudes. This is such a typical story of while fighting monsters I became a monster. This actually became my go-to strategy because it accomplished two things in my fucked up mind. It exposed a cheater but more importantly if they were willing to cheat on their boyfriends they would: A] be more secretive about it which meant the drama that would ensue when it came out would be elevated and B] it made me feel better about Lisa cheating because it proved it wasn't me that was the problem. It was women that were the problem. (I know its fucked up but that's what I thought back then.) I started to collect something from every girl that I hooked up with, like a bra, a pair of panties, or some jewelry etc.. (not for some creepy reason, but this is important later and was a part of my plan) Sometimes I didn't even have to try. One girl left a pair of very distinguishable shoes. I knew Lisa would know who's shoes they were. They belonged to the girl that Lisa's X boyfriend rebounded with after Lisa and him broke up which highly upset her because it was her friend. Now it would upset her more because that same girl slept with both of her X boyfriends. I especially tried to collect items if it was something that I knew Lisa could distinguish like a sweater from the women's track team with her teammates name on it. After some time I had collected a boatload of shit. After a couple months or so, one of the Lisa's teammate's boyfriends found out about me and his girlfriend and it started a big beautiful dramatic explosion of series of events with her and her teammates. This led to all of them finding out about one another's promiscuity. The drama was MASSIVE. Even their coaches had to get involved it got so bad. This made me feel so powerful in such and evil yet satisfying way. I fell in love with the destruction I was causing. (The most awesome part about all of it was that same week, the Athletics PR team had put massive posters of me all over campus promoting the next game. They were EVERYWHERE. Some of the posters took up the entire side of buildings) So Lisa and her friends had to see me all over campus every day while this drama was erupting all around them. I felt like a triumphant dictator. It was glorious and pathetic at the same time. Their coach even proceeded to have a "serious" meeting with the compliance department and my team's coaches. My coaches literally laughed at her saying "this seems like and internal issue, but OP hasn't done anything illegal or broken any school policy so there is nothing we can do". This infuriated the women's track coach. Their team had fallen apart. Their national ranking began to plummet. Then Lisa's coach even got in trouble for being caught tearing down some of the smaller posters of me on campus in raging temper tantrum. I loved all of it. I continued to add fuel to the fire. Posting photos of me with girls, smiling, being happy every chance I could on Facebook and Instagram. But under it all, I was bitter. I was so deep into my new mindset I had already forgotten the kind hearted naïve kid I use to be. I hated my old self because I let some girl emasculate me. I was so full of self pity looking back it, its depressing. No one really knew though because I played the cool guy attitude in front of people. There was even a girl on campus on one of the sports teams who claimed that she was pregnant with my kid after I pretended to like her the same way I did with all of the other girls on Lisa's team and soon as we "passionately hugged" I moved on. Its a long story, but it turned out she wasn't pregnant but the news or "press" that came from that further dug the knife deeper into Lisa's side. I left a trail of women I deceived and relationships I destroyed. I feel bad now but at the time I didn't care because they were equally at fault in my eyes since they were cheating on their boyfriends or sleeping with their friends X. Quickly, girls became weary of me. Plus I was running out of "potential targets" (Fuck I was an awful human being then the way I was thinking) and I was going after girls that weren't even friends or on the track team with Lisa but were just around her in daily life. For example her classmates and as well as her own family. I even flirted with her sister who was married with a kid and I almost succeeded. She was down but her and Lisa's dad found out about it and stepped in and put a stop it all before we could do anything. Her sister was ostracized as the news spread within the family. I wanted Lisa to know I was everywhere and constantly remind her how she fucked up. In my eyes this was all her fault and she unleashed this fury of chaos upon herself. She should never have fucked with me like that. Lisa had to take an extended medical leave because of her depression and mental health issues she was experiencing from the whole situation. She was becoming suicidal. She even had to go on medication and lost TONS of weight. She began to look extremely unhealthy. The whole mess was torturing her and the more she hurt the better I felt. At this point I had already inflicted more damage than she did to me but I had become addicted to the feeling of power... I spent 0 time processing my own emotions or moving on from what happened. All I wanted was more revenge and I couldn't stop. After weeks of ignoring Lisa's texts and calls she finally gets a hold of me by showing up to my apartment unannounced late at night. She was there to pick up some stuff she left from when she lived there to take home. She was actually a local and her parents lived close by. (She was still on her medical leave and no longer staying on campus but rather with her parents) I told her I would bring her stuff to her parents house that weekend but I couldn't let her in because I had "company". Which I did but it wasn't one of her teammates or friends unfortunately. I then to take all the items I had collected from all the girls over the weeks. There was probably like 8 or 9 things from different girls including her teammates and threw their belongings in along with Lisa's stuff into big black trash bags. I took the bags to her house and then called Lisa's dad. I told him I left her stuff on his porch and to inform his demon daughter. Me and Lisa's dad actually really got along and he even took my side after Lisa and I broke up. But after all these events transpired he obviously had a negative opinion of me. 15 minutes after I get off the phone with her Lisa's dad, I get a call from Lisa. I answer because I want to hear her reaction to having all these other girls shit mixed in with hers. She was sobbing uncontrollably. It sounded like that half crying half mumbling thing people do when they are hysterical. She wasn't even angry, just desperately begging me to point to stop my tyranny. I just smiled and baked in the glory of hearing her hurt. I responded "why were their other guys in our relationship? you mixed them into our relationship like I mixed other girls shit into your shit. Its perfect little ironic metaphor". I thought it sounded cool at the time and was real proud of myself. (*facepalm*) I later found out from one of Lisa's friends (who knew she was cheating on me during our relationship) that Lisa was convinced I WAS THE ONE cheating on her because "I was always out of town." This doesn't make sense since I was out of town because of basketball, a very legit excuse. Not just randomly on my own accord. You could literally see my schedule on the school's website. I kept in contact with her constantly when I was gone but obviously when I had practice or team meetings I couldn't be on my phone. But she didn't have the logic in her brain to figure this out I guess. I assume its just an excuse she made to protect her insecurities about the whole fiasco or to keep face with people who knew she was cheating. [months go by] Lisa comes back to school from her medical leave and we bump into each other at the physical therapy center in our athlete facility building. I see this as yet another opportunity. It had been a while since I did something that hurt her and I was still hungry for more vengeance. I proceed to pretend like I want to rekindle things with her. She is cautious at first but eventually bites after about a week. We start to mend our "relationship". We proceed for about a month but I wouldn't call this a relationship. I forbid her to have any male friends nor is she allowed to go out and party with her girlfriends. I also need full access to all her accounts and her location at all times. It was more like a hostage situation. It gave me a sense of control. Meanwhile I'm not being faithful at all. This was my plan all along. Finally, she finds out about me sleeping with a girl in one of her classes and we have a nasty "breakup". I told her that she literally knows what it felt like to be me when we last dated. Yet again, I felt Triumphant. It was just another chance to hurt her and I did. [After this we don't speak for YEARS.] I graduate university and move to Central America. She messages me while I'm there about a year after I moved and about 2 years after we last spoke. At this point my life has become that of a real degenerate. I was doing copious amounts of drugs on a daily basis and about 75% of my life was involved in some sort of illegal or nefarious activities. But I still blame her for me becoming the dark soul that I was and taking no responsibility for bitter immoral nature. I hadn't had another relationship since her and always had trouble because I couldn't trust a women in any capacity anymore. Even after years had passed, I saw this instance of her messaging me as yet another opportunity to hurt her. We begin to talk as friends and even getting flirty with each other over Facebook messenger. Mind you there is literally many countries, states and an ocean between us at this point. I was planning a trip back to my old university to visit some friends. However I told her was different: I explained to her I was moving back to the city for a new job I was just offered. We decide to meet up when I get back and see if there is anything worth saving between us. I had put on my best acting hat and try to seem like I've put our past behind us. However I'm just as vengeful now as I was years ago. She's finishing up her last year at University and I make the trip back to the USA. I meet Lisa at a coffee shop when I arrive.. We spend the entire night together. From her point of view it really looks like we had moved past our differences and what happened. We could actually work things out. However I'm not moving back obviously like I told her. I am only stay 2 nights. She doesn't know this. After hooking up a few times and spending 2 days together, without mentioning anything to her about me leaving, I pack my things and get back on a plane back to Central America. I blocked her on all my social media and communication outlets. This time I could only fantasize about what happened to her when I disappeared after she thought I had moved back and supposedly was ready to give our relationship another try. This time however it wasn't as satisfying as my previous plots of revenge. My drug habit and lifestyle only got worse every year. 3 years later I was hospitalized and almost died because of my extended drug use. I was never sober a full 24 hours after that day that went through that fucking period calendar. [Looking back] As much pain as I might have caused her with my vengeful life, my new identity that consumed my old one was so tainted with a dark spirit at heart. I think I honestly did more harm to myself with my actions and led me to down the road where I had no morals anymore. Though I spent the entirety of this story telling everyone of how I kept getting revenge at my X for cheating on me, as satisfying as it was, I wish I would have spent an equal amount of energy healing myself from the incident. If anyone reading this is experiencing the pain that comes with cheating, a good revenge story can bring you some satisfaction but I hope you don't make the same mistake I did. Rather spend MORE time healing yourself from the hurt and moving past it. The revenge wont heal you. It will be a separate journey but could distract you from putting yourself back together. Luckily I got sober and am sober now 4+ years. I even had another girl friend of 2 years cheat on me before I got sober but this time I didn't take revenge. I spent my time healing. I changed and only focused on myself and that was way more satisfying than the revenge I got on Lisa for cheating on me. Now I'm married almost 2 years to a woman who is sober and man do I have a good life. I have a dream job and a dream marriage. Thank you everyone who read this. Sorry if it wasn't well written I never write like this but I have never told the full story in detail before and I got a lot out of writing it. Mostly what I hope to get from this is to share my experiences doing horrible things but feeling an immense satisfying feel from it where its almost addictive. And morphing from generally a good person to a relatively dark evil one.. Obviously people have dark moments but I feel like my personality and psyche has never been the same since that experience. I'm looking forward to any responses to the people willing to read this shit. [written by commenter] TLDR: OP dated a woman a few years younger than him in college, Lisa. Lisa kept a period tracker and kept when she had unprotected sex, while documenting their sex for gf who had fallen asleep, OP saw she had been having unprotected sex with at least 4 dudes since they had been dating. OPs roommate kicked her out. OP decided to get revenge. This started with fucking all 3 of her relay partners (track team) which eventually led to the team crashing. They also had bfs, so OP used this as fuel to say that women are the problem, not him. At this time OP starts going down the rabbit hole with drugs and alcohol. This continued on for a long time, and OP started keeping an item from women that would be identifiable to Lisa for his plan. He would purposely “target” (own words) girls close to Lisa so drama would be worse, and he would have more ammunition to hurt her. Lisa took a mental health break from depression, and came to OPs house asking for her stuff back. He brought it to her parents and put all the items he had been collecting. She called him crying and he reveled in it. Months later, they run into each other at PT and he convinces her to give it another shot, knowing its a game. Knowingly holds her “hostage,” no guy friends, no parties, no going out, all while cheating. They eventually break up. Years later, OP is contacted by Lisa and says hes moving back to their country for a job. (IRL hes going for a 2 day visit) and basically catfishes her into trying to date him again, they meet up and hang out the whole time. He then packs up and leaves without a word to hurt her again. After this OP goes down a bad road with drugs and alcohol, ends up in the hospital, and has another Gf cheat on him. He did not take revenge on her. OP is now married, and has a good job and has (presumably) been clean. He is also aware of how toxic it all is. I think that’s everything
February 12, 1934: Bill Russell was born. No one did more to ensure his team’s success & win championships. Russell won 11 NBA titles, 2 NCAA titles, and Olympic gold with his elite defense, athleticism, versatility, passing, rebounding, leadership, intelligence, clutch play, etc.
Here are some highlights of Russell and here are his career stats. 1) WINNING (Part 1): The Celtics were ho-hum right before Russell joined the team, pretty bad right after he retired, and even worse when he missed games during his career, but when he was there they were the most dominant title-winning franchise in sports history, which proves how ludicrous the “He was simply the best player on a loaded team” comment is. DETAILS: a) Boston won 2 total playoff series in the 10 seasons before Russell arrived (he was a rookie in '57), and both were short best-of-3 series (‘53, ‘55), b) Boston went 34-48 and missed the playoffs in ‘70 right after winning the title in Russell’s final season, and c) when he missed games during his career, the Celtics were 10-18 (.357), and 18 of those 28 missed games were against teams with losing records, so there was no excuse for a “loaded” squad to be so bad. When Russell missed 3 or more games in a row --meaning his teammates really had to adjust & couldn’t just “get up” for one game without their leader-- the Celtics were a pitiful 1-12. They were horrible without him. There is NO evidence the Celtics were any good when Russell wasn’t on the floor, rather a ton of evidence to the contrary. 2) WINNING (Part 2): It's been commonly reported that Russell was 21-0 in winner-take-all games, but that’s incorrect …. he was 22-0. If Russell's team played even with an opponent throughout a series or got to the same place in a tournament, Russell's team was ALWAYS going to pull it out in the end.
At USF, his '55 team was 5-0 in the tourney on the way to the title.
At USF, his '56 team was 4-0 in the tourney on the way to the title.
In the '56 Olympics, the US squad was 2-0 when it came to the winner-take-all Final 4 for gold after the group stage.
In the NBA, the Celtics were famously 10-0 in Games 7's throughout his career.
In the '66 playoffs, the Celtics won Game 5 in the best-of-5 series with Cincinnati (link).
3) WINNING (Part 3): The Celtics didn’t win the title only 2 times during Russell’s 13-year career, and both were (very likely) due to difficulties experienced by Russell.
In 1958, the Hawks topped Boston 4-2 in the Finals (winning by 2, 3, 2, & 1 points), during which Russell missed 2 games and played at far less than 100% with a horribly sprained ankle when he was available in the series. It’s safe to say Boston would have won that title with a healthy Russell.
In 1967, the aging Celtics, fresh off of 8 straight championships, lost to the loaded and younger Sixers in the ECF. This was the first year Russell was Boston’s player-coach, which is significant since he faced horrendously stressful & over-the-top racism as the first black coach in major US pro sports history. He played so much and so intensely (43.3 min/gm in the playoffs) that he often forgot to sub players which hurt his team. The next season, the Celtics were older & considered “done”, but he added a bench coach to handle subs, and they beat the favored defending champion Sixers in the playoffs, and then won the title. Then the “seriously, they’re done now” 1968-69 Celtics clawed their way into the Finals & beat the loaded West-Wilt-Baylor Lakers 4-3 in Russell’s final season. Oh yeah, Russell was the only player-coach in NBA history to win a championship, and he won two.
Two giant asterisks have to go beside the only two championships Boston didn’t win during Russell’s career. 4) WINNING (Part 4): Russell went to college at the University of San Francisco which had just suffered through 3 straight losing seasons before he joined the varsity team. He lead an unranked USF team to 2 consecutive NCAA titles during his junior and senior seasons, going 57-1 along the way, and he could have won a title all 3 seasons he played at USF if not for losing teammate K.C. Jones one game into their sophomore season; they smashed the #17 team 51-33 in game 1 with Jones playing who was then hospitalized that night with a burst appendix, but 1st-year Russell still lead them to a 14-7 record without the HOF PG before going on to those 2 titles. Even at the college level, he could lead players who weren’t supposed to win to the ultimate heights; it wasn’t just in Boston. Also, he was the leading scorer, rebounder, and defender on the 1956 gold medal winning US Olympic team, which had an average margin of victory of +53, the highest ever (’92 Dream Team was +44). 5) CLUTCH: I already mentioned how dominant Russell’s teams were when it was all on the line, but I’ll add that his list of clutch games, series, and moments is ridiculously long, plus his ppg, rpg, and apg averages all rose in the playoffs. I’ll simply point out that he had the greatest Game 7 performance of all-time in the 1962 Finals, scoring 30 points & grabbing 40 rebounds to win the title in a super-tight Game 7. If you didn’t know, the NBA Finals MVP award is officially called the Bill Russell NBA Finals MVP Award. 6) INTELLIGENCE: Part of what made Russell so unbelievable in big games and moments was that his IQ and level of manipulating opponents is unparalleled historically. On defense, he’d often intentionally “just miss” blocking a particular star player’s shots earlier in a contest, but late in the game when the opponent was lulled into thinking they could get a certain shot off over Russell that night, he’d extend the extra inch and come up with clutch blocks & defensive plays they weren't expecting. I’ve never heard of another player doing stuff like this. The stories about his IQ are legendary & numerous; here are some clips about his hoops IQ. At least watch the 3rd one on that list ("Some more mindgames") to see a short interview with him talking about manipulation of a star opponent in a way I’ve never heard another player articulate; he truly was thinking on a whole different level to create advantages for his team. 7) VERSATILITY: Bill Russell was so versatile on the floor because he trained and played all 5 positions on offense. The only other players in history who could maybe do this are Maurice Stokes and Giannis Antetokounmpo, but Russell’s results were quite different, plus immediate & sustained. His value to the Celtics’ offense is WAY underrated, especially on the fast break where he arguably had a bigger influence than Steve Nash did for the Suns’ fast break due to how well he could start, run, and finish it. 8) PASSING & OFFENSIVE INFLUENCE: Speaking of his versatility on the fast break, Bill Russell was a great passer, both in the half-court & full-court, and put up insane assist numbers for a center, especially in the playoffs (averaged >5 apg in the playoffs during 7 different seasons, far more times than any other center). John Havlicek, in his 1977 autobiography, said the following about Russell's effect on Boston's offense when specifically discussing their first post-Russell season ('70):
"You couldn't begin to count the ways we missed [him]. People think about him in terms of defense and rebounding, but he had been the key to our offense. He made the best pass more than anyone I have ever played with. That mattered to people like Nelson, Howell, Siegfried, Sanders, and myself. None of us were one on one players ... Russell made us better offensive players. His ability as a passer, pick-setter, and general surmiser of offense has always been over-looked.”
I’ll add that Bill Russell finished 4th in MVP voting with an 18% vote share in 1969, his final season (‘69 MVP voting). I believe this is the best MVP finish by any player in their final season. 9) MORE ABOUT HIS OFFENSE: Fans often knock Russell for not being a high scorer. He played on a team that spread around the scoring, so very few Celtics ever had big scoring numbers, and he often had the best FG% on the team. Russell was top-5 in FG% in the league 4 times, while more recent dominant-scoring centers Hakeem Olajuwon, David Robinson, and Patrick Ewing all did it once. Russell understood what individual sacrifices to make and how to improve his teammates so they collectively would be winners, which is why he won the 1962 MVP (voting) over Wilt Chamberlain (his epic 50 ppg & 26 rpg season) and Oscar Robertson (his epic triple-double season). By the way, Russell holds the record for the most consecutive MVP awards (3), most consecutive top-2 MVP finishes (6), and has the 2nd most MVP’s of all-time (5). It was clear that Russell’s approach was far more valuable to his team’s success than that of other superstars with monster stats. 10) DEFENSIVE IMPACT: There is no hyperbole in saying Russell was unquestionably the most impactful defensive player ever. The Celtics consistently & regularly had the #1 defense in the NBA throughout his career, yet they were FAR worse before he joined the team, and they immediately dropped in the ‘70 season right after he retired. Here are Boston’s annual rankings in Defensive Rating, starting in the ‘54 season: 8, 8, 6, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 1, 8 (the highlighted parts represent Russell’s career). He had an overwhelmingly positive influence on the entire team’s defense to a degree we’ve never seen from any other player. 11) ATHLETICISM: Watching film of Russell, it’s clear he was extremely fast and active, elite even by today’s standards. He also possessed Olympic-level leaping ability (7th ranked high jumper in the world in 1956). For the record, he was measured as 6-ft-9-and-⅝ without shoes, taller than both Dwight Howard and Alonzo Mourning. This incredible athleticism is what allowed his defense to be a cross between Tim Duncan & Kevin Garnett, covering everything everywhere with phenomenal explosiveness, plus impeccable timing & decision-making. 12) LEADERSHIP: Bill Russell had the best combination of elite on-court impact on team synergy plus elite locker-room unity & positivity. Very few guys are even in the discussion of having this type of elite combo: Tim Duncan, Jerry West, Larry Bird …. not many more, especially when you also consider a player’s impact on his team’s defensive synergy.
The power of practice in League Of Legends - Why Korean/Chinese players are so good?
“Everybody has the will to win. Only a few people have the will to prepare to win.” Please, I really really really want you to read the whole post! I know it’s long, but I’m sure your League Of Legends thinking and gameplay will get to the next level. I’ve put so much effort and study into the topic I write about. This post is the reason WHY I posted about improving your mechanics yesterday and how to do it. This post consists of knowledge that I’ve paid thousands of dollars and spent more than 10.000 hours (gaming, playing other sports, coaching) to acquire and people paid me thousands of dollars to learn. That’s the first lesson of my coaching sessions program. You don’t want to miss this one if you really care about being better at the game! But first, let me introduce myself to you. I’m Hellfire Lord, and I’m passionate about teaching the game to others, not because I love teaching, but because I love helping someone climbing to their dream rank and achieve greatness. I’ve been playing and studying the game for years. My coaching process My coaching process follows the philosophy of one of the most successful coaches of all time: John Wooden, the coach of UCLA’s basketball team for 27 years. He was anointed “Greatest Coach of the 20th Century” by ESPN and the greatest coach ever -in any sport- by the Sporting News. Wooden led his teams to ten national championships in 12 years, won 88 consecutive games, and achieved the highest winning percentage (.813) of any coach in NCAA basketball history—all while building an enduring reputation for developing the character of his players at least as much as their skill. It’s not surprising that in the decades since Wooden retired, his influence has spread far beyond the basketball court. Books by and about Wooden apply his insights to life, learning, and business as much as to basketball. So what was Wooden’s secret of success? My answer, based on what I discovered in my effort to help promising League Of Legends players become great, is that he insisted on one thing that most people fail to realize how much powerful it actually is. This one thing is arguably the number one secret of Wooden’s success: old-fashioned practice, efficiently run, well-planned, and intentionally executed. If you were to ask Wooden what made his teams so successful, he would likely describe a series of unacknowledged moments in otherwise empty gymnasiums: his players practicing shooting without a basketball, say. Or perhaps he’d describe his evenings in his office scripting the next day’s practice, noting where the racks of basketballs should be placed so time was never wasted looking for a ball. John Wooden doted on practice to a degree that was legendary. He began—surely to much eye rolling—by practicing things that every other coach would have considered unworthy if they’d have considered them at all: how to put on socks and sneakers, for example.1 He timed his practices to the minute, husbanding every second to ensure its precise and careful allocation. He kept a record of every practice on note cards, which he filed away for future reference: what worked; what didn’t; how to do it better next time. Unlike many coaches, he focused not on scrimmaging—playing in a way that replicated the game—but on drilling, which is playing in ways that intentionally distorted the game to emphasize and isolate specific concepts and skills. He followed a logical progression, often starting his instruction on topics like shooting by having players work without the ball and building to increasingly challenging applications. He repeated drills until his players achieved mastery and then automaticity, even if it meant not drilling on more sophisticated topics. At the point where other coaches might decide their teams had learned a skill, Wooden’s teams were just beginning their work. And he always insisted that his players practiced doing it—whatever “it” was—right. Though we remember him for the championships, what ultimately made Wooden great was practice. Every iteration of teaching and explaining and executing, again and again, was a tiny bit better than anyone else’s. The culture in which those drills took place—what players were thinking as they stood in lines—was a little bit more humble, selfless, relentless. The compounded effect of these tiny differences was a dynasty. Author and sportswriter Daniel Coyle’s book The Talent Code is just one of several recent efforts to understand the tradition of intentional practice that Wooden helped establish. In the book, Coyle describes how the compounded effect of better practice accounts for the rise of seemingly inexplicable “hot spots” of talent around the globe. What seems like talent, it turns out, is often better practice habits in disguise. How could it be, for example, that a single tennis club in a freezing climate—a club Coyle describes as “rundown” and with just one indoor court—has, since its founding, produced more top-20 women players than all of the tennis clubs in the United States put together? The answer is Larisa Preobrazhenskaya, the gray-haired, track-suit-wearing majordomo whose players follow the adage that practice makes permanent—that if practice drives actions into muscle memory, it’s better to do it slow and right than fast and not quite right. Like John Wooden, she practices fewer things better, and with diligence. She is unapologetic about asking her athletes to imitate others, an approach that many coaches too often dismiss as demeaning. Again and again, Coyle shows that the aggregation of seemingly trivial improvements in practice can create otherwise inexplicable densities of talent sufficient to change a society and its conception of what is possible. Brazil’s passion for soccer makes it an international power, but its passion for futsal, a soccer derivative featuring small-sided games in an enclosed space using a less elastic ball, yields as many as six times the touches per hour for a developing Brazilian player, Coyle points out, than for a similar player in some other nation. The game’s space limitations reward skills learned to speedy automaticity. “Commentators love to talk about how ‘creative’ Brazilian players are—but that’s not quite right. The truth is, they’ve been practicing that creativity for their entire lives,” writes Coyle. The humble details of their practice separate Brazil from every other soccer-obsessed nation on Earth. For its part, League of Legends as a game remains a competition-loving culture. We love the heroic upset, the first game of the young rookie who has just hit the scene, the last teamfight of a close game. We watch games and follow teams and players, sometimes to the point of obsession, but if we really want to see greatness we’d better spend our time watching practices of the best players instead. Have you noticed something different about Faker and other Korean/Chinese players out there? Have you noticed that when they’re on queue times they train their mechanics in other games? Why do they do it in these games? Somebody would say they can just practice it in-game. The answer is they can, but in-game they practice it every time they fight which is hardly the 5%-10% of their time in-game. In mini-games, they practice it 100% of the time. So, when it comes to the mechanical skills you should train in order to become a better League Of Legends player, which method do you believe is more efficient? Do you know understand why Korean and Chinese players are better? It’s part of the culture. They are what the “Brazil” of League of Legends. That’s why Korean and Chinese teams win almost every international tournament and have been so successful over the years. It’s in their culture to practice what Wooden’s philosophy supports. They don’t only focus on scrimming or SoloQ games —which is playing in a way that replicates the game they will play in a tournament—but on drilling, which is playing in ways that intentionally distorted the game to emphasize and isolate specific concepts and skills. In order to know which drills you should practice, just read my post “How to improve your mechanics FAST!”. Make sure you also read this one to go from this theoretical approach to actual practical steps to achieve greatness.
My girlfriend cheated on me with 4 guys, so I got my revenge 4 time over
[This is a long one, there is a TLDR at the bottom] (This isn't just a story of revenge. This is a story of how revenge hurts both parties) To this day, a good revenge story gives me a warm bubbly feeling inside. I believe it comes from this college experience years ago when I got revenge on my cheating girlfriend and it felt GOOD. I know I'm not suppose to enjoy it but I can't deny how satisfying it feels. Its probably one of my favorite feelings in the world even though I'm ashamed to admit it. So I decided to write my first post about this because I don't tell the story often. It is so extensive and honestly just makes me look bad. I'm going to try my best to not paint a picture where my X looks as bad as possible and me as innocent as possible. I want to write this accurately as I can, even if it makes me look bad. [Bit of context and back story] At the time of this story, I played division 1 NCAA basketball at a school so I traveled a lot (weekly in different cities and states) and my entire life revolved around this. During the events of this story I was in the early stages of a horrible drug and alcohol habit. Years after this story I ended up getting sober and joined a program whos name you can find at the front of almost any phonebook. I am sure many people reading this are also sober and will understand how we addicts/alcoholics can be. This story is an effort to explain a character defect that manifested from the events in this story that lead me down a very dark path, however, I don't mean this story to come off in a "self pity" kind of way. Lastly, I was always a good kid, I was never "troubled". My upbringing was very difficult but I was able to keep an overall kindness in my spirit to other people and almost always "did the right thing" or "took the high road". When it came to dating, I knew people cheated in relationships but at the time of this story I always chalked it up to other people "not doing things the way I did". I never really thought it would happen to me.. I always thought that because I was a "5 star boyfriend" and my "amazing choice" in women, infidelity would never be a part of my dating journey. I was a naïve. I really thought highly of myself and also had a real arrogance like any guy in his early 20s I guess. [The Build Up] I was in my Jr year in University I had been single for about a year after me and my high school gf finally broke up after 3 years. I checked that relationship off as my "learning experience" and I now knew what to look for in my next girlfriend. The next woman I chose to have a relationship with I would most likely marry and start my future with. (I know I was young and dumb and thought I knew everything LOL) I had my eye on this girl at my school [we will call her Lisa]. I saw Lisa around the collegiate athletic facility (the university teams training grounds, and locker rooms). Lisa ran for the track team and was damn good. The various athletic teams often had parties and I knew that the first one I saw her at I would introduce myself and try to chat her up a bit and see where it led. Soon enough I see Lisa at one of these parties and we pass each other on the stairs. We make eye contact and she smiled at me. I sparked a conversation with her and after going back and forth a bit we exchange numbers. We begin the classic American style of flirting where we constantly just hint things back and forth indirectly. We slowly progressed the relationship in this manner for weeks. Sending texts back and forth hinting that we were interested in each other but also playing it cool to not let the other person know we had a crush on them. At the time, she was on a break with her current boyfriend who was a popular player on the football team. She ended up leaving him completely to date me. This shoulda been a red flag obviously but remember, I had severe hubris. At the time her leaving him to date me just gave me a superiority complex. I was playing good in sport and if she was willing to leave this guy for me then she will never leave me for another guy. Lmao I was a fucking idiot. I cant express how much I was into Lisa. I was addictively attracted to her and had that weird feeling of "I cant believe my crush is actually into me to". I really was so drowned and blinded by my crush on her I missed so many red flags but our relationship began progressing really fast. Because of this I didn't really do a proper inventory on why I liked her so much. [Fast forward like 8 months later.] We are together officially. Lisa has her own athlete's dorm room but I was a couple years older than her and was working during the summers full time and part time during school / season and had my own apartment near campus and Lisa was basically living with me. She even would stay there when I was out of town which was like 3 or 4 days of every week because we were in season and the team was flying all over the country. Me and Lisa were deeply in love regardless. At the end of the season I had planned two massive back to back parties. One was for my teammate's birthday (Friday night) and then my birthday (Saturday night). They just happened to be one day after the other and luckily landed on a Friday and Saturday night. Me and Lisa got drunk Friday night and had some unprotected sex. Lisa kept a period-tracking calendar app on her phone. She was asleep and I drunkenly remembered she always marked down in her calendar when we had unprotected sex so she knew if she should be worried if she missed her period. She missed her period often because she was an athlete. My inebriated brain thought she should put it in her calendar now because we would forget the next day since we were so fucked up. So I woke her up and said "can you put in that calendar that we had unprotected sex". At this point it was like 5am and we were that 5am kinda drunk where you're mostly just tired. She unlocked her phone and opened the app and before she could even do it she fell back asleep. So I took the phone while it was still unlocked and proceeded to try and figure out how to put it in her calendar myself. [side note] Through our entire relationship, Lisa went through my computer and phone constantly. She was very insecure and always had her suspicions. I didn't care that she was doing this all the time. She never found anything because I never did shady shit, ever. Again, looking back at this its an obvious red flag I missed. Remember I thought this girl would never cheat on me. So this wasn't one of those stories where I went through her phone looking for something and subsequently finding it. In this case I was innocently trying to navigate this damn period calendar while I was drunk and I was not suspicious at all. When I looked at the period-calendar app on Lisa's phone, I saw all kinds of little markers on different days of each month. Each marker was a different color so I opened one to see what the color coding meant. I saw that red was obviously symbolling her period and then there was also black markers that showed when she had unprotected sex. ........This is when my heart sank into my stomach...... This fucking calendar was PEPPERED with black markers. It looked like a checker board with only a hand full of red pieces left and ALL the fucking black ones..... There was black markers on dates that I was in a different city playing basketball.... I proceeded to open all of black markers going back for our entire relationship. We did not have unprotected sex very often. MAYBE once or twice a month. She had written the names of the guys she had unprotected sex with in the notes section of the black markers. There was a total of 4 guys through out the entirety of our relationship that she allowed to penetrate her raw. Some months there was almost a dozens of those fucking black markers. Sometimes there was TWO in one day! Looking back on this I wonder if there were more unlisted men that I didn't see because she clearly only kept track of the guys and times she had UNPROTECTED sex. In almost every story I hear of infidelity, it involves the discovery of text messages, being informed by a friend, or the classic coming home early and catching your partner red handed. I, on the other hand, discovered a fucking well documented LEDGER of almost every time she cheated and had unprotected sex. Amongst the 4 guys I discovered, one of them was her X that she originally left to date me. Cheating on me with him was a common occurrence. There was some other unkown guy she was also clearly sleeping with him regularly. The last 2 fellas looked to be just a one time thing but again like I said these markers were just the times she had sex without a condom. So who knows what the true story was there. I sobered up real quick. I proceeded to look through Lisa's texts and calls and found nothing. However, at the time Android phones had a folder where you can see deleted texts but not the contents of the messages. She had THOUSANDS of deleted texts and calls but I couldn't see what they said but I saw the numbers and did a quick Facebook search and matched one with her X in addition to something like half a dozen other random dudes. The worst part was I found TWO of my teammates... one guy I was actually pretty close with. I just put the phone down after a few minutes. The evidence was overwhelming. The more it seemed to look at the phone the more my insides began to hurt. I felt so defeated. I cant fully describe the feeling but I'm sure anyone reading this that caught a significant other cheating knows what I'm talking about. I felt so stupid for trusting her and having no suspicions of her. I couldn't stop thinking about how I regretted all the times that I had an "opportunity" to cheat and remained faithful to Lisa. I felt like and idiot for not cheating her when I could have. My loyalty felt like a waste. I know it sounds ridiculous and irrelevant to the fact that she was unfaithful. I think I obsessed over that because if I had cheated as well I wouldn't have hurt so much in that moment. All I could think about was about how much I was hurt. I would do anything to not feel the pain and embarrassment anymore. [Question] Am I the only one who thought this way after catching their partner cheating? I'm curious about this. I proceeded to leave my apartment and go for a long walk. I had never felt the emotions that were coming up and didn't know how to process them. My ego felt like it was literally dismantled in front of me. I wasn't sure what to do and I was too embarrassed to tell anyone. My sadness quickly turned to anger. I knew I was gunna get my revenge I just didn't know how yet. I was SEETHING with rage and wanted make sure she never recovered from this. My roommate/teammate and best friend at the who was sleeping on the couch in my living room [we will call him Bono] (an eastern European kid who stood 7 foot tall and was as Russian in demeanor as it you can imagine. He also had an equally ridiculous RL name hence: Bono) well, Bono called me shortly after I started my walk. I answered and he asked where I was. I asked him to keep this between us, and told him what happened. He stays on the phone and goes into my room and I hear him in his Russian accent yell at her "yo bitch, you cheated on OP?" Then I faintly hear her inaudibly say something in the background and him yelling at her to get out of the apartment. After hearing some scuffling Bono gets back on the line and says "yo! she gone, come back and lets talk" I head back home and me and Bono go over what had happened. Things don't get sappy because we are both complete alpha males who both come from cultures where "men don't cry" and neither of us really knew what to say or do in this situation. He makes his best attempt to comfort me and says: "tonight is your birthday, we gunna get fucked up and find you some sluts. Fuck her! I never liked her anyway" .... oh ya, this day was my birthday... forgot about that part ... Me and Bono go out for breakfast. I am still a little drunk. My phone is blowing up with calls and texts from Lisa. I tell her I saw everything on her phone and I cant stand to speak with her or look at her. She keeps trying to convince me to let her come to my birthday party and I make it clear I don't want her there. She clearly was concerned about exactly what Bono suggested to me earlier when me and him chatted. Lisa's entire reputation and popularity revolved around the fact that she was dating me. I think most people didn't like her in the first place but put up with her because we were together. She knew that if I acted single at my birthday party and she didn't show up everyone would know something was askew. I think Lisa was more worried about being embarrassed than our relationship. I don't remember much of what happened that night. But one of my friends sent me a little package for my birthday from California filled with some really good weed, hash, moonrocks, some pills and "the devil's dandruff" and I proceeded to do a glorious swan dive into an intoxicated oblivion. All I remember is sitting on my chair at the pregame for my party. There was two girls sitting on the arms of the chair and I still have a photo of that moment and I remember it vividly. We were preparing to head out. I had a few tables downtown at a popular nightclub. The booze and drugs were the only thing that made me feel normal. I had my sun glasses on and clearly had that happy loaded grin on my face. The longer you look at the photo of me on that chair, you can tell I'm hiding a huge amount of hurt. Sitting on that chair, the cocktail of drugs start to take effect. This was the first time I ever used substances not to "party" but to feel better. To make me feel normal. I remember thinking: "I want to feel this way for the rest of my life. I am never going to hurt like that ever again. With drugs, I have control and no one can hurt me again." Oh how ironic that turns out to be years down the line. I told my teammates and friends that me and Lisa were done when they asked why she wasn't at the party. I didn't tell them why though. I also didn't show them that I was affected by it in anyway and just played it cool. I tried to focus everyone on the party ahead of us. [The Revenge] So this is one of those revenge stories where it was only half planned. I knew I wanted to get revenge on Lisa for hurting me so much. But I kind of just improvised as opportunities came up. My original kind spirit had died at my birthday on that chair. All my morals went out the window. I never cheated in relationships therefore I believed I would never get cheated on. I realize now how dumb that is but that's what I thought at the time. I didn't care what collateral damage I caused as long as my mission to hurt Lisa as much as possible was accomplished. So continued every day of my life with this new selfish mindset. I was sitting at my computer later that next week skimming Facebook when I saw the profile of one of her track teammates on my feed. That's when I had my first vengeful idea. I decided I was going to attempt to get her teammates to bite the bait that I was about to cast out into the water. Though, I didn't have proof she hooked up with my teammates, she was clearly trying to hide conversations between them. So I was going to see how many people who are close to here I could "passionately hug". Luckily I had more options than she had when cheating on me. A women's track team is much larger than a men's basketball team. Also much better looking ;) Lisa's teammate I originally spotted on my Facebook had a boyfriend but I thought: "clearly everyone cheats, lets see if its true". I proceed to do the little flirty social media dance with her. You know, the one where I like a couple of her photos, she likes a couple of mine back. I shoot her a message and BAM! shes at my house in my bed about a week later. I proceed to do something similar to other teammates of hers. All on her 4x4 relay team coincidentally. 2 of the 3 girls I "passionately hugged" had boyfriends and subsequently cheated on them with me which gave me some real mixed emotions. It stroked my broken ego and also made me bitter and sad. Giving me one of those "women aint shit! none of them are loyal" attitudes. This is such a typical story of while fighting monsters I became a monster. This actually became my go-to strategy because it accomplished two things in my fucked up mind. It exposed a cheater but more importantly if they were willing to cheat on their boyfriends they would: A] be more secretive about it which meant the drama that would ensue when it came out would be elevated and B] it made me feel better about Lisa cheating because it proved it wasn't me that was the problem. It was women that were the problem. (I know its fucked up but that's what I thought back then.) I started to collect something from every girl that I hooked up with, like a bra, a pair of panties, or some jewelry etc.. (not for some creepy reason, but this is important later and was a part of my plan) Sometimes I didn't even have to try. One girl left a pair of very distinguishable shoes. I knew Lisa would know who's shoes they were. They belonged to the girl that Lisa's X boyfriend rebounded with after Lisa and him broke up which highly upset her because it was her friend. Now it would upset her more because that same girl slept with both of her X boyfriends. I especially tried to collect items if it was something that I knew Lisa could distinguish like a sweater from the women's track team with her teammates name on it. After some time I had collected a boatload of shit. After a couple months or so, one of the Lisa's teammate's boyfriends found out about me and his girlfriend and it started a big beautiful dramatic explosion of series of events with her and her teammates. This led to all of them finding out about one another's promiscuity. The drama was MASSIVE. Even their coaches had to get involved it got so bad. This made me feel so powerful in such and evil yet satisfying way. I fell in love with the destruction I was causing. (The most awesome part about all of it was that same week, the Athletics PR team had put massive posters of me all over campus promoting the next game. They were EVERYWHERE. Some of the posters took up the entire side of buildings) So Lisa and her friends had to see me all over campus every day while this drama was erupting all around them. I felt like a triumphant dictator. It was glorious and pathetic at the same time. Their coach even proceeded to have a "serious" meeting with the compliance department and my team's coaches. My coaches literally laughed at her saying "this seems like and internal issue, but OP hasn't done anything illegal or broken any school policy so there is nothing we can do". This infuriated the women's track coach. Their team had fallen apart. Their national ranking began to plummet. Then Lisa's coach even got in trouble for being caught tearing down some of the smaller posters of me on campus in raging temper tantrum. I loved all of it. I continued to add fuel to the fire. Posting photos of me with girls, smiling, being happy every chance I could on Facebook and Instagram. But under it all, I was bitter. I was so deep into my new mindset I had already forgotten the kind hearted naïve kid I use to be. I hated my old self because I let some girl emasculate me. I was so full of self pity looking back it, its depressing. No one really knew though because I played the cool guy attitude in front of people. There was even a girl on campus on one of the sports teams who claimed that she was pregnant with my kid after I pretended to like her the same way I did with all of the other girls on Lisa's team and soon as we "passionately hugged" I moved on. Its a long story, but it turned out she wasn't pregnant but the news or "press" that came from that further dug the knife deeper into Lisa's side. I left a trail of women I deceived and relationships I destroyed. I feel bad now but at the time I didn't care because they were equally at fault in my eyes since they were cheating on their boyfriends or sleeping with their friends X. Quickly, girls became weary of me. Plus I was running out of "potential targets" (Fuck I was an awful human being then the way I was thinking) and I was going after girls that weren't even friends or on the track team with Lisa but were just around her in daily life. For example her classmates and as well as her own family. I even flirted with her sister who was married with a kid and I almost succeeded. She was down but her and Lisa's dad found out about it and stepped in and put a stop it all before we could do anything. Her sister was ostracized as the news spread within the family. I wanted Lisa to know I was everywhere and constantly remind her how she fucked up. In my eyes this was all her fault and she unleashed this fury of chaos upon herself. She should never have fucked with me like that. Lisa had to take an extended medical leave because of her depression and mental health issues she was experiencing from the whole situation. She was becoming suicidal. She even had to go on medication and lost TONS of weight. She began to look extremely unhealthy. The whole mess was torturing her and the more she hurt the better I felt. At this point I had already inflicted more damage than she did to me but I had become addicted to the feeling of power... I spent 0 time processing my own emotions or moving on from what happened. All I wanted was more revenge and I couldn't stop. After weeks of ignoring Lisa's texts and calls she finally gets a hold of me by showing up to my apartment unannounced late at night. She was there to pick up some stuff she left from when she lived there to take home. She was actually a local and her parents lived close by. (She was still on her medical leave and no longer staying on campus but rather with her parents) I told her I would bring her stuff to her parents house that weekend but I couldn't let her in because I had "company". Which I did but it wasn't one of her teammates or friends unfortunately. I then to take all the items I had collected from all the girls over the weeks. There was probably like 8 or 9 things from different girls including her teammates and threw their belongings in along with Lisa's stuff into big black trash bags. I took the bags to her house and then called Lisa's dad. I told him I left her stuff on his porch and to inform his demon daughter. Me and Lisa's dad actually really got along and he even took my side after Lisa and I broke up. But after all these events transpired he obviously had a negative opinion of me. 15 minutes after I get off the phone with her Lisa's dad, I get a call from Lisa. I answer because I want to hear her reaction to having all these other girls shit mixed in with hers. She was sobbing uncontrollably. It sounded like that half crying half mumbling thing people do when they are hysterical. She wasn't even angry, just desperately begging me to point to stop my tyranny. I just smiled and baked in the glory of hearing her hurt. I responded "why were their other guys in our relationship? you mixed them into our relationship like I mixed other girls shit into your shit. Its perfect little ironic metaphor". I thought it sounded cool at the time and was real proud of myself. (*facepalm*) I later found out from one of Lisa's friends (who knew she was cheating on me during our relationship) that Lisa was convinced I WAS THE ONE cheating on her because "I was always out of town." This doesn't make sense since I was out of town because of basketball, a very legit excuse. Not just randomly on my own accord. You could literally see my schedule on the school's website. I kept in contact with her constantly when I was gone but obviously when I had practice or team meetings I couldn't be on my phone. But she didn't have the logic in her brain to figure this out I guess. I assume its just an excuse she made to protect her insecurities about the whole fiasco or to keep face with people who knew she was cheating. [months go by] Lisa comes back to school from her medical leave and we bump into each other at the physical therapy center in our athlete facility building. I see this as yet another opportunity. It had been a while since I did something that hurt her and I was still hungry for more vengeance. I proceed to pretend like I want to rekindle things with her. She is cautious at first but eventually bites after about a week. We start to mend our "relationship". We proceed for about a month but I wouldn't call this a relationship. I forbid her to have any male friends nor is she allowed to go out and party with her girlfriends. I also need full access to all her accounts and her location at all times. It was more like a hostage situation. It gave me a sense of control. Meanwhile I'm not being faithful at all. This was my plan all along. Finally, she finds out about me sleeping with a girl in one of her classes and we have a nasty "breakup". I told her that she literally knows what it felt like to be me when we last dated. Yet again, I felt Triumphant. It was just another chance to hurt her and I did. [After this we don't speak for YEARS.] I graduate university and move to Central America. She messages me while I'm there about a year after I moved and about 2 years after we last spoke. At this point my life has become that of a real degenerate. I was doing copious amounts of drugs on a daily basis and about 75% of my life was involved in some sort of illegal or nefarious activities. But I still blame her for me becoming the dark soul that I was and taking no responsibility for bitter immoral nature. I hadn't had another relationship since her and always had trouble because I couldn't trust a women in any capacity anymore. Even after years had passed, I saw this instance of her messaging me as yet another opportunity to hurt her. We begin to talk as friends and even getting flirty with each other over Facebook messenger. Mind you there is literally many countries, states and an ocean between us at this point. I was planning a trip back to my old university to visit some friends. However I told her was different: I explained to her I was moving back to the city for a new job I was just offered. We decide to meet up when I get back and see if there is anything worth saving between us. I had put on my best acting hat and try to seem like I've put our past behind us. However I'm just as vengeful now as I was years ago. She's finishing up her last year at University and I make the trip back to the USA. I meet Lisa at a coffee shop when I arrive.. We spend the entire night together. From her point of view it really looks like we had moved past our differences and what happened. We could actually work things out. However I'm not moving back obviously like I told her. I am only stay 2 nights. She doesn't know this. After hooking up a few times and spending 2 days together, without mentioning anything to her about me leaving, I pack my things and get back on a plane back to Central America. I blocked her on all my social media and communication outlets. This time I could only fantasize about what happened to her when I disappeared after she thought I had moved back and supposedly was ready to give our relationship another try. This time however it wasn't as satisfying as my previous plots of revenge. My drug habit and lifestyle only got worse every year. 3 years later I was hospitalized and almost died because of my extended drug use. I was never sober a full 24 hours after that day that went through that fucking period calendar. [Looking back] As much pain as I might have caused her with my vengeful life, my new identity that consumed my old one was so tainted with a dark spirit at heart. I think I honestly did more harm to myself with my actions and led me to down the road where I had no morals anymore. Though I spent the entirety of this story telling everyone of how I kept getting revenge at my X for cheating on me, as satisfying as it was, I wish I would have spent an equal amount of energy healing myself from the incident. If anyone reading this is experiencing the pain that comes with cheating, a good revenge story can bring you some satisfaction but I hope you don't make the same mistake I did. Rather spend MORE time healing yourself from the hurt and moving past it. The revenge wont heal you. It will be a separate journey but could distract you from putting yourself back together. Luckily I got sober and am sober now 4+ years. I even had another girl friend of 2 years cheat on me before I got sober but this time I didn't take revenge. I spent my time healing. I changed and only focused on myself and that was way more satisfying than the revenge I got on Lisa for cheating on me. Now I'm married almost 2 years to a woman who is sober and man do I have a good life. I have a dream job and a dream marriage. Thank you everyone who read this. Sorry if it wasn't well written I never write like this but I have never told the full story in detail before and I got a lot out of writing it. Mostly what I hope to get from this is to share my experiences doing horrible things but feeling an immense satisfying feel from it where its almost addictive. And morphing from generally a good person to a relatively dark evil one.. Obviously people have dark moments but I feel like my personality and psyche has never been the same since that experience. I'm looking forward to any responses to the people willing to read this shit. [written by commenter] TLDR: OP dated a woman a few years younger than him in college, Lisa. Lisa kept a period tracker and kept when she had unprotected sex, while documenting their sex for gf who had fallen asleep, OP saw she had been having unprotected sex with at least 4 dudes since they had been dating. OPs roommate kicked her out. OP decided to get revenge. This started with fucking all 3 of her relay partners (track team) which eventually led to the team crashing. They also had bfs, so OP used this as fuel to say that women are the problem, not him. At this time OP starts going down the rabbit hole with drugs and alcohol. This continued on for a long time, and OP started keeping an item from women that would be identifiable to Lisa for his plan. He would purposely “target” (own words) girls close to Lisa so drama would be worse, and he would have more ammunition to hurt her. Lisa took a mental health break from depression, and came to OPs house asking for her stuff back. He brought it to her parents and put all the items he had been collecting. She called him crying and he reveled in it. Months later, they run into each other at PT and he convinces her to give it another shot, knowing its a game. Knowingly holds her “hostage,” no guy friends, no parties, no going out, all while cheating. They eventually break up. Years later, OP is contacted by Lisa and says hes moving back to their country for a job. (IRL hes going for a 2 day visit) and basically catfishes her into trying to date him again, they meet up and hang out the whole time. He then packs up and leaves without a word to hurt her again. After this OP goes down a bad road with drugs and alcohol, ends up in the hospital, and has another Gf cheat on him. He did not take revenge on her. OP is now married, and has a good job and has (presumably) been clean. He is also aware of how toxic it all is. I think that’s everything
Peyton Pritchard is number 4 among rookies this year per hoops habit -
Tyrese Haliburton
LaMelo Ball
Tyrese Maxey
Peyton Pritchard
James Wiseman
Write Up - 4 Payton Pritchard, Boston Celtics, 8.6 points, 3.1 assists, 2.4 rebounds, 1.3 steals, Shooting splits: .516/.423/.900 Payton Pritchard is a pest who can score the ball, and he’s proven to be a physical force that belies his 6’1″, 195 lbs stature. With Kemba Walker missing time, he’s been forced into heavy action in high-leverage minutes, and he’s made the most of his opportunities. Pritchard isn’t just holding on, trying to survive as many rookies do. His strong play is a big reason that the Celtics have held their heads way above water in these early days of the season. https://hoopshabit.com/2021/01/10/nba-rookie-rankings-lamelo-ball/3/ They also published a good article focused on Prichard https://hoopshabit.com/2021/01/11/boston-celtics-rookie-payton-pritchard/
The Boston Celtics were initially criticized for selecting Payton Pritchard with their 26th pick, but he quickly became a fan favorite. So who is he?
The Boston Celtics‘ first-round pick, Payton Pritchard, has already exceeded almost all expectations. The Oregon legend was relatively overlooked in the draft. Also, being 22 (and turning 23 before Jayson Tatum) does not make you a desirable draft pick, no matter how good you might be. Comparatively, Patrick Williams, the fourth pick in the draft, is 19 years old. But the Celtics needed an NBA ready point guard with Kemba Walker hurt, and Pritchard, someone who knew how to be a winner, seemed to be the perfect guy to fix the Celtics problem. Back in high school, Pritchard would wake up at 5:15 AM and dribble until his hands would bleed and then shoot until school started every day. In his freshman year, he was a starter on a state champion team. The next year, the point guard won another title after beating Jaylen Brown; additionally, Pritchard won the division’s player of the year. RELATED STORY: Players Power Rankings: Steph Curry is back Then, as a junior, he and his high school won their third title, and Pritchard was named Oregon player of the year. As a senior, he averaged 23.6 points, 6.8 assists, 5.1 rebounds, and 3.1 steals, winning his fourth title in four years, and once again named Oregon player of the year. Eventually, Pritchard took his talents to the University of Oregon, where he was just as dominant. “Fast PP,” however, could not get a major role on an Oregon team filled with a plethora of talent. Dillon Brooks, Jordan Bell and Chris Boucher led them to the Final Four when they lost to top-ranked North Carolina. After that season, many of the team’s top players left, and Pritchard suddenly became a centerpiece of Ducks basketball. But the team did not fit the style of their point guard, who had the job of managing the disarray of players. Pritchard led the team in scoring, but the team only won 23 games and did not make the NCAA tournament. The next season, Oregon seemed like they would have the same dilemma, great players who could not play well together. Prichard had no outside shooters that could make it easier for him to manipulate the opposing team’s defenses, he did not have any big men to defend the interior, and he did not have many consistent players in general on either side of the ball. The team struggled until Pritchard was able to get a green light to shoot whenever he wanted during the Pac-12 Tournament. Pritchard helped Oregon win the tournament and get a March Madness bid. The Ducks made it to the Sweet Sixteen, and Pritchard decided to enter the draft after his success. Nevertheless, teams were not impressed enough, with only about half a season of NBA-level play from the junior. Thus, Pritchard immediately took his name out of the draft. After returning for his senior season, Pritchard impressed anyone who watched Oregon basketball. It was clear Pritchard was both the hardest worker and the best player on one of the best teams in the country. The team was ranked in the AP 25 throughout the whole season, winning the Pac-12 tournament, and Payton Pritchard won All-American honors. Pritchard then entered the draft once again. As a projected second-rounder, he was overjoyed when taken by the Celtics with the 26th pick.
Payton Pritchard is already overachieving for the Boston Celtics
Unlike many of Danny Ainge’s previous selections, most of whom were chosen based on potential, Pritchard had expectations to perform as soon as he entered the NBA. Without Walker, and with no players in return for Hayward, the Boston Celtics had limited playmaking from the guard position. Smart showed sparks that he could spread the floor in the playoffs, but there were doubts about if he could do it for 82 games along with his all-Defensive defense. And the best free agent the Celtics could sign to fill this void was Jeff Teague, an aging point guard who had begun to lose some of his abilities. So, Pritchard was immediately going to be a core player in the Celtics rotation. And shown by his game-winner on Wednesday night against the Miami Heat, he is suited to win. And the game prior, on Monday, he scored 23 points in 32 minutes in his first game as the lead ball-handler for the Celtics. On the defensive side, he has 1.2 steals per game in just 22.2 minutes, aggressive on defense while still strong enough to drive in traffic every time on offense. So it is not too much of a precursor to conclude: Payton Pritchard is good, and he could be really good. Right now, though, in this phantasmagorial season, Payton Pritchard will have more responsibility than most rookies. The Boston Celtics’ Twitter account needed a three tweet thread to write out the injury report, with the team experiencing a virus outbreak, and Pritchard is one of the few players who can play. So it will be interesting to see what he can do in his temporary role as an on-court leader for this Celtics team. But Pritchard looks like he is ready to hold the reigns.
Concerns aside, Aaron Nesmith is arguably outperforming Buddy Hield at the same age
Note: We discussed a lot of this in the most recent episode of The Celtics Reddit Podcast. I believe Buddy Hield is available. I believe his shooting could help us... though his defense, contract, and personality might be a problem. We'll continue to see his name floated as a TPE option as we continue to spend the early part of this season seeing what we have with the young guys. Certainly, some fans are concerned about Aaron Nesmith looking lost. The point of drafting him was that he was widely seen as "the best shooter in College basketball" and we need someone to consistently spread the floor for Brown and Tatum as kick-out options. The hope was that Nesmith could be our home-grown Buddy Hield on a rookie-scale contract. So him coming out of the gate shooting 2-9 from three in 39 minutes of action isn't that encouraging. Let's actually go through the exercise of comparing them as a means of "Putting Nesmith in perspective". I mean let's get real... if you were to compare 21 year old Aaron Nesmith to 21 year old Buddy Hield, it's pretty laughable. 21 year old Buddy Hield was a College Freshman averaging 7.8 points on 38% shooting with 23.8% from three. Buddy didn't even enter the league until he was 24 years old, having spent 4 years playing College ball and having used those key years of development to go from a scrub who averaged 7 points on poor shooting, to an NCAA star who averaged 25 points on 50%/46%/88% as a Senior. Aaron Nesmith, similarly, is coming off a solid Sophomore College season in which he averaged 23 points on 51%/50%/83% shooting. So Nesmith is 3 years younger and far less experienced than Buddy was stepping into the league. As many have mentioned, due to COVID, Nesmith didn't have a Summer League, the team had a shortened training camp, a shortened pre-season, and minimal practice time. He's getting thrown to the wolves having not really played major competitive basketball in nearly a year. Still, let's see what old man Buddy Hield did in his first NBA minutes: Hield's first 3 NBA games he was dreadful. He shot 5-24 overall (20%) and 0-8 from three in 51 minutes of action. Compare that to Nesmith's who has played a mere 39 minutes in his first 3 brief appearances, and has shot 3-12 with 2-9 from three. Look, it's not great... but it's certainly better than Grandpa Hield did in those first NBA minutes. It didn't get much better for Hield. Over his next month of NBA basketball as a rookie, Hield had 16 appearances (264 total minutes), and went 18-68 from three. That put his grand total over his first 19 games (317 minutes) to 18-76 from three = 23.6%. Yikes. At this point in time, plenty of people were called Buddy a bust. He looked like he couldn't shoot at all. Dude was total trash. Hield really didn't start to turn the corner until 21 games into his season when he finally had a decent performance. Funny thing is, by the end of the Year, Hield was averaging 10 points with a blistering 39% from three. Will Nesmith follow that example? Who knows. But it's certainly worth keeping in mind. I'd suggest having patience. I hope to see Brad force him some minutes so he can get comfortable with the speed of our offense/defense. My guess is those shots will eventually start to fall for him. Remember, just last year Grant Williams missed his first 25 three point attempts. So far this year he's shooting 40%. Give this shit some time. TL;DR: 24 year old rookie Buddy Hield missed his first 8 three-point attempts and 317 minutes into his career he was shooting 23.6% from three. 21 year old Aaron Nesmith is right on track to follow Buddy's lead.
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Build a Bear Dynasty Week 2: Modern Offense and Positionless Basketball; The Center of Jega
Welcome back to Build a Bear Dynasty, the least lit series about the most lit team in the NBA. This week I will be discussing Jonas Valanciunas. Before I get to that, there are a few topics I need to discuss to give context to what I consider Jonas’ strengths and weaknesses. I realize that in the introduction I had brought up alternating player profiles and analysis of modern NBA terminology, but in planning for this first player piece I quickly realized that it would be helpful to be ‘on the same page’ so to speak when using certain words and terms to discuss his game. So before getting to the analysis, there are a couple of the more vague terms used to describe basketball that I would like to break down first: Modern Offense, and Positionless Basketball. Modern Offense Broken down to its simplest terms, the game of basketball from a team’s perspective is played in two distinct phases: offense and defense. In the fewest words possible, offense is the team’s attempts to score points by putting the ball through a basket, and defense is the team’s attempts to prevent the other team from doing the same. What makes basketball unique amongst North American major sports, and in my personal opinion makes it the most intriguing and beautiful sport, is the fact that it is the only one where the rules are written so that every player on the floor is allowed to perform every single legal action. All players are allowed access to every spot on the floor, and when the ball is in theirs or their defender’s hands they are allowed to do the same things every other player is. Through a combination of the fluid nature of the sport, the inherent advantages both size AND speed can bring, and various changes to the ruleset, the game of basketball has evolved over time, valuing certain traits and attributes over others as they prove more or less useful in the changing landscape. If you are at all familiar with competitive video gaming, you might refer to this concept with the term ‘Meta.’ In esports players develop optimal strategies through time and experience, and due to games often having fixed values for things like ‘damage’ and ‘health,’ players quickly find the statistically most ideal strategies, and the best teams spend hours and hours honing very specific skills and counters to give themselves the best odds of winning based on the rules of the game. To counteract this rote memorization of inputs, modern game companies that produce multiplayer titles will often continue to update the game periodically after its release, not only to fix bugs and glitches, but to also change the game’s ‘meta’ to prevent the game from getting stale. They do this primarily through improving or worsening the values of certain items or characters in a practice known colloquially as ‘Buffing’ and ‘Nerfing,’ or by introducing new characters and gear all together. Players get used to the new changes, adopt new strategies, and the cycle continues as long as the developers continue to update, or as the players continue to uncover new strategies that provide further optimization. WARNING: Incoming extensive history of the game Super Smash Bros. It does relate to later content, but is unnecessary if you wish to skip ahead to the next section about basketball. An Unlikely Comparison In theory, if the values of a game remain fixed, given enough time the players will develop the optimal strategy to play the game. A popular meme referring to the game Super Smash Brothers is the phrase ‘no items, foxes only, final destination’ referring to the presumed ‘optimal’ way to play the 2nd game in the series, Super Smash Brothers Melee. No items that might randomly give a player an advantage, the character many veterans of the game consider to be the all around best when combining his speed, attack power, and ability to survive, and a completely flat and empty stage that quite literally levels the playing field. It took a very unique history for the game Super Smash Brothers Melee to get a point where there’s an almost universally held belief that there is a single ideal way to play the game. Before companies had the ability to update games over the internet thereby giving them the power to adjust the game after its release, one on one style fighting games like Tekken, Soul Calibur, and Street Fighter would release a new installment every few years. They would usually keep the majority of the same character roster and mechanics, while updating graphics, movesets, and the values of things like health and damage to keep the ‘meta’ game fresh between installments. Unlike the directors of those other game series, the creator of Super Smash Brothers, Masahiro Sakurai, prefers the elements of a game that are fun for everyone, over those that make for an ideal competitive experience. Things like powerful items appearing next to players out of nowhere, and certain parts of some stages randomly hurting players all add to the chaos of Smash Brothers that makes it a fun party game. But as with any game, whether it’s intended for fun or competition, players came along that wanted to adjust the rules to make it more challenging and skill based. By turning off the in game items and picking only certain stages agreed on by the competitors, a whole community developed to play an intrinsically anti-competitive game in a way that was more skills based. In 2001 Nintendo released the Gamecube and Sakurai released the second Super Smash Brothers game, Super Smash Brothers Melee. The new game not only introduced new characters, but also massively changed the speed and feel of the game, making use of the new console’s better processor to create a more dynamic and fast paced game. The competitive community grew some more, but Nintendo as a company is very protective of their intellectual property, and at the time would go to extreme lengths at times to shut down grassroots tournaments and consumer created content, so it remained small in comparison to other fighting game communities. Though a large number of players enjoyed the new gameplay, Sakurai felt that an overly competitive game was taking away from his vision of a fun and friendly game, and in the third installment he released, Super Smash Brothers Brawl, he slowed down the gameplay a bit, and added in random mechanics like tripping players that moved too quickly. Unable to turn off those mechanics like they could with items in previous games, the competitive scene rejected the new game with large sections of the community sticking with the older Melee, and some going to incredible lengths to actually rewrite the code to modify the properties of the game itself. Through a combination of a failure of the third game to capture the hearts of the players, and Nintendo focusing most of its efforts on shutting down the fan modified versions of Super Smash Bros Brawl, the competitive Melee scene exploded in a way unprecedented for a decade old fighting game. To this day, across the country tournaments are held fielding hundreds of players from here and abroad. Players new and old spend hours scouring over statistical data and practicing to hone the most optimal skills to give themselves an edge in tournaments with huge cash prizes. And it all culminates in a silly internet joke about Fox being the statistically optimal character. If you’d care to know more about the ‘golden age’ of competitive Melee, there is a very well done, fan-made, 9 part docu series on youtube called ‘The Smash Bros’ that follows one of the most unique fandoms and cultures of any group that I’ve encountered. But as I am sure most of you are thinking, what in the hell does a 20 year old Japanese video game played by a bunch of nerds have to do with basketball? BACK TO BASKETBALL Well, when it comes to sports in general, I feel that the term ‘meta’ is an excellent way of framing how basketball has changed as a sport over time. Players work on specific skills they feel give them an edge, coaches come up with plays that have more chance of success, defenses work to adapt to those and the league evolves. New players enter the league every year, rosters change through trades and free agency signings, and league management ‘updates’ the game with occasional rule changes that they feel will balance the game better for the players and viewers. Sometimes the changes are poorly received, like when they removed dunking from the college level of basketball from 1967-1976 as a result of a young Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s NCAA dominance. Other times they drastically affected the entire fabric of the sport. In 1979 when the league introduced the 3 point shot during Magic Johnson and Larry Bird’s rookie seasons, it changed the sport more drastically than anyone at the time may have realized. In the previous 87 years of the sport’s existence, having every shot during play have the same value of 2 points meant that the shot that went in the most is by default the best shot. This obviously led to taller players having an advantage, and a natural tendency for players to work as hard as possible to get as close to the rim when they can for an easier shot. If you looked at an overall ‘heatmap’ of an NBA court of how successful players were at shooting from certain spots, it would loosely look like a smaller hot circle centered on the basket, that cools in all directions the further from the basket it gets. But with some shots being worth 3 points, a player could shoot a worse percentage while adding more value to the offense. A player that could shoot 50% while 20 feet from the rim would add 6 points for every 6 shots, and compared to other players in NBA history would be a midrange god. But a player shooting just 34% from just a few feet further away would add a slightly better 6.04 points for every 6 shots, and would have been considered a below average 3 point shooter in the league last season. Kevin Durant, known as one of the greatest scorers of all time, over his career has shot 44.5% from between 3 and 10 feet from the basket, effectively 0.89 points per shot. On the other hand, the 2019-2020 league average 35.8% shooting from 3 is worth 1.074 points per shot. If you looked at a heatmap shot chart from today’s league, it would now have a ring that is the 2nd hottest part of the floor, behind the efficiency of the space immediately around the rim. Suddenly there was a spot on the floor that theoretically had the same offensive value as a spot much closer to the basket. In a sport dominated by long limbed giants, any time a team gets to spread out the defenders makes it a little bit easier to get off clean looks. We refer to this trend in modern terms as ‘Spacing’ which I’ll focus on a bit more in next week’s piece. It essentially boils down to that ‘spacing’ is all about generating separation between an offensive player and a defensive player. The more separation a player has from their defender, the more likely they’ll make their shot. If you’ve ever seen NBA players warm up before a game, you’ll notice very quickly that they almost never miss when shooting a wide open set shot. By the time most of these players get to the league, they’ve played thousands of hours shooting from all over the floor. The hard part of the sport for most of them isn’t being able to shoot well, it’s shooting well while being defended by 7 foot monsters that can reach above the height of the rim without leaving the ground. But the disadvantage that most 7 footers have that shorter players can potentially take advantage of is foot speed. Until 1979 this wasn’t a huge concern outside of transition basketball, as the goal of most players was to get as close to the rim as possible and taller players could camp out and wait, instead of chasing smaller, faster players around. But now there was an area of the floor that offers good value and covers a comparatively huge area. It’s easy to play defense when you know the team is working towards one direction and you don’t have to move as much, but when the offense can now move forwards AND backwards to get a better shot, it opens up a completely new realm of possibilities for offensive and defensive strategy. Since that point and unless the league removes the 3 point line, all strategies and players have worked towards optimizing that potential. Modern Offense is the culmination of all of those efforts. But what strategy has evolved from all of this combined talent and effort? It took the Smash Brothers community more than a decade of study and practice to come to the conclusion that Fox is the best character. What type of ideal player archetype has the past 40 years been building towards? The trend I personally feel the NBA is moving towards is another vague but oft repeated term. Positionless Basketball It's an intriguing pair of words that is often used when discussing players that don’t fit the historic trends. Giant playmakers like LeBron and Ben Simmons that make point guards of look tiny, PJ Tucker playing the center position full time despite being a good 4 inches shorter than most other centers, 7 foot shooters like Jaren and Kristaps Porzingis that play more like a traditional small forward on offense. But this loose definition feels like it’s only halfway there to me. There still seems to be this underlying assumption that positionless basketball is the positions themselves still existing, but players don’t have to play a specific role based on their size or skills. People will describe an idealized team of a 6’8 point guard with 3 6’8 wings and a 6’10 guy to play center and they all switch on defense. But they still expect the point guard to make most of the plays, the center to get most of the rebounds, and to generally run traditional NBA sets, just with a larger group of guys that are closer to a median height so they can all defend each other on the other end. But a few recent things lead me to believe that it’s more than that. Could positionless basketball actually mean the end of the concept of positions in the sport of basketball? While I’m not sure we’ll ever get to a point where every player does every skill equally well, I do think we are starting to see a fundamental change in the way NBA teams across the league build their rosters around this idea of positionless basketball, and nothing is more responsible for it than the combination of Steph Curry and YouTube. Breaking the Game From the start of his career, Steph Curry has worked his way to breaking nearly every record you can think of when it comes to 3 point shooting. For his career he has shot 43.5% from 3 on over 8 attempts a game. That kind of shooting is not only unprecedented, it is statistically dominating when it comes to winning games. At an absurd 1.305 points per shot, a player would have to shoot 65.3% from inside the 3 point line to match that kind of scoring output per shot. When you consider that the true shooting percentage of the average NBA champion over the last 10 years is around 57.5%, Steph is hands down the best player in league history when it comes to adding offense through 3 point shooting, and he does it at a level that can win championships. When the league average for 3 point shooting hovers around 35%, the value it provides is mostly from spacing the defenders, as though it’s efficient it’s not enough to beat scoring at the rim over the course of a game. The fact that Steph can shoot that volume, that efficiently, and maintain that performance against championship level defenses is game changing. He essentially proved that it’s possible to focus your game entirely around the 3 point line and still lead an NBA offense in scoring, something never done before. In terms of positionless basketball this might have changed everything. If a player can shoot from 3 better than most can from 2, then ideally you’d want players that can shoot from 3 more than players that score inside unless they’re truly elite at scoring inside. But not every player is Steph Curry, or Klay Thompson. Those two were raised by former NBA players that were above average 3 point shooters. You could argue that it might be that genetics gave them the shooting gift, but I think it’s more likely that they just practiced shooting more than any other kid playing basketball, and the part of genetics they benefited from most is their above average height. Just look at Jaren Jackson Jr. another player raised by a former shooting specialist. He has a completely different form and build from his dad, but because his dad likely had him practicing like a shooting guard he naturally spent more time shooting 3’s than most kids. Of course the vast majority of players coming into the league don’t have former players to teach them from a young age. But for players entering the league in this decade this might not be as big of a hindrance as it has been for players in the past. Unlike every other kid to grow up and play in the NBA in the past, any player born this millennium has access to YouTube from the time they are physically able to manipulate a touchscreen. Across society this has had far reaching consequences that I think we were entirely unprepared for, and are only just now starting to come to fruition. If you or someone you know is heavily into makeup as a hobby and artform, you might have jokingly said or heard them talk about the fact that “there are 13 year olds on YouTube that are experts at contour, and why don’t 13 years look like cabbage patch kids in overalls like when we were younger?” And it’s not just makeup. You look at any hobby, talent, skill, activity and you will see a bunch of experts expressing incredulity at the number of young people demonstrating master level skill in all these things that took them decades to hone. The internet, and specifically streaming video is still in its infancy as a human technology, so there isn’t a ton of long term research of the effects of things like social media. While some it is likely bad for humanity as a whole, I don’t think we’ve considered just yet how positive it could be as well. We have instant access to every bit of information you could think to find, and videos posted by talented people of every interest that want to share that interest with others. When you consider the fact that kids brains are at the height of their plasticity when it comes to learning new things, and that on average they have more free time to obsess over their interests, it seems like we have a combination specifically tailored to create super talented kids that seek out more and more advice from as many experts as they can. They watch videos, read, practice, and train until they themselves are experts, learned from the greatest minds on the planet in their chosen interest. Ja Morant didn’t have a superstar dad. He played AAU, but usually on teams in secondary gyms. He didn’t go to a major blue blood university with an elite basketball mind head coach to teach him the important things other star players would be taught coming through their programs. All Ja had was a loving and supportive family that pushed him as hard as he wanted to go, a natural abundance of athleticism, and the internet. Is it just happenstance that Ja Morant’s game reminds people so much of so many different great point guards? Westbrook, Wall, Chris Paul, and Rose have all been used dozens of times in Ja comparisons. Is it coincidence all 4 of those players had their primes overlap with Ja’s formative years? From whatever age his parents let him get online, he could look up highlight videos and film of any player he wanted to, whenever he wanted to, studying and breaking down all their movements to recreate them himself. He didn’t need to be taught, as much as he taught himself through pure motivation and drive. And it’s not just Ja. International players like Giannis Antetokounmpo and Joel Embiid have both talked about watching film of American players while they were learning the sport of basketball. Growing up across the Atlantic ocean they didn’t have access to all the coaches and leagues young players here have, but they could still watch the best of the best whenever they wanted to. The first players to grow up this way are now into their NBA careers, and the results haven’t gone unnoticed even if the means aren’t talked about. Players like Luka, Trae, Tatum, Ja, Jaren, Mitchell, Murray, Jokic, and Giannis have all displayed skill far beyond their years when compared to other NBA superstars of the past. But it’s not just the star players. John Konchar recently made local media laugh a bit when asked what player he compares himself to, and he said ‘Pat Connaughton.’ Almost every player that enters the league has been the best player on every team they’ve played on for maybe a decade and rookies will usually compare themselves to stars that they watched and idealized growing up. So for Konchar to compare himself to an NBA role player that’s still in the league and only a few years older than him seems silly.But if you go back and look at their college numbers and their physical profiles, you start to realize that John Konchar might just be the single most self actualized player in the entire league. Both 6’5, 210 pound guys, played all 4 years at schools that aren’t traditional basketball powerhouses. Efficient scorers that score in the paint and from 3, incredible at rebounding for their size, above average passing for off ball players, very solid defense, and advanced numbers that blow most players out of the water, though against weaker competition than most NBA recruits. John Konchar was never heavily recruited and always played against weak competition, even if his own numbers suggested he was incredibly good. Is it possible that he went out and found the best possible player that looks and plays like him, and did everything he could to emulate that player knowing it would be his best shot of making the NBA? I don’t think it’s that far fetched. If this trend continues for all the young players entering the NBA for the foreseeable future, it might mean that we are right on the edge of a new era in the sport, where the best players come into the league ready to lead within the first year or 2, and role players perfectly comfortable with their smaller roles on NBA rosters. Players that hit early growth spurts won’t necessarily be regulated to center positioning, and a lifetime of paint scoring and rebounding. If a taller player wants to work on their 3 point shot, independent of coaching or parenting they can now study videos of the best 3 point shooters ever and add that element to their game if they choose to. And the most motivated players, the ones that live and breathe basketball, they have limitless teachers and lessons to watch with as many hours as they can spare. Flirting with the Future A future where maybe basketball truly is positionless, where players all know how to box out when they're in the paint and a shot goes up, that can all shoot the 3 when open, drive the paint if they see a lane, and pass to the open man when the defense slips up. Of course smaller players will on average tend to have an easier time creating separation on the perimeter through their speed, and taller plays in the paint through their verticality, though both types of players may at least be able to do both well when the opportunity presents itself. Some teams have already experimented with this concept to some extent, but right now the majority of the players in the league are not ready for that type of offense. For the majority of players over the age of 25, they grew up in a basketball culture that placed certain focus on their game based on their size. Most aren’t capable of playing all aspects of basketball at an NBA level because they didn’t get the practice in all the necessary skills as they developed. The Houston Rockets might be the most aggressive team when it comes to molding the team to this mindset, with them refusing to sign players that aren’t capable of all those aspects of basketball. With a lack of players above 6’8 meeting all the criteria to be a truly good basketball player, this limited them to playing PJ Tucker, the largest such player on the roster, against other teams playing true 7 foot centers. It’s not that the Rockets overvalue smaller players, there just aren’t many players that are tall and capable of meeting those requirements, and the Rockets valued the concept of positionless basketball offense above getting players capable of defending elite frontcourts in a playoff setting. Miami might be the best recent example of a team that has gone ‘full positionless’ when it comes to their roster. Pretty much every player on the roster in the recent playoffs was capable of making the right play on the offensive and defensive ends, and though they weren’t very efficient compared to other playoff team offenses, their ability to change roles on a moments notice got them all the way to the NBA finals against one of the strongest teams in NBA history. If you go back even further, take a look at the playoff numbers of the 2014 Spurs that ended the Heat’s chances at a third title under the dominance of LeBron, Wade, and Bosh. An incredible balance of scoring, playmaking, and overall basketball talent from all the players to get significant minutes in the playoffs led to a sum greater than the whole, and a team that went down in history as playing ‘the beautiful game.’ But where does that leave the Grizzlies with their current roster? While other young star studded teams went after vets that they felt would compliment their current talent, the Grizzlies continued to go young and replaced the open spots on the roster with more players on their rookie deals, and resigning young players coming off their first contracts. Most of these young guys have more in common than you might expect. To give you an idea of what kind of players the Grizzlies have focused on acquiring, here is every player that in their final year of college play had an above average assist, rebound, steal, and block rate when compared directly to players roughly their height and weight, a true shooting percentage that was above the NCAA average for that season, but did NOT lead the team in shot attempts. Listed by their season, along with their box plus minus rank of all college players from that season (minimum 500 minutes played) In other words, these are the players that were above average in almost every NBA counting stat we track to measure a players success: Xavier Tillman (1st - 19/20) Killian Tillie (5th - 19/20) Desmond Bane (19th - 19/20) Brandon Clarke (2nd - 18/19) John Konchar (91st - 18/19) Jontay Porter (42nd -17/18) De'anthony Melton (102nd - 16/17) Justise Winslow (33rd - 14/15) Kyle Anderson (13th - 13/14) Grayson Allen met all the requirements except rebound rate and block rate, but was still 62nd overall in box plus minus. Ja and Dillon (yes, Dillon too) met all the requirements except they both led their respective teams in shot attempts in their final seasons. Ja was 29th overall in 2018-19, and Dillon was 42nd in 2016-17. Jaren met all the requirements except an above average assist and rebound rate, and was 4th overall in 2017-18. Notably, every player saw their assist rate and 3 point attempt rate increase dramatically each year they returned to play in college. If you asked me, the FO is 100% bought into the idea of positionless basketball, and they've got a whole group of some of the best all around players to come out of college in the last 5 years with the proper skillset for it. I don't think the fact that so many players on the list played with each other in college is coincidental or something as simply as appeasing the star players by signing their friends. The Grizzlies FO has gone out and gone after elite all around players, that played at some of the programs in the country with the most long term success. Coaches like coach K and Izzo are basketball geniuses that instill smart play into any player that comes through their program, and between 5 players on the roster we have over a decade of collective experience under those guys, on top of their own individual talent and expertise. I think the team will hit the ground way faster than anyone expects. Don't be shocked if they blow past expectations this year. The Grizzlies as a whole seem very forward thinking when it comes to the ‘meta’ of the NBA, and their plays have all paid off so far. But where does that leave a player like Jonas Valanciunas?
Who is Scott Borgenson? Profile from 2016 in “Institutional Investor”
(Note the connections) CargoMetrics Cracks the Code on Shipping Data Scott Borgerson and his team of quants at hedge fund firm CargoMetrics are using satellite intel on ships to identify mispriced securities. By Fred R. Bleakley February 04, 2016 Link to article One late afternoon last November, as a ping-pong game echoed through the floor at CargoMetrics Technologies’ Boston office, CEO Scott Borgerson was watching over the shoulder of Arturo Ramos, who’s responsible for developing investment strategies with astrophysicist Ronnie Hoogerwerf. At Ramos’s feet sat Helios, his brindle pit-bull-and-greyhound mix. All three men were staring at a computer screen, tracking satellite signals from oil tankers sailing through the Strait of Malacca, the choke point between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea where 40 percent of the world’s cargo trade moves by ship. CargoMetrics, a start-up investment firm, is not your typical money manager or hedge fund. It was originally set up to supply information on cargo shipping to commodities traders, among others. Now it links satellite signals, historical shipping data and proprietary analytics for its own trading in commodities, currencies and equity index futures. There was an air of excitement in the office that day because the signals were continuing to show a slowdown in shipping that had earlier triggered the firm’s automated trading system to short West Texas Intermediate (WTI) oil futures. Two days later the U.S. Department of Energy’s official report came out, confirming the firm’s hunch, and the oil futures market reacted accordingly. “We nailed it for our biggest return of the year,” says Borgerson, who had reason to breathe more easily. His backers were watching closely. They include Blackstone Alternative Asset Management (BAAM), the world’s largest hedge fund allocator, and seven wealthy tech and business leaders. Among them: former Lotus Development Corp. CEO Jim Manzi, who also had a long career at IBM Corp. Compelling these investors and Borgerson to pursue the shipping slice of the economy is the simple fact that in this era of globalization 50,000 ships carry 90 percent of the $18.5 trillion in annual world trade. That’s no secret, of course, but Borgerson and CargoMetrics’ backers maintain that the firm is well ahead of any other investment manager in harnessing such information for a potential big advantage. It’s why Borgerson has kept the firm in stealth mode for years. In its earlier iteration, from 2011 to 2014, CargoMetrics was hidden in a back alley, above a restaurant. Now that he’s running an investment firm, Borgerson declines to name his investors unless, like Manzi and BAAM, they are willing to be identified. “My vision is to map historically and in real time what’s really going on in economic supply and demand across the planet,” says the U.S. Coast Guard veteran, who prides himself and the CargoMetrics team on not being prototypical Wall Streeters. “The problem is enormous, but the potential reward is huge.” According to Borgerson, CargoMetrics is building a “learning machine” that will be able to automatically profit from spotting any publicly traded security that is mispriced, using what he refers to as systematic fundamental macro strategies. He calls the firm a new breed of quantitative investment manager. In unguarded moments he sees himself as the Steve Jobs or Elon Musk of portfolio management. Though his ambitions may sound audacious, one thing is certain: Borgerson doesn’t lack in self-confidence. Over the past six years, he has secretly and painstakingly built a firm heavy in Ph.D.s that can manage a database of hundreds of billions of historical shipping records, conduct trillions of calculations on hundreds of computer servers and systematically execute trades in 28 different commodities and currencies. For his part, Borgerson seems an unlikely architect of such a serious, ambitious endeavor. Easygoing and fond of joking with his colleagues, he is a hands-off manager who credits CargoMetrics’ investment prowess to his team. His brand of humor comes through even when he’s detailing the series of challenges he had starting the firm. After using the phrase “It was hard” several times, he pauses and adds, “Did I mention it was hard?” Although Borgerson declines to provide any specifics about CargoMetrics’ portfolio, citing the advice of his lawyers, performance during the three years of live trading apparently has been strong enough to keep his backers confident and his team of physicists, software engineers and mathematicians in place. “Hopefully, it won’t be too long before we can make a more significant investment,” says BAAM CEO J. Tomilson Hill. Former Lotus CEO Manzi is optimistic about the firm’s prospects: “It has an unbelievable edge with its historical data.” CargoMetrics was one of the first maritime data analytics companies to seize the potential of the global Automatic Identification System. Ships transmit AIS signals via very high frequency (VHF) radio to receiver devices on other ships or land. Since 2004, large vessels with gross tonnage of 300 or more are required to flash AIS positioning signals every few seconds to avoid collisions. That allows CargoMetrics to pay satellite companies for access to the signals gleaned from 500 miles above the water. The firm uses historical data to identify cargo and aggregation of cargo flow, and then applies sophisticated analysis of financial market correlations to identify buying and selling opportunities. “We’re big-data junkies who could not have founded CargoMetrics without the radical breakthroughs of this golden age of technology,” Borgerson says. The revolution in cloud computing has been instrumental. CargoMetrics leverages the Amazon Web Services platform to run its analytics and algorithms on hundreds of computer servers at a fraction of the cost of owning and maintaining the hardware itself. At his firm’s headquarters — where the lobby displays a series of colored semaphore signal flags that spell out the mathematical equation for the surface area of the earth —Borgerson leads the way to his server room. It’s the size of a closet; inside, a thick pipe carries all the data traffic and analytic formulas CargoMetrics needs. That computing power alone would have cost $30 million to $40 million, Manzi says. CargoMetrics is pursuing a modern version of an age-old quest. Think of the Rothschild family’s use in the 19th century of carrier pigeons and couriers on horseback to bring news from the Napoleonic Wars to their traders in London, or, in the 1980s, oil trader Marc Rich’s use of satellite phones and binoculars for relaying oil tanker flow. Other quant-focused Wall Street firms are latching onto the satellite ship-tracking data. But, Borgerson says, “I would bet my life on a stack of Bibles that no one in the world has the shipping database and analytics we have.” The reason he’s so convinced is that from late 2008 he was an early client of the satellite companies that had begun collecting data received from space and on land to build a large database of all the world’s vessel movements in one place. That’s what caught Hill’s eye at Blackstone when he learned of CargoMetrics a few years ago. BAAM now has a managed account with the firm. “If anyone else tries to replicate what CargoMetrics has, they will be years behind [Borgerson] on data analytics,” Hill says. “We know that a number of hedge fund data scientists want his data.” But too much reliance on big data can go wrong, say many academicians. “There is a huge amount of hype around big data,” observes Willy Shih, a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School. “Many people are saying, ‘Let the data speak; we don’t need theory or modeling.’ I argue that even with using new, massively parallel computing systems for modeling and simulation, some forces in nature and the economy are still too big and complex for computers to handle.” Shih’s skepticism doesn’t go as far as to say the data challenge on global trade is too big a puzzle to solve. When informed of the CargoMetrics approach, he called it “very valid and creative. They just have to be careful not to throw away efforts to understand causality.” Another big-data scholar, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor of electrical engineering and computer science Samuel Madden, also urges caution. “What worries me is that models become trusted but then fail,” he explains. “You have to validate and revalidate.” Borgerson grew up in Southeast Missouri, in a home on Rural Route 5 between Festus and Hematite. His father was a former Marine infantry officer and police official, and his mother a high school French and Spanish teacher. The family traveled 15 miles to Crystal City to attend Grace Presbyterian Church, which was central to young Borgerson’s upbringing: There he was a youth elder, became an Eagle Scout and received a God and Country Award. The church was across the street from the former home of NBA all-star and U.S. senator Bill Bradley, whose backboard Borgerson used for basketball practice. When it came to choosing what to do after high school, Borgerson was torn between becoming a Presbyterian minister and accepting an appointment to the U.S. Coast Guard Academy or West Point. He went with the Coast Guard because, he says, “the humanitarian mission really appealed to me, and I had never been on a boat before.” At the academy, in New London, Connecticut, Borgerson played NCAA tennis and was also a cutup, racking up demerits for such antics as placing a sailboat on the commandant of cadets’ front lawn and leading bar patrons in a rendition of “Semper Paratus,” the school’s theme song. Still, he graduated with honors and spent the next four years piloting a 367-foot cutter — which seized five tons of cocaine in the Caribbean — then captaining a patrol boat that saved 30 lives on search-and-rescue missions. From 2001 to 2003 the Coast Guard sent Borgerson to the Fletcher School at Tufts University to earn his master’s of arts in law and diplomacy. While at Tufts he volunteered at a Boston homeless shelter for military veterans and founded a Pet Pals therapy program for senior citizens. Following graduation, from 2003 to 2006, Borgerson taught U.S. history, foreign policy, political geography and maritime studies at the Coast Guard Academy, and co-founded its Institute for Leadership. While there he would get up at 4:00 each morning to work on his Ph.D. thesis exploring U.S. port cities’ approaches to foreign policy. He would also travel to Boston to complete his course work at Tufts and meet with his adviser, John Curtis Perry. Borgerson’s military allegiance runs deep. One weekend last fall he played football in a service academy alumni game. On another he attended the Army-Navy game. Still militarily fit at age 40, the 6-foot-5 Borgerson works out regularly at an inner-city gym aimed at helping youths find an alternative to gang violence; a few weeks ago he was there boxing with ex-convicts and lifting weights. Leaving the Coast Guard was a hard decision for Borgerson, resulting in part from his frustration with the military bureaucracy’s stymieing of his bid to get back to sea for security missions. With his degrees in hand, he applied for a fellowship at the Council on Foreign Relations. During the application process he met Edward Morse, now global head of commodities research at Citigroup. Morse was on the CFR selection committee in 2007 and recommended Borgerson as a fellow. Morse introduced Borgerson to commodities, and to trading terms like “contango” and “backwardation.” Morse himself had, earlier in career, gotten the jump on official oil supply data by hiring planes to take photos of the lid heights of oil tanks in Oklahoma’s Cushing field. Working for the CFR in New York reconnected Borgerson with his Missouri roots. Bill Bradley’s aunt called the former senator to say: “The son of a family who went to our church in Crystal City is in New York. Would you welcome him?” Bradley did — and would later play a part in Borgerson’s career development. While at the CFR, Borgerson became an expert on the melting of the North Pole ice cap, writing numerous published articles on its implications; this led him to co-found, with the president of Iceland, the Arctic Circle, a nonprofit designed to encourage discussion of the future of that region. Borgerson recently spoke to 50 international generals and admirals about the Arctic and is co-drafting a proposal for a treaty between the U.S. and Canada that would help resolve the differences the two countries have in allowing international ship and aircraft travel through the Northwest Passage. His Arctic research led to an aha moment early in 2008, while he was still with the CFR, on a visit to Singapore and the Strait of Malacca with his Fletcher School classmate Rockford Weitz and their former Ph.D. adviser, Perry. Seeing the mass of ships sailing through the strait, Borgerson and Weitz decided to build a data analytics firm using satellite tracking of ships. Like many successful entrepreneurs, the two struggled to find financing before reaching out to a network of friends and their contacts. One was Randy Beardsworth, who had sat with Borgerson at a 2007 Coast Guard Academy dinner, where Beardsworth, then the Coast Guard’s chief of law enforcement in Miami, was the guest speaker. Borgerson “made references to history and literature, and I thought, ‘Here is a sharp guy,’” recalls Beardsworth. “We have been friends ever since.” But Borgerson didn’t turn to his new friend in his initial fund-raising. “He came to me in 2009, after he had been turned down by 17 VCs, was maxed out on his credit card, was married and had a newborn son,” says Beardsworth, who was reviewing the Department of Homeland Security as part of the Obama administration’s transition team. Beardsworth came to the rescue, not only committing to invest a small amount but introducing his friend to Doug Doan. A West Point graduate and Washington-based angel investor, Doan took to Borgerson right away. “To be honest, it wasn’t his idea, it was Scott I invested in,” says Doan, who provided $100,000 in capital and introduced Borgerson to a few friends, who added $75,000. Manzi came on board as an investor in 2009, having been asked by Bradley to check out Borgerson’s plan for a data metrics firm. (Manzi knew Bradley from the late 1990s, when the latter was considering a run for U.S. president.) With Doan, Doan’s friends and Manzi as investors, CargoMetrics was finally able to garner its first venture capital commitment in early 2010, from Boston-based Ascent Venture Partners. That gave the start-up the capital it needed to hire a bevy of data scientists to build an analytics platform that it could sell to commodity-trading houses and other commercial users. In 2011, CargoMetrics added Summerhill Venture Partners, a Toronto-based firm with a Boston office, to its investor roster, raising roughly $18 million from venture capital and angels for its data business. By then Borgerson had already begun to contemplate converting CargoMetrics from an information provider into a money manager; he saw the potential to extract powerful trade signals from its technology rather than share it with other market participants for a fee. Among those he consulted was serial entrepreneur Peter Platzer, a friend of one of CargoMetrics’ original investors. Platzer, a physicist by training, had spent eight years as a quantitative hedge fund manager at Rohatyn Group and Deutsche Bank before co-founding Spire Global, a San Francisco–based company that uses its own fleet of low-orbit satellites to track shipping, in 2012. “We had lengthy conversations on how to set up quant trading systems and how [commodities giant] Cargill had made a similar decision to set up its own in-house hedge fund to trade on the information it was gathering,” recalls Platzer. So Borgerson reset his course. Doan describes the decision as a “transformative moment” for the CargoMetrics co-founder. “The military trains you to be a strategic thinker,” Doan explains. “Scott had been tactical until then, making small pivots, and like a general who sees the theater of war, he moved into strategic mode.” Borgerson’s ambition to succeed was in no small part fueled by the early turndowns by many venture capital firms and a fierce determination to best the Wall Street bunch at their own game. “There’s a lot that motivates me, including — if I’m honest — I have a big chip on my shoulder to beat the prep school, Ivy League, MBA crowd,” he says. “They’re bred to make money, but they’re not smarter than everyone else; they just have more patina and connections.” (Bred differently, he spent last Thanksgiving visiting his parents in rural Missouri. After breakfast he and his father were in the woods, shooting assault guns at posters of terrorists, with Gunny, his father’s Anatolian shepherd dog.) Borgerson’s plan was not met with enthusiasm from the company’s then co-CEO, Weitz. CargoMetrics had been gaining clients and meeting its goals, and was on its way to becoming a successful data service provider. Weitz, who now is president of the Gloucester, Massachusetts–based Institute for Global Maritime Studies and an entrepreneur coach at Tufts’ Fletcher School, did not return e-mails or phone calls asking for comment. For his part, Borgerson says: “A ship cannot have two captains. The company simply matured and evolved into a streamlined management structure with one CEO instead of two.” Eventually, Doan went along with Borgerson’s plan. “We believe in Scott and that shipping holds the no-shit, honest truth of what the economy is doing,” he says. But buying out the venture capital firms several years ahead of the usual exit time would require a hefty premium over what they had invested. Once again Borgerson’s early supporters played a key role. Manzi, a fellow Fletcher School grad who had mentored Borgerson since the company’s early days, put up more money (making CargoMetrics one of his single largest investments) and introduced him to a powerful group of wealthy investors. Separately, the CFR’s Morse suggested that Borgerson meet with Daniel Freifeld, founder of Washington-based Callaway Capital Management and a former senior adviser on Eurasian energy at the U.S. Department of State. Impressed by Borgerson’s “intellectual honesty, vigor and more than four years of historical data,” Freifeld brought the idea to a billionaire third-party investor, who took his advice and became one of CargoMetrics’ largest backers. “I would not have suggested the investment if CargoMetrics had not done the hard part first,” adds Freifeld, declining to name the investor. A chance encounter in the fall of 2012 gave the CargoMetrics team its first taste of real Wall Street trading. Attending an Arctic Imperative conference in Alaska, Borgerson met the CIO of a large investment firm, whom he declines to name. When Borgerson confided his ambition and that CargoMetrics had developed algorithms to trade on its shipping data once it was legally structured to do so, the CIO suggested CargoMetrics provide the analytical models for a separate portfolio the money manager would trade. Live trading using CargoMetrics’ models began in December 2012. Manzi brought in longtime banker Gerald Rosenfeld in 2013 to craft and negotiate the move to make CargoMetrics a limited liability investment firm. Rosenfeld acted in a personal role rather than in his position as vice chairman of Lazard and full-time professor and trustee of the New York University School of Law. The whole process took a year and a half. During that time Blackstone checked in as an investor. Bradley, now an investment banker, has yet to invest in CargoMetrics, explaining that he is unfamiliar with quantitative investing. But he may eventually invest in Borgerson’s firm, he says, because “we are homeboys. I believe in him and that things are going to work out ” — pausing to add with a smile, “based on my vast quant experience, of course.” Borgerson has been in stealth mode since CargoMetrics’ early days, when he moved the firm from an innovation lab near MIT because the shared space was too open. He is much more forthcoming when boasting of the firm’s “world-class talent.” The team includes astrophysicists, mathematicians, former hedge fund quants, electrical engineers, a trade lawyer and software developers. Hoogerwerf, who has a Ph.D. in astrophysics from the Netherlands’ Leiden University, built distributed technical environments for scientists and engineers at Microsoft Corp. Solomon Todesse, who works on quant investment strategies, was head of asset allocation at State Street Global Advisors. Aquil Abdullah, a team leader in the engineering group, was a software engineer in the high-performance-computing group at Microsoft. And senior investment strategist Charles Freifeld (Daniel’s father) has 40 years’ experience in futures and commodities markets, including nine with Boston-based commodity trading adviser firm AlphaMetrics Capital Management. “All were self-made people; none were born with a silver spoon,” Borgerson notes. One of his blue-collar-background hires was James (Jess) Scully, who joined as chief operating officer in 2011, after his employer Interactive Supercomputing was acquired by Microsoft. “The team we built treasures team success, which is Scott’s motto,” Scully says. “We want shared resources, one P&L, not ‘How much money did my unit make?’” Both Scully and Borgerson say CargoMetrics is like the Golden State Warriors, a leading NBA basketball team known for putting aside personal glory and playing as a band of brothers having fun. Borgerson says he fosters a no-ego policy with “lots of play because investment teams are built on trust, and playing together builds trust.” Team building at CargoMetrics includes pub crawls, picnics at Borgerson’s house, poker nights, volunteer work in a soup kitchen for the homeless, Red Sox games and visits to museums. Trips to the Boston docks or Coast Guard base are intended to remind the CargoMetrics team of the real economy. There are also occasional “touch a tanker” days. On one visit to a tanker, everyone was amazed that the ship was the size of a city building, Borgerson says. “They could smell the salt on the deck,” he recalls. “Wall Street can lose sight of the real fundamentals in the world. I don’t want that to happen here.” Unlike the Rothschilds 200 years ago, only a small percentage of the trades that CargoMetrics makes relate to beating official government data. Most simply are aimed at identifying mispricings in the market, using the firm’s real-time shipping data and proprietary algorithms. At a whiteboard in his conference room, Borgerson sketches out CargoMetrics’ general formula. He draws a “maritime matrix” of three dynamic data sets: geography (Malacca, Brazil, Australia, China, Europe and the U.S.), metrics (ship counts, cargo mass and volume, ship speed and port congestion) and tradable factors (Brent crude versus WTI, as well as mining equities, commodity macro and Asian economic activity). Using satellite data with hundreds of millions of ship positions, CargoMetrics makes trillions of calculations to determine individual cargoes onboard the ships and then to aggregate the cargo flows and compare them with historical shipping data. All that leads to the final comparisons with historical financial market data to find mispricings. If CargoMetrics observes an appreciable decline in export shipping activity in South Africa, for example, its trading models will determine whether that is a significant early-warning sign by considering that information alongside other factors, such as interest rates. If CargoMetrics believes a decline in the rand is forthcoming, it might short it against a basket of other currencies. “This is like a heat map showing opportunity,” Borgerson says, noting that CargoMetrics is not trading physical commodities. “We are agnostic on whether to be long or short, and let the computers spot where there is a mispricing and liquidity in the markets.” He sums up his simple, but still less than revealing, process by writing on the whiteboard “Collect, Compute, Trade.” Borgerson says CargoMetrics is building a systematic approach that will work even when cargo cannot be identified — on containerships, for instance. It already knows a large percentage of the daily imports and exports into and out of China and island economies such as Japan and Australia. And although the firm cannot glean from its calculations on satellite AIS data the type of cargo, such as iPhones from China, it can measure total flow, which shows present economic activity. CargoMetrics’ data scientists are working on linking such activity to the firm’s data set of the past seven years to measure the evolving global economy. That will lead, Borgerson maintains, to more trades on currencies and equity index futures and, eventually, trades on individual equities. “Uncorrelated” is a mantra of Borgerson and his team. Well aware that correlated assets sent the performance of most asset managers, including hedge funds, plunging in the financial crisis, CargoMetrics is determined to come up with an antidote. Careful not to say too much, Borgerson lays out the simple principle that the process starts with placing many bets among uncorrelated strategies in different asset classes, like commodities, currencies and equities. The goal is diversification, staying as market neutral as possible and remaining sensitive to tail risk in different scenarios. CargoMetrics’ analytic models help find asset classes that are outliers. Those may include a publicly traded instrument such as oil, another commodity or an equity for which shipping information was a leading indicator during times when other asset classes marched in lockstep. The historical ship data is then blended with this new information to seek opportunities. Identifying mispriced spreads among different trades within an asset class is another way of avoiding the calamity of correlation. Borgerson says the firm’s models will find instances where one type of oil should be a short trade and another a long one. The same goes for whole asset classes — shorting one that will benefit if virtually all asset prices plunge and buying another that will rise when oil prices gain. “We’re counting cards with the goal of being right maybe 3 percent more than we are wrong, as a way of making profits during good times and staying afloat during times of sudden, unpredictable but far-reaching events,” Borgerson says. The key, he adds, “is to know your edge and spread your risk.” CargoMetrics’ uncorrelated approach worked during the dismal first three weeks of this year, says Borgerson. Dialing down risk as volatility in the markets soared, the firm was on track in January to have its best month since it began trading. To improve the firm’s models, eight of its data scientists hold a weekly strategy meeting, nicknamed “the Shackleton Group” after the band of sailors shipwrecked in the Antarctic from 1914 to 1917. Hoogerwerf and Ramos co-lead the group. At one recent meeting they were deciding how much risk, including how much liquidity, there was in a possible strategy; reviewing whether to keep previous strategies; and assigning who would research new ones. The Shackleton Group’s meetings are free-form, with a lot of “I’ve got an idea” interjections that disregard official roles. “We hit the restart button a lot,” says Ramos, a former director of business intelligence and a quantitative economist at law firm Dewey & LeBoeuf who joined CargoMetrics in late 2010. “That’s why our motto is ‘Never lose hope.’” A bet on oil, related to Russia’s production, was stopped at the last minute in 2014, when Russia invaded Ukraine. Some currency-trading strategies have been abandoned in theory or after failing. Strategies the Shackleton Group likes are passed on to the firm’s investment committee of Borgerson, Scully and Ramos for a final decision. CargoMetrics has a unique set of big-data challenges. Historical shipping patterns may not be as useful in the new global economy now that shipping freight prices are plunging, a sign that trade growth rates may be changing. And analysts point out how hard identifying oil cargo can be in certain locations and instances, even in more-predictable economic times. “While it may be easy to say that ships leaving the Middle East Gulf are typically carrying crude oil, knowing the type of crude is sometimes quite difficult,” says Paulo Nery, senior director of Europe, Middle East and Asia oil for Genscape, a Louisville, Kentucky–based company that analyzes satellite tracking of ships. Borgerson maintains his team is well aware of the dangers of data mining and getting swamped by noise. “If you run computers hard enough, you can convince yourself of anything,” he says. To make sure CargoMetrics’ algorithms for identifying cargo are valid, the firm spot-checks manifest data filed at ports and imposes statistical confidence checks to guard against spurious correlations. Getting the jump on official government statistics is likely to become tougher too thanks to the recently formed High-Level Group for the Modernization of Official Statistics. Although the U.S. is not a member, Canada is a key player helping to lead the mostly European nation group (including South Korea) in coming up with a global blueprint for measuring and reporting economic activity. Reflecting on his journey to Wall Street — raising money, hiring employees with different skill sets, making changes to CargoMetrics’ culture, overcoming legal and regulatory hurdles — almost gives Borgerson second thoughts about whether he would do it again. “I’ve sailed ships through tropical storms, captured cocaine smugglers and testified before Congress [on his Arctic research],” he says, “but this was the hardest.”
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