There are two types of basketball player and only two. The first type says to himself, “What’s the best situation for my team?” You always want to play with those guys. That’s everyone on the Hawks and Spurs, basically. The second type says, “What’s the best situation for me?” Usually, you do NOT want to play basketball with those guys. It’s extremely difficult to contend for titles with them unless they’re named Michael or Kobe. And if they’re running your team? In the words of James “Baby Doll” Dixon, I wish you a lot of luck.

There’s an inherent safety with those old-school point guards, the ones who built their careers around the question “What’s the best situation for my team?” Abrams wrote a Conley feature that included this killer quote: “I have a clock in my head for Zach. For Marc. For Courtney [Lee]. For anybody on the court. There’s guys that don’t need to play with the ball. Tony Allen doesn’t need to have the ball to be effective. I say, ‘Zach needs to get the ball. He’s working very hard on the defensive end and on the offensive end.’ And I can feel four minutes go by, Zach hasn’t had the ball and I can see it. He’s starting to get a little antsy. OK, now it’s time to bang it in to him four straight trips to see if he can get something going.”

THAT’S WHAT I WANT FROM MY POINT GUARD. Right there. That’s how Magic thought. That’s how Isiah and Stockton thought. Then again, Kyrie Irving doesn’t think that way. Neither does Russell Westbrook. Does it matter? We’ll tackle that question later. By the way, are you ready for an Atlanta-Memphis Finals? Can you imagine the lengths that David Stern would have gone to in order to prevent that from happening? Would we have seen this Shawshank-like moment right after Memphis beat Houston in Round 2?