AKABAS | The Top 50 Players in the NBA: #7-1

In case you missed Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, you can scan through my complete, updated Top 50 list for a quick refresher. This final group of players was so hard to rank that, after losing nights of sleep over it, my dad suggested that I go back to my original criteria for ranking players: “If you dropped this player onto any NBA team at random, by how much would they improve that team’s odds of winning the title?” I set up a spreadsheet with each of the remaining players as the columns and all the playoff teams as the rows, and I tried to estimate (as best I could) the increase in championship odds if each player were to be magically placed onto each team’s roster. The results were laughably inconclusive. For the players ranked 5 through 7, I estimated that their average increase in championship odds would be 17.26%, 17.21%, and 17.15%, respectively. RIP.

AKABAS | The 10 Commandments of Awkwardly Running Into People on Campus

You’re walking straight down College Ave. and find that someone else is walking straight at you. You both realize a bit too late that an unfortunate collision is imminent, so you each try to get out of the other person’s way at the last second. You both move in the same direction. Then you both hop back the other way.

AKABAS | The Dunkies

The dunk contest was my favorite night of the NBA season as a kid, to the point where I would count the days down from months away until I would get to watch the most athletic players in the league see who could jam a basketball into the hoop in the coolest way. Many years after I reenacted every single dunk contest dunk on my NERF hoop, something about the event continues to enthrall me, so I’m handing out awards for the bests and worsts in dunk contest history. Best Dunk Contest

I ranked every dunk contest throughout history in four different categories. While 2016’s duel between Zach Lavine and Aaron Gordon unequivocally had the best dunks of any contest, the overall greatest contest ever is a tie between 2000 and 1988. In the former, Vince Carter attempted five dunks, made all of them on the first try, never competed again, and remains the undisputed greatest contest dunker of all time.

AKABAS | The Top 50 Players in the NBA: Part 2

If you’re interested in which guys were 27 through 50 on my list, my criteria for these rankings, or the meaning of the different statistics I’m referencing in this article, check out Part 1. Additionally, after flubbing some players’ rankings in Part 1, I’ve decided to keep my Top 50 in a Google Doc, so that I can both correct my previous mistakes and continue to update the list throughout the season. All stats are current as of 1/11/19.  

26. Marc Gasol – I think he’s a tad overrated.

AKABAS | The Top 50 Players in the NBA: Part 1

We know how to rank teams: my team beats your team, therefore my team is better. Just rooting for our teams carries an old-school sense of hometown pride and loyalty, but ranking players is overwhelmingly more interesting and fun — it’s a combination of statistics and intuition, of situational evidence and conjecture. How does one even begin to try to rank basketball players? One obvious way is to determine which players are most valuable to their own teams. That’s what the Most Valuable Player award tries to do, at least in theory, but does anyone really know what that award means? This metric is fairly quantifiable, since we can look at team performance with a certain player both on and off the court.

AKABAS | Stop Complaining About A Perfectly Good NBA Finals Matchup

Since when did NBA fans become so spoiled? All I see online is people kvetching about another “boring” finals rematch between the Golden State Warriors and the Cleveland Cavaliers and how Kevin Durant has ruined the NBA. Said people are dumb. First off, this is the best option we had. The Celtics are fun, but they would have gotten romped by either Western Conference team.

AKABAS | A Definitive Ranking of Fruits

Fruit has been on everyone’s mind throughout history. According to the Bible, the only reason humans even have the mental capacity to think about fruit was because Adam ate a fruit. During the Dutch Renaissance, painters literally just painted bowls of fruit, which was the 1600s equivalent of Instagramming your food. In the present day, nearly everyone I told about this article had strong feelings; people like fruit and are surprisingly opinionated about fruit. So to clear things up once and for all, I’ve generated a definitive ranking of fruits.

AKABAS | A Way Too In-Depth Analysis of the Avengers: Infinity War Trailer

Last Friday, the second Avengers: Infinity War trailer was released, and millions of nerds around the country immediately creamed their pants. Let’s analyze it. Here is the trailer, for those of you who have been living under a rock for the past week (although if you haven’t seen the trailer yet, I have no idea why you would have clicked on this article):

0:01 – If you don’t see that shot and immediately think of this, I don’t know if we can be friends. 0:06 – Unlike the first Infinity War trailer, the first 45 seconds of this trailer isn’t just a teaser trailer for the rest of the trailer. 0:09 – Classic unnecessary pronoun game.

AKABAS | Which Movies’ Plots Change Drastically if We Change One Letter of the Title?

 

Forrest Gump → Forrest Dump
Synopsis: In this two-minute live-action short, a young boy on a hike in the Adirondacks walks 50 feet away from the trail, poops, walks back to the trail, and continues his hike. Critical Response: One critic calls the short a “hauntingly realistic slice of life” and many are even moved to tears, while a minority of writers call it “hogwash” and “utterly pretentious.”
Difference-O-Meter: Forrest Dump is a TOTALLY DIFFERENT film.  

Tomb Raider → Womb Raider
Synopsis: An anti-abortion propaganda film. Critical Response: The film induces one of the most inappropriate strings of Trump tweets to date and is so divisive that it actually hurts the Republican Party at the 2018 midterm elections. Difference-O-Meter: Womb Raider is a TOTALLY DIFFERENT film.

FOOD WEEK | On James Harden, and Why Cereal Isn’t a Breakfast Food

In late September 2016, Houston Rockets coach Mike D’Antoni announced that his star player, James Harden, would be switching positions to play point guard. This seemed like a peculiar decision at first. Harden had played shooting guard his entire career up to that point, and was just coming off a season in which he did an awful lot of shooting, averaging 29 points and finishing third in the league in usage rate. Running an entire offense and getting teammates involved is a difficult thing to just pick up on the fly. But Harden did it.