Don’t get me wrong, Amare Stoudemire is a very talented basketball player. But Knicks fans excited about signing him might want to consider that he’s about as good as David Lee, who’s now going to wind up leaving the team.

Lee takes 15.5 field goals per game and adds 4.1 free throw attempts, scoring a total of 20.2 points per game. Stoudemire takes 15.4 field goals and 7.7 free throws to add up to 23.1 points per game. In other words, STAT scores more points and does it because he’s a bit more efficient. On the other hand, Lee grabs 11.7 rebounds per game to Amare’s 8.9 boards. So if you switch Lee out for Stoudemire, you should expect the new team to score a few more ppg while grabbing a few more rebounds. You can make the case that this is an upgrade, but it’s a pretty small one and it’s possible that the team could have resigned Lee for less money.

Of course if signing Stoudemire persuades LeBron James to move to New York, then it’s a deal well worth making. But otherwise it seems like another case of an NBA team handing out a huge contract to a talented player who’s not talented enough to be worth the money.

In order to minimize the wrongness of NBA playoff predictions, this year we’re going to do them round-by-round and then have new predictions when round one is over.

In the east fortunately things are easy and all four home teams will win.

The West is very close-packed. The teams with the best point differentials (Utah +5.3 and San Antonio +5.1) will both be playing on the road, the team with the worst differential (Dallas +2.7) is at home, and injuries are a factor in many cases. I like LA over Oklahoma City, San Antonio over Dallas, Phoenix over Portland, and Utah over Denver by I imagine we’ll see a lot of hard-fought series.

John Hollinger hails the “de-Rileyization of the game” as one of the best NBA trends of the decade:

In a response to the increasingly rough tactics of the 1990s, personified by the brutish style that Pat Riley’s teams employed in New York and Miami, the league enforced handchecking rules and made other modifications to open up the floor. The result was a much-more-entertaining style of play and a rebound for the post-Jordan NBA in the second half of the decade. Ironically, Riley stumbled upon the one player best suited for the new rules (Dwyane Wade) and won a championship with him in 2006.

I basically agree, but I don’t think “ironically” is really the best way to look at this. One thing that’s noteworthy about Riley is that while he adopted a very distinctive and much-loathed style in the 1990s, he’s not at all dogmatic about it. That’s not how he coached the Lakers in the 1980s and when the rules changed and it ceased to be the most effective way to run a basketball team he swiftly built a team around a perimeter slasher who thrives in the current system. Some guys, like Don Nelson or Larry Brown, seem monomaniacal about their particular basketball concept. Riley, by contrast, seems to have a very realistic view of the landscape and adapts what he’s doing to the situation.

I think it’s fine if All-Star voting doesn’t rigorously track a player’s actual NBA skillz. Half the game, after all, is defense but that’s not what the All-Star game is all about. So bias toward scorers, bias toward guys who make cool plays, etc., I can live with it all. But Barry Petchesky observes that China is ruining everything in a way we really can’t live with. Right now, Tracy McGrady is scheduled to be voted in as a starting guard even though he hasn’t played at all this year:

You see, the Chinese really like Yao Ming. And because of this, they really like the Rockets. So they’re punching their ballots in force for anyone who wears a Rocket jersey.

To wit: Trevor Ariza is sixth in the voting at forward, despite having the second worst FG% in the NBA. Luis Scola is eighth in the voting. And Aaron Brooks is ahead of Brandon Roy, Deron Williams and Chauncey Billups at guard.

This is no good. US officials have had no luck hassling China about its currency policy, but surely we can get something done about the ridiculous pro-Rockets bias of their voters. There’s an urgent need for China to become a responsible member of the international community, and this sort of thing does not inspire confidence.

The Jewish people are not necessarily known for our athleticism, nor are the Sacremento Kings known these days for winning basketball games, so I was a bit surprised when I looked it up and found that Omri Casspi, the 21 year-old forward who’s the first Israeli to make it to the NBA, is not only playing, he’s playing pretty well—8.5 points and 3.1 rebounds on 60.1 TS% and 21.3 minutes per game. Not All-Star numbers, obviously, but the kind of guy you’d gladly have on your team.

And actually Sacramento, which projected terribly during the offseason, is doing pretty well. A return to form by Kevin Martin and a big sophomore leap from Jason Thompson are the main causes but Casspi is part of the change that Sactown can believe in.

With Caron Butler needing to leave Friday night’s game after an injury, Brendan Haywood told The Washington Post: “I hope he bounces back and is back quickly. Sometimes it’s frustrating, feels like we’re cursed.”

But are the Wizards cursed or do they have a sub-par medical/training staff? There seems to be very little attention paid to that kind of issue. But the conventional wisdom is that the Phoenix trainers are unusually good, so doesn’t it make sense that some would be unusually bad. Wizards players not only get hurt a lot (which happens to everyone) but seem to take a very long time to recover.

I don’t think all that highly of my abilities as a sports prognosticator, but I really did think it would take more than two days of action for my NBA predictions to start looking foolish. But I said Cleveland would be the best team in the league and even though I think Boston will be very good thought Cleveland and Orlando would both be better. This theory took a hit when Boston beat Cleveland on opening night. But one game is one game. Then came last night. Boston thrashed a weak Charlotte Bobcats team while the James Gang went and . . . lost to Toronto. Basically nobody except Shaq on Cleveland shot a good percent. LeBron put up a triple-double and took enough free throws (although he shot these with a bad percentage, too) to make the overall scoring pretty efficient, but everyone else stank. And since when is Andrea Bargnani good?

Oh well. Frankly, I don’t much care for the Cavs so I’d be happy for them to turn out to be surprisingly bad. But I just don’t see how this personnel could fail.