Entry 1:

Dear Charlie,

Know how NBC always opens its NBA broadcasts with shots of some fetching, iconic scene in the city from which the game is originating? Before the openers of the conference finals over the weekend, producers had awfully slim pickings: a shot of the waste-brown Sacramento River and an aerial view of the Hoffa-esque potter's field that is the New Jersey Meadowlands. Yet as aesthetically unsatisfying as those images are, the Sacramento Kings and New Jersey Nets play perhaps the most eye-pleasing basketball in the league.

How come? In the case of the Kings, I think it's because they have a raft of foreign players, and beyond the United States, kids are learning how to move and pass and shoot before they turn to film-at-11 skills like the dunk and the crossover dribble—whereas the American high-school kids who leave prematurely for the pros have plenty of the latter and less of the former. Moreover, Sacramento has found a place on its bench for the Hall of Fame coach Pete Carril, who has brought the precepts of spacing and ball movement he installed at Princeton.

In the Nets' case, the team has its own assistant, Eddie Jordan, who had learned the Princeton system from Carril in Sacramento, and, in guys like Jason Kidd and Keith Van Horn, the perfect all-court, polyvalent players to implement it—as exemplified by that sweet backdoor bounce pass Van Horn threw to Kerry Kittles for a layup in yesterday's defeat of the Boston Celtics.

Having explored the themes of non-American hoops and the Princeton system in my new book, I've long wondered what a backdoor offense would look like if you subbed in the most gifted athletes in the world for non-scholarship mudders. Now we know. The playoffs thus far have actually been fun to watch. Over the past few years, the Cassandras have brayed that the NBA has been in crisi, as Italians like to say of their soccer clubs, either because of a dearth of stars like Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley or that old chestnut about the league being "too black"—which is rather like saying that jazz is too black. In fact, the problem was something entirely different. The basketball just wasn't that good. Thanks to tinkerings (permitting zones), and play-makers who actually make plays (Kidd, the Celtics' Kenny Anderson, the Kings' Mike Bibby, and the Los Angeles Lakers' Derek Fisher), the mosh pit of the low post (remember Ewing and Olajuwon grinding against each other during the 1994 finals?) is no more. Even Shaquille O'Neal looks faintly balletic these days.

Of course, pure aesthetics will founder when they run up against the brutal utilitarianism of an irresistible force like Kobe Bryant or an immovable object like Shaq. But the Lakers' dominance of this field is a topic for later.

Cheers,
Alex