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"FacebookPinterest\n\nEach Friday throughout the playoff season, GQ's guest blogger Bethlehem Shoals will be joined by his pal and fellow hoop-head David Roth, a sportswriter for The Wall Street Journal and The Awl, for a wide-ranging, savant-level dialogue about the week's action and the games ahead. Oh and in case you're wondering, \"kibitz\" is a Yiddish word for a chatty back-and-forth. Like so:\n\nDavid Roth: What's your favorite postseason Kobe Bryant gesture-of-incredulity?\n\nBethlehem Shoals: I'll defer to your expertise here\u2014you're the Audubon of this shit.\n\nRoth: I'm easy enough to please on this\u2014I'll take anything with a mirthless grin and an eye-roll. His usual emotive heelery aside, though, he's been kind of dull and thwarted thus far. He's still interesting to watch, but more in the way that you're flipping through cable and find some reality TV monster and are just like \"what the devil is that?\" That'll change, because he's Kobe, but right now he's the basketball equivalent of a troublemaker character on VH1's Confident Hairdressers of Atlanta. Also, I know this isn't really controversial, but he's not the best player in that series, either. Which is to say that I am psyched to be getting some more Chris Paul in my life.\n\nShoals: What's so great about Paul is that, regardless of what numbers he puts up, or even whether the Hornets win, he changes the ecology of the game. It's not only that the Hornets play a certain style because of him\u2014you really are watching a different vision of the sport when he's got the ball in his hands. Steve Nash makes us droolers for the same reason, but with Paul, the lack of help makes it all the more glaring. He is the puppet master. Or the cosmos. I get a similar tingle from Jrue Holiday, albeit in nascent form. I wish \"nascent tingle\" didn't sound so much like \"barely legal\".\n\nRoth: Kenny Smith is like \"pause pause pause pause.\" By the way, I'll ride for the at-the-half team all day, but I don't know when the halftime show became the Miller Lite Gay Panic Freakout Brought To You By T-Mobile. They need Chris Webber back in there to cool everyone out, although I am enjoying C-Webb's frankly avant-garde color commentating.\n\n Shoals: He always takes risks. In the studio, it's being vulnerable. On the call, it's cutting loose in weird, creative ways that have as much to do with confidence and intelligence as they do with a lack of experience. It's like watch Walt Frazier find himself, but the floor's on fire and nobody has any idea how they got here in the first place.\n\n Roth: His malaprops are basically psychedelic, but he makes some good calls\u2014Indiana and Denver as mirror images of each other was an on-the-fly gem he just tossed off between weird syntactic decisions\u2014and I think he's doing great. He leverages his credibility in a really interesting way. As you know, besides Mike Fratello, Webber is the only guy in TNT's stable to make a beat for a Nas album. (Note: Fratello produced \"Dr. Knockboot\" off Nas's \"I Am\" album) Anyway, but Paul: what I'd forgotten, during his two or so years out of the spotlight, was how idiosyncratic his game is. He dribbles SO MUCH, but not in the way that bad PGs do. He plays it like a bor in the early rounds, kind of jabbing and probing (pause pause pause) with this weirdly urgent calm. I'll be sad when the Hornets get eliminated.\n\nShoals: J.E. Skeets pointed out to me, in maybe Paul's second or third season, that he had suddenly adopted Nash's \"keep the dribble going forever\" ethos. But Nash does it in search of an as-of-yet unknown passing lane. Paul is shaping the possession as he goes. That's what it is: He's maybe the only NBA player who really seems to not only have a sense of holistic, or enacted, strategy, but for whom it's a living, breathing thing. Kobe is like that on a micro-level, but Paul has a canvas at his feet.\n\nRoth: It's weird how many of these teams are fun to watch, actually\u2014there are usually a couple of we'll-play-in-the-80s turds, but the only team I can't really enjoy watching is the Heat. (And the Spurs, forever and ever, but whatever on that)\n\nShoals: With the Heat it's all just waiting for that one good play, and then resenting that the rest of the time.\n\n Roth: Just the opposite of the basketball I like to watch.\n\n Shoals: Also Spoelstra told them to \"keep jumping\". That was good advice.\n\n Roth: Resentment has a lot to do with it for me, but also they're just a drag to watch\u2014all grunty and stagnant. It doesn't help that I don't find Joel Anthony or any of their humps charming at all. Swap out James Jones and Erick Dampier and whoever for, like, Antoine Walker, Birdman, DeMarre Carroll and Patty Mills and 1) they'd be no worse and 2) I'd like them more. But there's no idiosyncrasy or happiness there. They play like really tall, robustly tattooed actuaries.\n\n Shoals: Sometimes I see them do something that is technically very awesome, but there's no life in it. Like when they play a three-man inside-outside-inside game with the Big Three, or discover that gyroscopic pick and roll we spent all summer anticipating, it's like they could care less.\n\n Roth: Even though it's awesome! That's exactly it for me. All this phoned-in stuntin' after shots, that general joyless sense that everything they do is in some imaginary hater's FACE...again, I can't know what motivates a LeBron James any more than he knows what it's like to be me and make jokes about his hairline for dollars. So I guess in a way I'm cool with him just doing what he's got to do. But they just give off a curdled, nasty vibe that isn't a good look. It's one thing to embrace the villain thing, but they don't seem to have much fun with it.\n\n Shoals: LeBron's greatest strength was that he had fun, pre-Decision. I figured he would make Wade have more fun. Instead, he has become the one making everyone sad.\n\n Roth: And not in the Kobe way, where you suspect everyone sort of appreciates it and can also agree on what a butthead he is and maybe laugh about it during the offseason. I imagine LeBron listening to a lot of Kanye and really just Getting It. He understands.\n\nShoals: Have I told you about my secret hobby of Photoshopping bouffants onto Phil Jackson?\n\nRoth: Oh man. I dislike Phil Jackson too much. I am aware, at some level, that he's simply a slightly smugger-than-average version of your workaday NBA Authority Figure Type. But something about the mythos and the build-to-suit Buddhism and the ditching-your-wife-and-kid-to-spend-more-time-with-your-job/Jeanie Buss thing has turned him into an advertisement against a generation in my mind. He just strikes me as someone who takes skiing really seriously, is really snobby about pot, and has a classic car that he refers to as \"my baby.\"\n\nShoals: Even the whole handing out books thing turned out to be a sham, or at least more stunt than anything else. \"I'm the kind of coach who gives you books\". And his snark has nothing on Popovich\u2014Pop's just not so smug that he trots it out whenever someone sticks a microphone near his craw. I am learning through this conversation that I view Phil Jackson as some sort of NBA father figure, but I think he has brought that on himself.\n\nRoth: He absolutely has. That's his brand. Dickish Dad Who Thinks You Should Read Siddhartha, Steve Blake. In his early days, Pop coached basketball at my alma mater, and apparently was a really good sport about all the D3 shit he had to do. Used to referee intramural water polo games and everything. I sense he is someone with a serious bullshit allergy, whether it is coming from within or without. Whereas I imagine Jackson always having a little cone of bullshit-scented incense burning in his office.\n\n Roth: The coach I've admired the most, in the postseason, is George Karl. Talk about actually letting go of desire\u2014he has absolutely just given that nutty Nugs roster to the universe, and let them become something stranger and far, far better than they were before. Although I guess he has really coached them up on defense. Anyway, George Karl is Buddha-nature as hell, DESPITE having to spend time with JR Smith. Meditate on that, Phil. Take those words home and think them through.\n\n\u2014Bethlehem Shoals\n\nShoals is the founder of FreeDarko.com and the co-author of The Undisputed Guide to Pro Basketball History.\n\nRoth writes for The Wall Street Journal, The Awl and Can't Stop The Bleeding."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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