Oh Dream, What Now?

As anyone who is an Atlanta Dream fan knows, this season was an emotional roller coaster. From Chamique Holdsclaw declining to report to training camp, to a 6-0 start, to the end-of-the-season tailspin, to the brand new post-season lineup to the sweep through the Eastern Conference playoffs, through Angel McCoughtry's 42 in one game and 35 in another, to the Dream losing in the narrowest sweep in WNBA history in front of a sellout Atlanta crowd, you quite literally didn't know what was going to happen next.

When you go to the Finals for the first time, but you lose, the question is "should you be bitter or should you be happy"? My answer is that whatever you are, you shouldn't be that happy - or, if you are happy, you certainly shouldn't show it. You don't want the Dream to be like the Chicago Cubs, one of those teams that just seems happy to be participating win or lose. No, we are most emphatically NOT just "happy to be there". We want to WIN.

But even though we are not happy, we can take satisfaction in many things. We might walk out with a sad contenance, but we can also walk out with pride. It is quite possible for the two to coexist. No one predicted the Dream as WNBA Finalists - but we were. There were some in the tight-knit community of women's basketball fans - you know who you are - who predicted that not only would the Storm sweep but that they would romp, a "sit back, grab the popcorn and enjoy the fun" moment. Undoubtedly, some of those viewers choked on a few kernels.

The Dream could have beaten any team in the WNBA except the Storm. I believe we might have even been able to beat the 2009 Phoenix team, but you never get to choose the team you play. The 2010 Storm was one of the best WNBA teams in history, and they would have beaten several past WNBA champions if you want to match championship squads historically. The 2010 Seattle squad probably couldn't have beaten those turn of the century Los Angeles Sparks championship teams but they could have beaten just about anyone else. In a way, the Atlanta Dream were much like the Boston Red Sox - except that the Dream have only had the opportunity to draw one all-world opponent whereas the BoSox kept drawing them over and over and over again.

The good thing about the Dream's championship run is that it the team might have earned the attention of a few more local faces. Marynell Meadors in her post-game press conference stated that Dream was getting more attention from the girls high school community. From my own personal experience I know that more people know about the Dream that I would have previously expected.

Hopefully, the experience will leave everyone hungry for more. My hope is that Kathy Betty has enjoyed the experience so much in her rookie year of WNBA ownership that she'll just want to keep repeating it over and over. My estimation is that WNBA teams can lose as much as $1.5-$2.5 million per year - not a lot of money in the sports world but a very expensive purchase. Betty stated in an interview that she loved the team but also realized that it was a business, and her goal - and necessity - was to put the team in black ink.

Aaron's Inc. helped. They didn't go in for a jersey sponsorship but they helped in a lot of other ways. We saw the Aaron's Inc. mascot, Lucky, at several Dream games. One thrilling event was the Aaron's Dog Drop, where several tiny versions of the mascot were parachuted down into the crowd from the attic of Philips Arena. Those little dogs cost money.

I'm reminded of a complaint on Twitter from some anonymous lout that went along the following lines - "Ha ha, you had to discount your tickets 65 percent for your Finals game. FAIL." Watch out for that FAIL taunt, because it can a double-edged sword. First, our Finals game was sold out with over 10,000 in attendance. Second, it seems like the previous complaint of the haters was that the WNBA couldn't sell out its Finals games. Now, they've had to adjust their whining - now, they claim that we sell them out but we sell them out too cheaply. The crowd might not have paid full price - but trust me, those seats were filled and that crowd was definitely active. So the haters get a BACKFAIL.

Great year for the Atlanta Dream. Sad year, but also a year of accomplishments and a lot to build on and look forward to next year. (And by the way, WNBA, the officiating was terrible. At least it didn't affect the Finals that much, since the bad was dolloped out in equal portions to the Dream and the Storm.)

"So Pet," you might ask, "what now?" Well, Angel McCoughtry and Marynell Meadors get on a plane to the Czech Republic to join the United States team at the FIBA World Championships. Everyone else on the Dream not involved in FIBA scatters like paper in the wind. Most hop on flights overseas to join their European teams for "off-season" professional play. Shalee Lehning and Armintie Price might hook up with Kansas State or Mississippi again to join their coaching staffs. Alison Bales might crack open the books and take a few more med school courses. The majority of them who don't live in Atlanta won't be seen again in the United States - save for the rare vacation - until 2011.

Marynell Meadors will probably go back to her home in Florida (I believe) after the FIBA championships for a little while before swinging into Phase Two - watching a lot of college games and keeping her eyes on the free agency status of players all around the league. Some Dream players probably won't be back next year, despite the success of 2010 - it's rare for rosters to remain fixed year after year after year. The actual nuts and bolts of the front office will reduce itself to a skeleton crew without the need to handle the day-to-day issues associated with the regular season. For Kathy Betty, the goal will be to raise both awareness of the Dream in the Atlanta community and to seek sponsorship money.

As for me, I'll probably end up following the Dream players - in spirit, anyway - on their various world-wide journeys, reading websites in a bevy of languages to determine how well overseas players are faring. I'll be watching Georgia Tech women's basketball, and my goal is to plan things so that I can watch even more women's basketball games than I did the year before. The Yellow Jackets play Tennessee on a neutral court and Connecticut in Atlanta, so it will be a fascinating season.

And the blog...oh yes, that....

In Zen, there's a concept called "beginner's mind". This, in Wikipedia, is defined as "having an attitude of openness, eagerness, and lack of preconceptions when studying a subject, even when studying at an advanced level, just as a beginner in that subject would". During my first two years of writing the Pleasant Dreams Blog, I was definitely in a state of beginner's mind, because I was a beginner. I had never followed basketball up to that point, and everything was new and interesting and fun to learn.

However, mastering the intricacies of basketball is virtually impossible even for those who get paid for it. In terms of fandom, I'm years behind and I am coming to grips with the fact that I shall simply never catch up - the teenage years when I could have soaked up the sport like a sponge or even attempted to play it are gone for good. I can only see linearly on a court, and not multilinearly. I'm still applying my baseball mind to basketball, and so I can't recognize pick and rolls and can only barely recognize the concept of rotation defense. I can at least tell a zone from a man-to-man...but so can a lot of other people. My understanding of the game, in many respects, is that of a clever elementary school student. I've had to try to listen as much as I could to people who knew more than I did, but fight the temptation to substitute my knowledge for theirs. There's no point in being free of preconception when you just pick up someone else's preconceptions.

The changes in my life over the past year in terms of employment and home combined with hitting the hard part of the basketball learning curve wiped out my beginnner's mind. Reporting on the sport became tedious, my attention focused in a thousand directions, my energy lackluster. I wasn't open, I wasn't eager, and I was full of preconceptions. So I walked away from the blog in an attempt to recover my beginner's mind and my time away from the blog and from other issues has partially helped...but I'm not where I'd like to be, not yet.

So I will continue to go on walkabout, and stay away from serious blogging. I might contribute to Swish Appeal every now and then and I'll provide links at this blog to any new Swish Appeal articles. I might have something else to write here at Pleasant Dreams during the interim, but the goal is to break away from the old habits and seek new approaches. "Strive on with diligence," as Buddha might say.

For those who have hung on for the journey, thank you. I don't know where the journey is going to end, but I still love the game. I'm sure that whatever happens, it's going to be wonderful.

(P. S. : As to specific thoughts about the particulars of this series and off-season moves that might be made, this might come later.)

The Finale Rack

I've been having trouble blogging...as you might have noticed recently. What you might not have known is that over the three years I've followed the Atlanta Dream I've had my paws in three separate pies: this blog, an unnamed National Sports Website, and Swish Appeal, a new website hosted by SB Nation and devoted to women's basketball.

It's taken a long time to figure out what the problem has been. Namely, "how come I can't blog?" I felt more and more disorganized with less and less to say. Furthermore, this affected the other areas in which I was writing. I wondered if I had hit some sort of mental wall and if I should just walk away from blogging with maximum apologies all around.

Part of this was, as close followers of the blog know, caused by a change in my work environment. For the first two years of Pleasant Dreams, my work environment was rather lax in how it monitored by personal time. I had unlimited access to the internet and there were no expectations as to how I should be using my time. This gave me the time to be able to devote attention to all of these aspects of my blogging life, as well as to follow the WNBA on the internet and elsewhere, to play with statistics and to otherwise make blogging about women's basketball fun.

Then, last year, things changed. My unlimited access to the internet became very limited all of a sudden. No blogging from work. And then, after a while, no substantial use of the internet from work, either - the bean counters were now counting every bean. This killed not only the chances for me to post from work, but even to work on the background of posts from work. Of course, I could do this at home - but home was supposed to be a time of relaxation and reflection, not a time for furious blogging. Trust me, when you're slaving over a computer for eight hours at work, it can be tedious coming home and doing the exact same thing you did at work, shutting yourself away from everything. It becomes something you don't look forward to doing.

So I soldiered on. I would try to eat three pies at one setting, to extend this analogy past its breaking point. I would keep all of these plates spinning, and do the best I could. Pleasant Dreams slowed down to a trickle. I was unhappy with the work I was turning in at the sports website, although it was getting some play from big women's basketball websites. Swish Appeal seemed almost forgotten.

Most of the time, I just blamed myself for the failure. "The reason this isn't working, Pet, is because you don't care. If you cared you could make this work." Then I read a recent article called Solitude and Leadership. The article discussed, among other things, the concept of multitasking and said something that might seem obvious to you but which was rather surprising to me.

One thing that made the study different from others is that the researchers didn’t test people’s cognitive functions while they were multitasking. They separated the subject group into high multitaskers and low multitaskers and used a different set of tests to measure the kinds of cognitive abilities involved in multitasking. They found that in every case the high multitaskers scored worse. They were worse at distinguishing between relevant and irrelevant information and ignoring the latter. In other words, they were more distractible. They were worse at what you might call “mental filing”: keeping information in the right conceptual boxes and being able to retrieve it quickly. In other words, their minds were more disorganized. And they were even worse at the very thing that defines multitasking itself: switching between tasks.

That described me to a "T". My mental filing and organization system had simply broken down. "Disorganized" wasn't the half of it. By trying to do three things well, I ended up doing none of them well. The problem wasn't that I was inept at spinning plates, or that I was neglecting my plate spinning duties, or that I didn't care if the audience was assaulted by flying shards of broken glass. The problem was that I was spinning too many damn plates to be good at keeping any individual plate spinning.

Don't spin so many damn plates! Don't expect to do so much! That was the solution. Focus on one thing, and one thing only.

The question then became - "what thing? Where should I be putting my time and effort?" The answer, after thinking about it, became obvious. Parts of my blogging life had to be pared down. And until I can figure out what goes where in my life, there has to be a temporary walking-away process.

I will continue to maintain my obligations in the women's basketball blogging world, as best I can, until the end of the Atlanta Dream's 2010 season. I will keep the plates spinning - not very well, or not very carefully - until then. After that, I will be ending some of my obligations, formal and otherwise. I will continue to attend Atlanta Dream games during the 2010 season and, when able, write about them.

However, when the season is over, this blog will go into hibernation. There might be a few months or so after the season where I just...think about things. So don't expect any posts of any sort here after the final ball bounces for the Dream in 2010. I'll keep occasionally blogging here during the season, but beyond that, who knows?

So thank you for your patience. We'll be seeing out the rest of the season together, and I know that we're going to playoffs...and beyond that! Until next time, what did Casey Kasem say? "Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars?" Sounds good to me!

A New Poll and the Future of the Blog

I'm going to beg the patience of my infinitely patient readership and post another poll. But first, you have to hear my litany of woe.

If you've been paying attention, posting has dropped off in recent months. This is not something I wanted to have happen, but it seems that I can't avoid it. With limited internet access at work - and with work becoming busier despite the decline in the economy - my opportunities for posting on a daily basis are now significantly restricted. When I get home, I have very little time to read message boards like RebKell, to follow the Dream at home and overseas through Google News and international basketball websites, and to keep up with all of the great women's basketball websites out there everywhere.

The problem was that when I started the Pleasant Dreams blog, I had hoped that it would be a day-to-day, up-to-the-minute update on the goings-on of our favorite WNBA team. That if a reader needed Dream news - and needed it now - this was the blog that you would visit. Unfortunately, not only can I not do up-to-the-minute, it seems that I can now longer do day-to-day either. Another problem is that I had hoped for the blog to have several thoughtful posts mixed in with the updates - essays on the state of the game, statistical research and observations, etc. However, it takes time to write long posts or to grind out statistical stuff, and I can't keep all of this up at the same time.

My love for the Dream is as strong as it ever was. My enthusiasm for women's basketball has not flagged. I'll still be attending Dream games, and hopefully, still commenting on them. The problem is that the blog can't remain the way it is now.

There are two directions in which the blog can go. The first direction is to simply transform the blog. Posting would be restricted to perhaps just on the weekends - the blog would become "digestified" if you're familiar with an e-mail digest. The blog would probably not keep up with news on a daily basis, not even for breaking important news. You could read the Women's Hoops Blog or RebKell if you needed to know what was going on now in the WNBA. You would probably go to the Dream website or the Dream Facebook page to get day-to-day Dream information. In essence, it would be a very different blog than it is now. Fewer pictures. Fewer updates. What would show up on the blog on the weekends - well, it's difficult to say. We'd cross that bridge when we come to it.

The other direction is to simply halt the blog - but not to halt my writing. I try to make contributions to the Swish Appeal blog whenever I can, but this time - the news would show up there in the fan posting section (and Swish Appeal has been kind enough to make some of my posts front page posts). This way, whenever you read Swish Appeal - and if you don't visit it day-to-day, what's wrong with you? - you could check in for whatever my future contributions happen to be. Moving the "operation" to Swish Appeal would give me a lot more flexibility, in that I would no longer have to post on a regular schedule - I would post when I had something to say, and shut up otherwise.

And of course, the "Game Breakdowns" of Dream games will not stop. I don't plan on giving up my little essays on Dream posts, come what may.

I'm posting a poll that will run for three days. Based on what the readership decides, that's the direction we'll be going. Either we'll turn the blog into a digest, or the posts can be read on Swish Appeal with the other writing there.

Once again, thanks for your indulgence. And Go Dream!

Can Blogging Ever Replace Journalism?

I've recently read the testimony of David Simon to a Senate Subcommittee regarding the state of newspapers in the United States. You don't have to a serious student of journalism to realize that newspapers are having a hard time of it. It seems that a month hardly passes before you read about some newspaper in America either scaling down or going under.

Simon proposes a couple of remedies to the problem. One remedy is to for newspapers to move behind a pay wall, because Simon believes that the present model of giving content away for free isn't working. The other remedy is for newspapers to become non-profit corporations and move away from the news-for-profit model.

He is particularly pessimistic about the internet as a source for news. Since most blogs (including this one) simply repost excerpts from online news sources, he makes the point that the parasites (blogs) are killing the hosts (newspapers). Furthermore, he states that in order for newspapers to be worth the price of an on-line subscription, they're going to have to do what blogs can't do - create original content from investigative journalism, through the cultivation of sources and through the ability to devote themselves to news gathering. Amateur bloggers have neither the time nor the financial freedom to do either.

Simon has some good points. I began to think about Simon's points with regard to the state of the WNBA in particular and the state of sports journalism in general. This led me to think about what it is that exactly sports journalists - or what any kind of journalists - do.

So what is news? Here's my working definition: news is something that you didn't know before and that has happened relatively recently. As a result, sports journalists have to be present at sports events as they happen in hopes of not only presenting the facts at hand - the game results and statistics - but also to prove insight in the form of quotes and speaking to personnel who are unavailable to the general public.

A sport writer is at his or her most useful when he or she can provide information through investigation and cultivation of sources. Which leads to the question: is this what's going on in sports journalism?

I think the answer is "no" for the most part. Most sports writers today don't supply much of anything that isn't readily available elsewhere. They can't be the first with the boxscore anymore. The WNBA (for example) realizes that its fans want statistics. Those are available at the website, sometimes in real time. Sometimes, the league teams will even supply quotes for writers on deadline. There's nothing taking place at a sports event that couldn't be obtained by any of the other writers present - all of them are eating from the same plate, so to speak. All any individual writer is doing choosing what he or she cares to pass on, and all of the writers usually have the same number of choices. A give writer might make the decision that quote A is more important than quote B, or choose to emphasize one fact or ignoring another, but its unlikely that any one writer at the event could supply something that some other writer somewhere wouldn't have picked up. There's no "investigation" in your usual post-game piece.

As a result, bloviation has taken the place of investigation. Since few writers can scoop the others because all are presented the same buffet of facts, the writer can only distinguish himself or herself either through being a better storyteller, or more likely, through writing an opinion piece. The impression I get is that the big money in sports journalism isn't in covering the beat anymore - it's in being a feature columnist like Bill Simmons, or in being a television talking head. (The joke about sports journalism is that every sportwriter has to have an opinion about everything, whether he knows anything about it or not.) The present philosophy seems to be "why not just let the AP cover the games?" Sports journalism is not much more than a collection of "This I Believe" columns, some AP game writeups and a back page of statistics.

Frankly, I don't need to pay 50 cents to read someone's opinion about a game that we both saw with our own two eyes or someone trying to play amateur comedian on Page Two. There are hundreds of guys on the internet giving out those opinions for free, and if I want chuckles there's the Chuckle Hut out on Route 12.

Granted, some journalists have the "name power" to command an interview with the coach or the general manager. In the past, this was a given - sports writers commanded the leverage of an implicit threat: talk to me or I'll just write what I want to. Back in the days of two papers and no television, this power could be used as a cudgel. However, today's media is a mile wide and an inch deep and a multitude of outlets compete for the public's divided attention. Such threats can be laughed off now because few sports writers possess such a powerful platform. There's no more Dick Young in sports.

So to sum up:

* sports reporting is at its best with investigation and in-depth reporting
* for various reasons, this isn't being done any more
* all writers select from the same pool of facts, and therefore
* opinion sports journalism is now pre-eminent.

So what options do sports bloggers have?

Clearly, the same facts about the game are available to us as to the general press. We can get those facts in real time. Bloggers can't get game quotes, but sometimes the teams will even supply those, and 95 percent of game quotes aren't really "scoops" of any sort. The major advantage print journalists have is that they at least have access to the movers and shakers. Sports bloggers don't, for the most part.

However, sports bloggers can do some things that print journalists can't. The chief advantage is that a print journalist's time is both divided and directed. Print journalists are expected to be able to cover more than one sport these days. Despite the fact that they are paid full time for their skills, how much of that time will be spent thinking about the problems of any specific sport?

The stereotype of internet bloggers being obsessive geeks becomes a strength instead of a weakness. Sports bloggers - writing from the prospective of fans - spend a lot of time thinking about sports. I would dare to venture that I spend much more time thinking about the WNBA in my spare time than the print journalist for, say, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that attends the WNBA game. This is because my plate is free in my spare time, and she only has so many hours in her day. She might have to cover a different sports event every day. How much intellectual firepower can she direct to the WNBA?

Furthermore, her time is directed. She doesn't have the leisure to think about what she wants to. She has an editor who wants to please the bulk of the readership, and that editor tells her what she has to do. This means reporting about "football and spring football" at least in Atlanta. If she becomes really good at her job she might be hired and given a beat, or if she's even better she might be given an opinion column and can write about what she chooses. But without a full time beat or an opinion platform her priorities are set by someone else and her work is closely monitored.

Sports bloggers can set their own priorities. They're not only mavens regarding their chosen sports but they're their own editors. (If you read this blog, you can see how that could be a detriment.) If I want to do a statistical study of the WNBA for a full week, there's no editor to stop me. I only have to please myself. This gives a sports blogger freedom that a reporter might envy.

There is still the disadvantage in that the journalist can speak to the participants directly. Furthermore, there is the strong possibility that newspapers with an on-line presence will move to a subscription-only basis - deny sports bloggers the chance to mooch off free content. The only sources a sports blogger will have would be the statistics and the press releases. Surely, nothing can be done with that, right?

Allow me to mention the second advantage sports bloggers could have over sports journalists. This would involve thinking more like a faux-historian and less like a faux-journalist. I am reminded of the great writer I. F. Stone and his investigative writing. What Stone would do is take a look at the public record and examine the record for gaps and incongruities. A lot can be found in the most pedestrian writing if you know where to look for it.

For example, take the press release about the waiver of Jessica Morrow. The information is combined in the same press release that announces the signing of Marlies Gipson. There's nothing said about why Morrow was waived - most press releases don't do that - but it certainly begs the question of why a third-round draft pick suddenly gets dropped without so much as showing up to mini-camp.

If the release is taken at face value, it just becomes one more available fact out of many. If you examine the information in depth, however, it suggests a mystery. I. F. Stone was great at mining such mysteries, in trying to determine what the press didn't tell you and why it didn't.

Sports bloggers are going to have to become good at mining such pedestrian data sources. It's something that sports journalists can't do, and it could be a real advantage in blogging becoming an alternative media. A good blogger has to bring something to the table that a journalist can't bring - either a skill at statistics, or a grounding in the league's history, or a skill for information analysis. I know several internet bloggers that have taught me more about the WNBA than the WNBA's reporters ever did (or tried to do).

It's not that sports bloggers are going to "replace" journalism. Rather, it's that sports blogging is going to provide a type of content that sports journalists can't (yet) provide. Right now, journalists aren't so much providing content as they are providing opinion. I'm in complete agreement that sports journalists have to give us the content we want - original investigative journalism about our chosen sport, whether that sport be the NBA or WNBA - or readers are going to go elsewhere.