2010 Season Preview: Houston Rockets

It's time for the Love in the Time of LeBron 2010 Season Team Previews. You know how we do. Next up, the Yao Ming Yao Mings (feat. Daryl Morey).

Classification
Wonder of the World

Why We Care
The Houston Rockets, thanks to Michael Lewis, are apparently the standard-bearers of the advanced stats movement. Don't care about stats? What about bandwagons? Thanks to Yao Ming, the Houston Rockets are arguably the most popular basketball team on the planet: more people watch regular season Rockets games than the Super Bowl. Honestly, without these things, the Rockets are still a team worth watching, chock full of players with unique and clever styles: Kevin Martin, Shane Battier, Chuck Hayes, and Luis Scola are all scintillating in their own way.

Significant Beards
Aaron Brooks: Goatee pinching his face like a vise. Painful.
Chase Budinger: Same as Brooks, but orange. Seasonal.
Chuck Hayes: Too thin. Beard up or beard out.
Jordan Hill: Split goatee. Choice, or a barren strip?
Jared Jeffries: Sparse, but so well shaped. Confusing.
Alexander Johnson: He dipped his chin in a mud puddle.
Courtney Lee: Sparse and vaguely pubic. Bikini season.
Kyle Lowry: Unacceptable. Not a beard.
Brad Miller: Cries out for a sweater and a guitar.

Guiding Text
The Varieties of Religious Experience

If They Were A Nirvana Album They Would Be...
Incesticide

LeBron on the Rockets
“It is not so, LeBron. We believe in the Copenhagen interpretation. Wave function collapse is necessary and proper. There is a possibility of many worlds until a particular outcome is observed and then we discard the possibilities. They don’t endure.The wave function only represents our knowledge of a given system. But what of Wigner’s friend, you will surely ask. And the answer is simple, the wave function is subjective as it models only our subjective knowledge and indeed beliefs. There is a distinction between reality and probability that is worth discussion here, but for now, let us simply say that probability is subjective and this is not a problem, because waveforms do collapse and all the unobserved possibilities cease to be valid in the actual world.”

“What do you mean?”

“It is consciousness that necessitates waveform collapse. And I know you will say Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen means that there’s a problem because you could have information traveling at faster than the speed of light, violating special relativity and thus causality, but you are taking for granted ‘local realism,’ and you just can’t demand it because it seems like a nice thing to be true. You have to acknowledge that there can be spooky movement at a distance and yet not necessarily violate causality by having faster than light information.”

“Must I? This doesn’t actually seem to mean anything.”

Yao shrugged. He turned and shot the ball. It went through the net with ease.

Rosetta Stone
This pretty much explains it.