The Quest for the Ring User Guide

The Mission and the Primary Objectives of The Quest for the Ring

2011-06-07T21:45:00.000-07:00

The last time Quest for the Ring (QFTR) posted the very important statement of mission and primary objectives was two years and two weeks ago. This is something that in a perfect world we would post once a year. But with the time limitations we have, posting an updated version of the mission and the primary objectives every two years is a reasonable compromise, and we are happy to have an update in the two years and two weeks!

In this updated version there is a primary mission and a primary objective based on that mission. Then there are ten primary specific objectives all of which are tied to the primary mission and the primary objective.

THE QUEST TO COMPLETELY NAIL DOWN THE POINT GUARD ISSUE
Among the ten primary specific objectives, one stands out as particularly new and interesting, number eight: To teach players (especially point guards) and coaches how to manage and operate the point guard role.

The reason I pulled that out and mentioned it up top here is that I recently realized that one of the most important things QFTR will ever do is determine and explain how great point guards should approach playoff games and series. This year, in the Conference Finals, the Oklahoma Thunder lost to the Dallas Mavericks and the Chicago Bulls lost to the Miami Heat for about the same reason: their offenses broke down for lengthy stretches because their point guards, Russell Westbrook for Oklahoma and Derrick Rose for Chicago, were too young and inexperienced to be able to correctly determine on their own how to nail down key playoff wins. Their coaches failed to completely and accurately instruct them, but in all fairness the subject is too complicated for most coaches to be able to correctly and completely instruct young point guards.

There are establishment writers who claim that NBA Championships are almost always won by whichever team has the best centers and power forwards. They are seriously underestimating the role of veteran point guards in winning Championships.

I saw a short article by one of those establishment writers very recently that irritated the hell out of me. This writer stated that LeBron James smothered Derrick Rose while defending him in the Miami-Chicago East final this year and that Chicago lost all hope of winning because of that. Well, maybe LeBron did "smother" Derric Rose, but that hardly meant Chicago had no hope of winning. So what if LeBron "smothered" Derrick? Derrick Rose should have had a plan B (and a plan C and a plan D for that matter) for what he would do if Miami resorted to putting LeBron James on him. If James is on Rose then there is going to be a Chicago 2-guard, a small forward, or a power forward that enjoys a huge advantage. Rose should have abandoned all hope of scoring a lot himself and should have been ready to get the ball to that teammate badly guarded (and to all his other teammates for that matter). It’s really just tunnel vision to say that LeBron James won it for Miami by smothering Derrick Rose defensively. No, what really happened was that Derrick Rose was not smart or experienced enough to know what to do when Miami made the move of putting LeBron James on Rose. There were options available to Chicago and to Rose that if taken could have led to Chicago winning the series rather than Miami. But Rose and Chicago were not smart enough to take those options.

As you might expect, at one level we are talking about what the breakdown should be between the point guard shooting and the point guard making plays. That’s complicated enough as it is, and more complicated than you probably think, but there are other aspects, and the overall subject is much more extensive and complicated than most people are going to think it is.

QFTR has written extensively before about how point guards should play (and about which types and which specific ones are the best) but we still have not by any means completely covered this subject. So for the rest of 2011 and for most or all of 2012 look for QFTR to concentrate on the point guard issue. Under development and nearing roll-out are new custom designed point guard ratings (as well as broader “offensive quality” ratings.)

We want to reach the point where we can completely and accurately instruct young point guards how to win NBA playoff games regardless of what moves the opposing team makes, particularly of course when the young point guards’ team is actually better than the opposing one. The best of the veteran point guards more or less know instinctively what to do but young point guards generally do not. So unless the young point guard can learn some sophisticated strategy, he is generally going to have to wait a few years before he learns this stuff the hard way and is then eligible to win the Quest.

So the reason why it seems that a lot of Championships are won by the team with the better centers and power forwards is that younger point guards (right up to historical superstar level) don’t have enough experience to be able to instinctively know the smartest way to play in and win key playoff games when the opposing team is using “every trick in the book” to win themselves. If young point guards such as Derrick Rose and Russell Westbrook were to learn how to play to beat the tricks thrown at them they could definitely win playoff series whenever their team was overall better than the opponent. QFTR is going to work like hell in the months ahead to nail down the extensive point guard issue more than we ever have up until now.

But for now let’s get to the matter at hand, an updated version of the mission and objectives of The Quest for the Ring.

Before we state the primary mission and the primary objectives it’s interesting and important to see the context in which they developed. The following is a very brief and partial history of Quest for the Ring (QFTR). It is not intended to be anything close to a full history. For that see the User Guide article on the history of QFTR.

A BRIEF AND PARTIAL HISTORY OF QFTR
QFTR was born as of about January 1, 2007 as a Denver Nuggets fan site. The roots of QFTR were in 2006 and production actually started on a forum rather than on a QFTR controlled Site. The deep roots go back years prior to 2006 in the sense that the primary writer had a huge interest in basketball going back some years prior to 2006.

On the other hand, QFTR as an independent Internet entity located at http://www.nuggets1.blogspot.com did not really begin until in the spring of 2007. As a compromise between using either an unrealistically too early or an unrealistically too late date, we think of January 1 2007 as the effective beginning of the QFTR Project.

In 2007, Editorial Plan #1 was basically that reports were done for each Denver Nuggets game. In the first year or so, most articles were centered on particular games, although even back then some of the topics covered while the games were being reviewed were ones that transcend any individual game.

In those very early days, we didn't yet realize that understanding how basketball games are won is even more important to us than it is to most other fans and writers. Today that is obvious that we are more obsessed about winning than seemingly all other writers out there, and more interested in getting to the bottom of exactly how NBA playoff games are won and lost.

In 2007 and into 2008, the game-based reports started out short and became longer and longer. More and more statistical performance measures were added into the mix. The statistical measures and the text reports were all rolled into one, and these reports eventually (in 2008) exceeded 10,000 words in length. These reports are most likely the longest reports based on NBA games ever produced in history!

During the course of the second year, 2008, we gradually decided that Plan #1 was too narrow, that being mostly a rose colored glasses wearing fan of a team was not going to be a productive enough way to spend time long term. So we graduated from that in the summer and fall of 2008.

For about ten months in late 2008 and early 2009, we had an editorial plan, "Plan #2," that was an expanded and modified version of the basic fan site concept. The number of teams covered in detail was doubled to two. We phased out extensive game recapping in favor of more wide ranging team-based reports and in favor of reports even more focused on how games are won than they already were. We started to focus more on how playoff games are won as opposed to mere regular season games.

Plan #2 was considered "state of the art," but nevertheless it turned out it didn't last very long! Plan 2 turned out to be just an interim because it was realized that even more departure from the original concept in Plan 1 was needed. So in May 2009, a huge editorial change was made.

At that time it was realized that resource limitations made it foolish to spend a lot of time on regular season games, especially since QFTR had become focused like a laser on winning the whole thing: the NBA Championship. So we decided to plan to pour a far higher percentage of our production effort into NBA playoff games (including the Championship) and a far lower percentage on regular season games than all other basketball sites do.

FORMATTING AND PERFORMANCE REPORTING
Formatted reports make heavy use of custom designed performance measures that use knowledge about basketball winning, valid statistical theory and data from reliable sources from across the Internet. Formatted reports have a pre-set format and there is little or no commentary included. The whole idea of formatted reports is to provide a very large amount of important information very efficiently. The carefully planned and long evolved and perfected formatting eliminates the need for time-consuming custom text reporting in contexts where there is really no need for it.

But to fully understand a formatted Report you need to be familiar with the User Guide for it. There are two things you can do to get the full value out of formatted / statistical Reports including Real Player Rating ones. First, you can read parts or all of the User Guide for them. Second, you can simply visit QFTR often and see a lot of Reports and then you will automatically become better at interpreting what you see.

In contrast to formatted reports, QFTR breaks new ground in general and reveals its latest discoveries about basketball in particular in free form (non-formatted) text reports. While formatted posts are "on the reservation", non-formatted text reports are where QFTR "goes off the reservation".

Both types of reports are essential; having just one type without the other type would reduce the value of QFTR by MORE than half.

As the editorial plan for reports has changed from time to time, the quantity and the quality of the statistical reports have been growing almost month by month. The primary pre-formatted performance measurement reports can and generally do stand well alone (they are no longer attached to text reports). But other, more freelance performance reporting is interwoven into the text articles.

THE ANNUAL PRODUCTION PLAN
As of 2011 there are dozens of types of Reports that QFTR can and does produce. What they are and the schedule for them is shown in the QFTR Annual Production Plan which is on Excel and is continuously updated. A couple of the more recent versions were posted on the User Guide Site and on QFTR itself. The 2010 Production Plan was posted here. The 2011 Production Plan has never been posted and either soon will be or else it will be skipped.

The 2012 and subsequent Production Plans are scheduled to be posted each December on both the QFTR Site and on the User Guide Site.

The Production Plan gives titles of Reports and classifies them by type but does not attempt to explain in any detail what different types of Reports contain. For details about what is in various Reports see the latest version of the "What QFTR Produces" article on the User Guide Site (and potentially on QFTR itself). The version of this in effect right now is here, but be aware that this version is outdated and will be updated soon

Note that the Production Plan is never completely fulfilled but each year it is more completely fulfilled than the year before. In percentage terms as of 2011 the Production Plan is more than half fulfilled which is not as bad as it sounds given how big the Plan is and given that the percentage used to be down around 25% a few years ago. No one has the resources to produce everything he or she would like to including us. We are always pledging to produce things in the future that are put off indefinitely and we often miss target dates for all types of Reports.

Now let's get to the primary purpose of this User Guide....

THE PRIMARY MISSION OF THE QUEST FOR THE RING
First and foremost, the mission of this site is to investigate, to determine, to verify results, and then to reveal at the QFTR Site exactly how professional basketball playoff games are won and lost. The specific League covered is the NBA of the USA.

The primary mission exists in pursuit of the primary objective. The primary objective could alternatively be called the ultimate objective because reaching it is a lot more complicated than it may sound and so technically we may never completely (100%) reach the objective.

THE PRIMARY OBJECTIVE THE QUEST FOR THE RING
The primary objective is stated one way for players, coaches, managers and owners and is stated a little differently with respect to QFTR users and basketball fans.

For players, coaches, managers and owners, the primary objective is to explain to them what they have to DO and even more fundamentally what they have to BE if they want to become NBA playoff game and Championship winners. When you are a loser, basketball is nowhere near as fun and rewarding as it is when you are a winner. And when you lose you make a lot less money. So in other words our mission is really to make teams, players, coaches, managers and owners winners both in basketball terms and financially.

With respect to QFTR users (who are NOT also a player, a coach, a manager, or an owner) and with respect to everyday basketball fans, the primary objective is to make those users and fans smarter than everyone else out there. Since the primary objective of every basketball game and series is to win, fans who know exactly how games are won and lost will be ahead of most other fans in how much they know that is important. The more you read QFTR the more separation you get between how much you known and how much the average fan knows. QFTR is definitely NOT intended for the typical fan who wears rose-colored glasses for a particular team. QFTR heavily criticizes every team it ever discusses because no team and no person associated with any team is perfect or close to it.

For those wearing rose-colored glasses, either you will have to stop wearing them or you will not be able to fully understand, appreciate and enjoy QFTR.

MAJOR SPECIFIC OBJECTIVES
Specific objectives are too numerous to list in full, but here are the ten specific objectives that come to mind as the most important specific objectives:

MAJOR SPECIFIC OBJECTIVE ONE
To determine and report on how basketball games are won, specifically and in general, which is information that can be worth millions or at least thousands of dollars to NBA and other players, coaches, and managers. You can and we do fine tune our understanding of how and why games are won from breaking down each and every game that we report on.

MAJOR SPECIFIC OBJECTIVE TWO
To determine and report on what various NBA teams are doing right and wrong and why. The NBA teams are broken down and ranked via the Real Team Ratings. Teams that are closely covered, which include all four of the Conference Final teams each year and some of the other playoff teams, are sliced and diced to the point where every substantial mistake or problem becomes public knowledge. Teams go under the microscope so that we can see in enough detail what they are doing right and what they are doing wrong.

MAJOR SPECIFIC OBJECTIVE THREE
To determine and report on how well the NBA players are doing, or more to the point how valuable they are with respect to winning NBA playoff games. This is reported sometimes in words but primarily by using Real Player Ratings.

Critics of statistics seemingly never understand what the most important purpose of statistics really is. (The ones who do understand apparently never mention the most important purpose for fear it would make their anti-statistics position look silly). The most important purpose of all for statistics is not to replace text reporting but to convey large quantities of important information efficiently that could be reported in text but only if far more time and space was used. Critics who say that statistics are inferior to text have literally missed the point: statistics first and foremost are very efficient ways to present information that were it in text would take a huge amount of text and too much time to produce. You could report every statistic in text format but it would be extremely inefficient if you did so.

Real Player Ratings at QFTR is an especially efficient way to convey information about players because they give you one number summaries of:

--How valuable a player is overall (for winning playoff games).
--How much a player has produced (the good minus the bad).
--How good (valuable) a player is on offense.
--How good (valuable) a player is on defense.

It is more than ten times more efficient to report on players using Real Player Ratings than using text reporting. In other words, per hour of investment in using Real Player Ratings, we can produce more than ten times as much information about players than we could by producing text reports about those players.

MAJOR SPECIFIC OBJECTIVE FOUR
To determine and report on how well or badly NBA coaches are doing in the regular season and especially in the playoffs.

MAJOR SPECIFIC OBJECTIVE FIVE
To determine and report on how well or badly NBA managers are doing managing their roster and in other relevant respects.

MAJOR SPECIFIC OBJECTIVE SIX
To determine and report on how well or badly NBA owners are doing with respect to operating their team (at the executive level).

MAJOR SPECIFIC OBJECTIVE SEVEN
To determine and report on why certain organizations such as the Lakers, the Celtics and the Spurs, are so often to be found at or near the top of the standings, in the Conference Finals and in the NBA Championship, whereas other organizations, such as the Nuggets, frequently drop down to become major losing teams, and seldom if ever reach the Conference finals or the Championship. In explaining why and proving the reasons, what we are really doing is giving advice to managers and coaches on how to keep their teams on the long term winning track. This information (assuming of course that it is correct) is worth millions of dollars, and could in theory be worth tens of millions of dollars.

MAJOR SPECIFIC OBJECTIVE EIGHT
To teach players (especially point guards) and coaches about how to manage and operate the point guard role. By 2011 the following have become obvious:

(a) The point guard role is the most complicated and tricky thing in basketball.

(b) Only a small minority of the smartest coaches and point guards are smart enough to manage the point guard role (or position if you prefer) in a really good way that makes winning playoff games a lot easier.

(c) Virtually all basketball writers underestimate the importance of point guard and the real reason is that whether or not they know it they do not have the ability (or in a few cases they don’t have the desire) to explain how point guards should play in order to win NBA playoff games.

MAJOR SPECIFIC OBJECTIVE NINE
To fill in critical basketball Internet information gaps. For example there was no place on the Internet to find out exactly how many Championship rings players have won (unless you restrict that to just roughly a dozen very famous players) so QFTR produces annual Reports that tell you how many rings have been won by EVERY player who has won one or more of them since 1980.

MAJOR SPECIFIC OBJECTIVE TEN
To focus on “basketball economics” in a handful of annual reports. For one thing, this fills another critical basketball information gap existing on the Internet. So another unique thing about QFTR is that we extensively cover financial and economics issues for the NBA and more generally for basketball and for sports. The primary QFTR writer has degrees in economics and accounting and is more than qualified to accurately cover financial and economics aspects.

Note that we cover the financial and economics aspects in such a way that helps the overall objective of explaining how playoff games and Championships are won and lost. We do NOT cover them ONLY to fill the Internet void.

What is the common denominator of all of these ten specific objectives? That is obvious: its how and why players, coaches, managers, owners, and franchises who win in pro basketball do so. And to make fans who read QFTR the smartest fans out there and to make them qualified to become good players, coaches, managers and owners should they want to be one of those in the future.

IN CONCLUSION
The internet is where secrets are revealed, and here we have and will continue to reveal how and why the winners win in basketball.

You may be surprised about what the real factors are. Basketball, like life, is much more complicated than it seems. For example, you are a fool if you think that the truly best players, coaches, or managers always win. Having great players, coaches, and/or managers is necessary but not sufficient. And there is a lot more involved than "how good" the players are or "how hard" the players play.

Also, you are a fool if you think the styles or personalities of players are among the important factors. Many managers and coaches make this mistake while the ones who win more than their share of playoff games do NOT make this mistake.

In order to win the Quest for the Ring, you don't have to be perfect and you don't have to be better than everyone else in everything, but you do have to do certain things very well, with some of those things being unknown to most of the general public and to many players, coaches, and managers.

Aside from doing “certain things” very well, teams also need a player or two or three or four of them to be extremely good at something, to be about the best in basketball. You’re going too far if you think that basketball is ONLY about the team and that whether individual players are the best at something is not really important.

Always remember too, the Quest for the Ring is out to make the unknown known for those who hang with us.

In final summary, at QFTR you will find out the true, verified, real factors that determine pro basketball winning and losing. We will relentlessly study and report on games, teams, players, coaches, managers, and owners. We will continually produce valid and custom performance measures and continually verify them. With each year we get closer to the ultimate objective, which is to discover and report on ALL of the factors that determine exactly how and why NBA playoff games and the NBA Championship are won and lost.

Google can and does drop sites from search results all the time, so don't forget to bookmark the QFTR home page. Or write it on your wall!

Quest for the Ring Production Plan 2010

2010-08-14T09:46:00.001-07:00

Two years ago I promised myself I would every year publish the production plan for Quest for the Ring (QFTR) even though the early plans were dead on arrival because they were unrealistic. I think visitors and users deserve to see what the Plan for a website is instead of being strung along in a state of uncertainty about what is coming in the coming months. My view is that this is one of the big flaws of the Internet: for informing viewers about what is happening sites often have only a skimpy "about page" which does not give you any specifics about what is coming or about how to use what has already been produced. Whereas QFTR maintains a full array of what we call User Guide Reports.

The 2008 and 2009 Production Plans required far more time than I have available and the components (Reports) were changing so rapidly that maybe half the components would be replaced by new, better components in six months flat. The 2008 plan was largely worthless from a 2010 perspective. The 2009 plan was better but was a monstrosity and was only at best moderately followed.

Things have changed big time for the better. The 2010 plan shown below is going to be followed to a good extent because it is most definitely realistic and it most definitely tightly fits what we are doing here, which is no longer changing quickly. Individual Reports and features are still going to be improving and sometimes expanding, but the number of brand new types of Reports will be much fewer going forward.

The primary objective of Quest for the Ring, from which everything flows, has evolved to the point where it is at the top of the food chain so to speak, which means it isn't going to be changing except maybe on the edges anymore. (The higher something is on the food chain, the less it evolves because it doesn't have to evolve to avoid going extinct anymore; thank you Charles Darwin. And that means I could eat CBS Sports or ESPN if I wanted to, laugh out loud.) This site is going to be indefinitely and probably forever about the pro basketball playoffs in general and about exactly how teams and franchises win the Quest in particular. For example, we will be later this year (at the scheduled time; see the production plan) telling you exactly how the Los Angeles Lakers won the 2010 Quest and exactly how the Celtics could have won it.

Another thing that has changed is that high efficiency and true, high grade scientific management has come to the Production Plan. Now that I am so experienced with Excel that I actually enjoy what used to frustrate the hell out of me, I can use Excel to efficiently apply scientific management to anything including the QFTR Production Plan. Specifically, in the Plan I have what will be produced shown chronologically and in terms of the production detail number of words. Everything is optimized for the best possible flow of information to the users (which include me; more and more I use QFTR as a reference as opposed to going somewhere else for something I need.)

So the new Plan is a massive improvement over the prior Plans and this Plan will definitely be followed. But even so, some Reports will be several weeks late, a few Reports will be cancelled, and sometimes a new Report will appear out of nowhere (and will be added to the Plan assuming it is not a "one hit wonder"). But these departures from the Plan will be limited so that it can be said that the Plan as written is being followed to a good extent.

I am already behind, what a surprise! If you look at the August plan, a Real Coach Ratings Report is overdue. And "NBA Salaries, Payrolls, and Cap Space Report (Annual)" is late. And the Players Who Won the Quest Report series are due right about now. So look for these soon.

There is an exellent reason why I am a little behind right now. The elves who work behind the scenes here at Quest have been very, very busy. Many of the QFTR databases have been improved and there are some brand new, very crucial databases. For example, finally there is a multiyear Real Player Rating database which right now can show just two years 2008-09 and 2009-10. The 2008-09 ratings were redone using the 2009-10 methodology, which was surprisingly easy to validly do by the way.

LeBron James was the best NBA player both years. But it turns out that Chris Paul was so good in 2008-09 that he was basically exactly as good as LeBron James that year (James won out by a tiny, tiny amount.) In 2009-10 a gap opened up between Paul and James because James got better and Paul was not as great (due to injury effects and because the Hornets overall were just not a good team anymore.) In 2009-10, Chris Paul was the third best NBA player behind James and Tim Duncan, who was much better than the year before and who moved into second place.

Anyway, with that intro I give you the 2010-11 Quest for the Ring Production Plan:

Welcome to The Quest for the Ring, Also Known as the Real Zone; Things are Different Here

2010-06-28T11:19:00.000-07:00

WELCOME TO THE QUEST FOR THE RING. YOU HAVE LEFT THE HYPE ZONE AND HAVE ARRIVED IN THE REAL ZONE.
Please check any rose colored glasses at the door. The Hype Zone is where you can find out about the personalities and the styles and how popular they are and what they are up to lately. In the hype zone you can fantasize about trades and acquisitions that never happen to your heart’s content.

You can’t do the hype zone things here except maybe on rare occasions when we visit that zone for laughs. The vast majority of our time and work here are in the Real Zone, which is where we DO NOT think personalities and styles and how popular or unpopular they are are things to waste time on just for ratings or traffic. Its basically the opposite here: in the Real Zone, people get criticized regardless of what high position they hold and regardless of how much money they make. There are virtually no editorial restrictions here in the Real Zone, unlike in the Hype Zone where, ironic though it may be considering the relative unseriousness of that Zone, there are boundaries that can not be crossed.

Instead of hype, here we post as much truth about how NBA basketball playoff games and Championships are won and lost as we can 365 days a year and at any hour of the day or night. Please have a productive visit, and a nice trip back to the Hype Zone when your visit is over.

A SMALL SAMPLE OF CURRENT AND SOON TO COME QUEST FOR THE RING REAL ZONE TOPICS
--How and Why the 2010 Los Angeles Lakers, the 2010 Cleveland Cavaliers, and the 2010 Boston Celtics Win or Lose in the 2010 Playoffs.

--What is the right "amount of" LeBron James and what is too much?

--How players we know deserve to win a first or second Ring can get one, highly talented players such as Chris Paul, Chris Bosh, Rajon Rondo, and Dwyane Wade.

--How and why the Denver Nuggets Franchise has repeatedly fooled the public, and possibly themselves for that matter. We originally planned to discontinue “covering” the Nuggets pretty much forever, but plans changed thanks to how successful the Nuggets were in 2008-09. When the Nuggets won ten playoff games in 2009 we in fact had to do a very long multi-series report about how and why we were wrong when we predicted in January 2009 that the Nuggets would not win more than two playoff games that year. Further, our plan to not spend any real time at all on the Nuggets in the future changed: we decided we will always “cover the Nuggets” at least to a limited extent, even after we leave the Nuggets 1 blogspot web address during 2010.

--How and why much of what you may think you know about Allen Iverson is dead wrong (continuing, with much done already).

--How and why the playoffs are something completely different from the regular season, and why your team may be simply not prepared for them despite a lot of regular season wins (continuing, with much done already).

A SMALL SAMPLE OF ALREADY COMPLETED QUEST FOR THE RING REAL ZONE TOPICS (There are dozens more)
--Why Mike Brown Needs to be Fired.

--Why George Karl Needs to be Fired.

--How and why Carmelo Anthony was been downsized due to a quest for "well-roundedness," and why this was really bad.

--How and why the owner of the Nuggets shortchanged and cheated his team out of a possible Championship.

--How and why being physical alone can not win you a Championship.

--How and why the Nuggets' high fouling defense will take them only so far.

--How and why George Karl is doing more harm than good with respect to J.R. Smith.

--How and why George Karl's obsession with personalities is wrong and bad for any team.

--How and why George Karl and the Nuggets can not win in the playoffs (2007, 2008) or a West final (2009). If Quest commits a foul, we own up to it, as we do right here: we thought the Nuggets could not win in the playoffs in 2009. They did win 10 games before being eliminated by the Lakers in the West final, so in response we corrected our evaluation of what you can do with the Nuggets' unique 2009 approach to basketball without, however, going overboard.

--How and why George Karl cheats the fans and the franchise out of performance and development of "reserve" players.

--How and why playmaking is so important, probably more than you think, and how you manage playmakers correctly.

--How and why you have probably been fooled regarding the Nuggets' 2008 off-season and their 2008-09 defense

HOW THE MOST IMPORTANT QUEST PAGES ARE ORGANIZED
The organization is based on the same tried and tested approach that operating systems use to organize data, in hierarchical fashion. Here is the organization we use:

Primary Home Pages
Secondary Home Pages
Primary Feature Pages
Secondary Feature Pages

Primary Home Pages are where you can find every word of every Report. As of summer 2010 there are three of them and this will probably not be changing for at least the next five years. The three pages are clones with respect to the Reports and with respect to “core features,” but they differ with respect to noncore features. For example, one Primary Home Page has last year’s Real Player Ratings for about 330 NBA players near the bottom of the page (for reference) while another Primary Home Page has a video jukebox player for a key player or team. There are several dozen such features distributed roughly equally among the three Primary Home Pages. Non-core features on home pages change from time to time.

Secondary Home Pages have subsets of Reports with very few features. For example, Real Ratings shows Real Player Ratings, Real Team Ratings, Real Coach Ratings, and so forth at the League-wide level in one convenient spot. The purpose of these pages is to make many of the most important Reports very easy to find and access by putting them in one place. Everything on the Secondary Home pages is also on the Primary Home Pages, but it takes more time to find it on those.

Primary Feature Pages have no Reports at all but as the name implies have other useful information about NBA teams, players, coaches, managers, owners, and the League as a whole. Secondary Feature Pages have the same type of content but as the names suggest the primary pages are considered more important than the secondary ones. Links to the primary feature pages are a little easier to come across or find than are links to the secondary feature pages; the latter are usually found only in the Main Menu on the Primary Home Pages.

THERE MUST BE TEN WAYS TO READ REPORTS [PAUL SIMON LOL]
There are close to ten ways to find out about, select, and read Quest Reports! The standard, traditional blog presentation is available as one of the many ways to choose, access, and read reports. On the Home Page, only one report loads in the traditional format in order to keep these pages as quick loading as possible.

One key place to find Older Reports is on sequentially numbered url's thequestforthering4.blogspot.com, thequestforthering5.blogspot.com, and so forth. These are the Quest Archive Pages.

See the "Total Freedom of Navigation" section for complete details and links about how to find, choose, and read reports.

UNIQUE SITE DESIGN
The Quest is organized in a completely different way from what you are used to on the internet. We have combined the best features of the blog and the conventional web site formats, the latter being the norm for large organizations. However, since we do not like the idea of using flash to "wow" visitors, we do not use flash except within video and other discrete components. So we are state of the art in terms of expanding the power of visitors to get exactly what they want very quickly, but we do not have the latest flash gadgetry just to "keep up with the Joneses". More broadly, you will find that Quest for the Ring never seeks to keep up with the Joneses, simply because the Joneses never had the nerve, the intelligence, and the persistence to do what we do.

2009: A PROFESSIONAL ORGANIZATION COMES TO QUEST
Just before the 2009-10 season tipped, the very large number of features and links to important resources were strategically reorganized and placed within an easy to use and clearly labeled section system. So ended the era of the rapidly developed, sprawling and slightly disorganized Quest, and so began the era of the big but under careful control and extremely well organized and professional Quest for the Ring.

The Quest Home Page consists of numerous types of content, organized carefully into the new sections as of November 2009. Features can be any educational and / or entertaining thing you can think of, including everything from music players to videos to photos to breaking NBA news readers to top teams performance breakdown pages.

Quest for the Ring has a world class link system for those who know what they are looking for and wish to find and engage the appropriate link, But the Quest visitor does not HAVE to hunt for links to have an intelligent and entertaining experience. The Quest home page is big enough and chock loaded enough that link hunting is not absolutely necessary the way it normally is at many other basketball sites.

THE QUEST USER GUIDE VERSUS an “About Page”
Other sites most often have undeveloped and limited in scope "about pages" which is usually all they have for what we call a "User Guide". Our User Guide material is a vast improvement, quantitatively and qualitatively, over a mere "About Page" While many other sites don't help their visitors to make the best use of the content, we do. Also, the User Guide is chock loaded with invitations to visitors to participate in all kinds of ways, including for example advertising for free, link exchange, and getting a team site supported by Quest.

History of the Quest for the Ring

2010-04-03T16:25:00.000-07:00

The history is organized by year and to some extent by topic. This is by no means a complete history of every detail. This is however a very good basic record of all of the important changes and developments that occurred each year. This is updated at least once a year with the history from the year just past. For example, the 2010 history will be added in January or February of 2011.

This is an annually revised User Guide article. Once a year, this article will be improved, revised, and extended. At that time, this posting will be replaced by the annual revision. The revision will be posted when completed and when that happens the previous posting (including the one you are reading now) will be deleted. Bookmarks to User Guide articles that are revised annually (or at other frequencies) will need to be updated after the prior version is deleted.

========== 2007 HISTORY OF THE QUEST FOR THE RING ==========
The Quest for the Ring Internet Project was born similar to the way a human baby is born: all promise and potential but in the infancy years more or less aimless and very dependent on others. Just as a baby is totally dependent on its parents, Quest in the very early days was dependent on basketball forums for motivation and for learning how to report on basketball as flawlessly as possible.

In the early days, when someone on a forum said we were wrong about something, we would check everything out and change our thinking and reporting if we discovered we were wrong. Errors in the early months were not common but they were not rare either. The surprisingly low error rate in the early days (before we had a lot of expertise that comes from experience and repetition) was just as much due to the modest scope of the content as it was due to the propensity of the perfectionist type writer/producer to be correct about things 24/7.

For about the first half of 2007, we cross posted all reports on a forum that no longer exists, because it was annexed by another forum called Sports Two. All of the postings from the prior forum were carried over to Sports Two. So starting sometime in the summer or fall of 2007, the cross posting was done on Sports Two. Virtually all of the postings were done on the Denver Nuggets forum at Sports Two under the name “tremaine”.

Also, we were posting "comments" at the Nuggets Talk forum for a few months before Nuggets 1 was born, throughout 2007, and into 2008. These comments were often improved, revised, and extended in subsequent Nuggets 1 postings.

EDITORIAL SCHEMES IN THE VERY EARLY MONTHS
The editorial scheme of the Quest started out very simply in very late 2006. The site started out named "Nuggets 1" and at birth it was to be a simple basketball fan site for the Denver Nuggets. Reports were simply game recaps but they fairly quickly became far more expansive and sophisticated than the short, simple, and quick recaps you find in newspapers or at ESPN.

In the first two years, in both 2007 and 2008, the size and the scope of what were called “basketball reports” grew by leaps and bounds. The quantity and the quality of game descriptions increased month to month. Gradually, players and then coaches were more and more "dissected" and evaluated. Starting about the beginning of 2008, management of NBA teams by general managers and owners became fair game for evaluation, commendation, and criticism.

At the same time the core text of Reports was expanding in quantity, scope, and quality, “Report Features” were one after another rolled out and added onto reports. Features within Reports in the early days in 2007 were structured and usually statistically based presentations of the most important aspects of basketball.

EXAMPLE OF AN EARLY FEATURE: THE TEAM ALERT SYSTEM
For example, there was the “Team Alert System” to precisely measure and report on the condition of the team. The theory behind the alert system was that the more unexpected distress a team was under, the less likely it would be able to win in the playoffs even when favored by the mainstream media. Key things such as injuries, player shooting slumps, whether the playing times and rotations were right, and whether the primary coaching strategies were working or not were incorporated into the alert system. An overall alert index (consisting of the colors red, orange, yellow, and so forth) formed a complete and easy to understand measure of how much distress the team was under.

The Alert System was a precursor to the eventual May 2009 official adoption of the full dedication to the NBA playoffs and Championship, because it was a way to try to figure out in advance whether a team was going to be able to succeed in the playoffs or not, and exactly why or why not. The alert system itself was mothballed early in 2008 and it was replaced by new features such as the Real Team Ratings.

In general, features come to an end if and when one or more new features that are better (more powerful, more accurate and/or more detailed) come into being.

THE NUMBER OF WORDS IN REPORTS GREW AND GREW AND GREW SOME MORE
Reports grew exponentially and extremely rapidly. Reports started out just a few hundred words long in January 2007 but were three to five thousand words long by the end of 2007. Reports grew even longer in 2008. Reports would grow to over 9,000 words long by about mid 2008 before editorial restructuring done in the summer of 2008 smashed the everything contained in the game report scheme, which was replaced by multiple types of reports for multiple types of content. None of the new types of reports would ever be exceeding about 4,000 words and many of the new types of reports born in 2008 and thereafter were much friendlier to the reader who doesn’t have a lot of time, because they were in the 1,000 to 3,000 word range (which, however, is still much longer than your everyday basketball article or blog posting).

REAL PLAYER RATINGS IN 2007
Out of more than two dozen features you find at Quest, the Real Player Rating (RPR) system is the king of the hill, in other words, it’s the most important feature of all. In the early days, RPR reports did not include the hidden defending adjustment. Therefore, players with big defensive contributions were rated lower than they should be while players with big offensive contributions but who are lacking defensively were overrated. Moreover, the basic formula was quite good but was not great or perfect. Also, back in 2007 RPR was done for the entire NBA just one time for the year, at the end of the 2006-07 season, and results were shown in only one way: for the NBA as a whole. Needless to say, Real Player Ratings was destined to be dramatically improved in the years following 2007.

========== 2008 HISTORY OF THE QUEST FOR THE RING ==========
By very early in 2008, we had already outgrown the simple one-team fan site concept. The outgrowing of it was rapid and this was due more than anything else to the amateur and quite frankly foolish way the Nuggets were managing and coaching their team when Allen Iverson was on it. By early 2008, the myriad mistakes of the Nuggets franchise were getting on our nerves and it was becoming more and more unacceptable to have a site focused only on the Nuggets.

So by very early in 2008 we realized that merely being a fan site for one particular team was not going to be enough in the long term to hold our interest and keep us motivated. Just being a fan site was not going to be enough from a basketball perspective and was not going to be enough from a worthwhile web site that might possibly generate good traffic perspective either.

When it comes to producing quality, real, and original content, it’s actually better to have too much to do than not enough to do, mainly because if you can easily do everything that is in your editorial plan, you will become bored and dangerously unmotivated. Whereas if you have too much to do the motivation level should stay high and the “stagnation level” should stay very, very low. No pain, no gain applies in producing content just as it does in producing athletes.

So in very early 2008 the mission expanded from extensive description of basketball games, coaching, and management to include a new primary mission: to discover and report on exactly how NBA basketball games are won. Since if you win more games than anyone else in the playoffs you win a Championship, and since in the NBA you are awarded a very sharp looking ring if you are a Champion, we decided during the summer of 2008 to drop the "Nuggets 1" name and to adopt the name "The Quest for the Ring."

DECISION ON HOW MANY TEAMS TO FOCUS CLOSELY ON
It was decided during the summer of 2008 that we would compromise between on the one hand being a site for just one team, and on the other hand being a site which tries to cover the entire League. The former was considered to be too narrow and the latter was considered to be too broad.

The thinking in the summer of 2008 was that if you are covering just one team, you can discover and report things that even the Coach and/or the managers of the team don't seem to know or understand. But if you are focusing on just one team, then by definition you can not know very much about other teams, nor can you do much true analysis of the League as a whole. If on the other hand your site is for the NBA as a whole, you may have increased your “global audience,” but you can seldom if ever have an opportunity to get detailed enough to be truly useful to readers who are trying to learn about exactly how and why basketball games are won. In other words, it was considered obvious that if we attempted to cover every team in the NBA, our reports would have to be watered down and thus less useful. In other words, the reports would not have the detailed accuracy needed to help players, coaches, and managers to win basketball games, a detail that can only come if you limit the teams covered in detail to no more than three.

So the new editorial strategy regarding teams was to compromise between covering just one team at one extreme and covering all of the teams at the other extreme. So in early November 2008, we decided to cover two teams: the Detroit Pistons and the Denver Nuggets.

In October 2008 the name of the site officially became "The Quest for the Ring." However, the site remained located at the original Nuggets 1 BlogSpot Internet address.

SPRING AND SUMMER 2008 SUSPENSION OF PRODUCTION
At the same time the editorial plans and the name of the site were changing as just described, actual production of Reports slowed and posting of reports slowed to a crawl during the spring and summer of 2008. Some Report drafts were being produced (and posted to a forum called Sports Two) but there was very little being posted on Nuggets 1 (soon to be Quest for the Ring) during this time period. I had the time to produce some content and put it on the forum but not enough time to refine it and make it almost perfect so that I met the demanding quality requirements for posting on Quest for the Ring.

The main reason for the virtual suspension of production was the 2008 economics crisis in general and especially the real estate crash in particular. That crash forced us to put in far more hours than we would have had to put in otherwise in real estate projects that were absolutely mandatory to achieve.

REVIVAL OF QUEST FOR THE RING IN OCTOBER 2008
Starting in October 2008, the site, now officially called The Quest for the Ring, sprung back into life. To be exact, the site came back to life as of October 14, 2008.

During October and November of 2008, content that actually had been produced during the suspension and put on the Sports Two and the Nuggets Talk forums was improved, revised, extended, and posted. Brand new content was also produced (and posted immediately)!

I had not planned to do any production at all during the spring and summer of 2008 because I really could not afford even that amount of time, but I could not resist doing so. This was new proof that I was going to continue on with basketball for the foreseeable future.

But this created the bizarre circumstance where my site was neglected in favor of these two forums. So I had to go back and collect what I had posted at the forums and, after improving, revising, and extending it, put it on Quest for the Ring where it really belongs.

The content (in the Quest posting called “the comments”) was arranged by when they appeared on the forums, mostly in ten day periods, which meant each month was divided into three parts: early, middle, and late. Each of the posts had the same title format: "Return of Nuggets 1: [period of time comments went on forums] Comments. For example, the first one was "Return of Nuggets 1: Late March 2008 Comments." August had only a tiny number of contents so all of the August comments were in one post. The comments were in chronological order and there were different subjects without any lead-ins. Rearranging all of the content so that postings were confined only to certain topics would have taken much more time than it would have been worth.

With respect to past and any future suspensions, I again much congratulate and thank anyone who has come back here again despite the dead months. And as I always say, Quest for the Ring will keep getting bigger and better even if the road is rocky and rough sometimes. Even if the damn road disappears!

SPECIAL REPORTS
So called special reports began by spring 2007. They are a series of reports on a topic that you will never see covered anywhere else, at least to the degree covered by Quest. Unfortunately, due to the continual upheaval caused by the explosion of features, by the huge amount of time needed for development of webmaster capabilities, and by the multitude of big and small editorial changes in 2007 and 2008, special reports were involuntarily suspended in the spring of 2008.

In particular, the “George Karl Fiasco” special report series and the “Allen Iverson: What Could Have Been” special report series were suspended before they were completed. As you might expect, the plan is to eventually revise, extend, and complete both of those important series of special reports. They will eventually be completed, by the end of 2012 at the latest.

LIVE GAME PAGE
The live games page was extensively worked on in 2007 and in 2008. However, the editorial conception turned out to be wrong, so the page had to be completely made over during 2008. By the fall of 2008, the site finally had the correct editorial design (the one needed to reflect the realities associated with watching live NBA games on a computer). By the fall of 2009, the site finally came of age as a fully on point and very useful live game watching resource. Also in 2008, the mission of that page expanded to include providing links to downloads of completed NBA games. This too was perfected by the fall of 2009.

REAL PLAYER RATINGS IN 2008
The system begun in 2007 was expanded on but not radically improved during 2008. The factors in the core RPR formulae were improved a little; you can say the core formulae went from very good in 2007 to extremely good in 2008. By late 2008 the ratings were now reportable by team and not just for the entire NBA anymore. However, the crucial hidden defending adjustment (HDA) to basic real player ratings took longer to develop than was hoped and did not materialize until early January 2009. The first version of HDA, which was fairly good but by no means great or nearly perfect, was incorporated into League-wide late February 2009 ratings. Ratings throughout 2008, though, had no HDA at all.

For full details about the Real Player Ratings, see the User Guide to Real Player Ratings on the Reference Site.

========== 2009 HISTORY OF THE QUEST FOR THE RING ==========
In January 2009, we produced and posted the only Report in history that was later declared to be in error. This whole episode is described in great detail in Reports coming out in the last few months of 2009 and even into 2010, mostly in the “How Darth Vader Set out to Destroy the Quest” series of reports.

REAL PLAYER RATINGS IN 2009
At the end of February, 2009, we published the first ever Real Player Ratings (RPR) that included a statistically valid adjustment to base RPR for "hidden defending," for in other words defending not tracked by scorekeepers, such as man to man defending, pick and roll defense, and defensive recognition. This is called the Hidden Defending Adjustment (HDA).

We had hoped to have HDA in 2008 (including for the 2007-08 season final ratings) but that was not to be. But beginning with 2008-09, RPR includes HDA and the ratings are therefore close to perfect and close to being as good as they can be.

Without HDA, the RPR system is very good and is as good as or better than any other player rating system out there. But with HDA, Real Player Ratings becomes clearly the best player rating system in existence.

Later in 2009, extensive improvements in Excel and related skills enabled a vast improvement in production efficiency and reporting capability for the RPR system. Beginning in the spring of 2009 (in time for the 2008-09 season RPR reports for the NBA as a whole and by team for all teams) RPR started to be reported out in four dimensions:

--Real Player Rating
--Real Player Production
--Offensive Sub Rating
--Defensive Sub Rating

The User Guide to Real Player Ratings which is on the Quest Reference site was improved, revised, and expanded several times during 2009.

A RELATIVELY SHORT 2009 SHUTDOWN
Three short weeks after that milestone, a technological disaster, and simultaneously the necessity of completing another large-scale project, forced a suspension of production again. For the second year in a row, the suspension was at about the worst possible time during the year: just before the playoffs were to get underway.

The 2008 suspension was for six months, though content was actually being produced during four of those months but not posted to the site until October, as already explained in the 2008 history. The 2009 suspension was for about two months, so it was no where near as drastic as the 2008 one.

We apologize to readers for those and any future necessary suspensions, particularly to any regular readers out there. Any time there is a suspension, we promise to (a) come back even stronger than ever and (b) make up for at least some of the lost time by for awhile producing more than we would have had there been no suspension.

THE MAY 2009 REVOLUTION BACKGROUND
As of May 2009 The Quest for the Ring was about two and a half years old. Actually, it was in effect only about two years old, because the reports in the first six months were relatively short and not all that earth shaking to be honest. The site had come a very long way in a very short time. Especially considering that there are only two people who had and were producing it.

The Internet is a very powerful communication system, so powerful that people who produce and post content to the World Wide Web are continuously developing their content and their editorial scheme. On the Internet, the days when editorial and specific content plans stay the same year after year are over, especially for perfectionist type producers of content and Internet sites.

The guy behind the Quest, sure enough, is an especially creative and perfectionist type person, which means that he is always coming up with new ideas, most of which are quickly rejected before they are implemented, some of which are rejected after implementation, and only a small subset of which survive indefinitely. Since he is a perfectionist type person, the Quest founder and producer is never completely happy with whatever the current Quest editorial and organizational scheme is.

Therefore, it was no surprise that a decision was made in May of 2009 to once again radically revamp the editorial strategy of the Quest.

NEW EDITORIAL DESIGN OF THE QUEST AS OF MAY 2009
No change was made to the mission or to the primary objectives of the Quest (as decided in early 2008): to discover and explain exactly how basketball games are won and lost, and how and why teams and franchises are successful or unsuccessful. But in May 2009 we made some smart changes on how best to achieve the mission and the objectives. The May 2009 changes were a radical restructuring of the “second level” of the editorial plan.

We made two major changes. First, although we continued the two team specialization plan, the amount of freedom we have to choose which teams to specialize in was reduced from complete freedom to choose whichever two teams we wanted to very little freedom to choose. From now on, we were supposed to cover in detail the defending Champion and whichever team is considered (by basketball people we believe in including our self) to be the most likely to challenge the Champion in the next Finals.

However, we decided to, given that Kevin Garnett was not available to the Celtics for the 2009 playoffs, to technically violate the new rule for the 2009 playoffs. But starting in October 2009 and in each subsequent October, the plan was to specialize in whatever team won the June Championship and in whichever team is considered most likely to challenge for the Championship in the next June (as of October). The specializations would change each October according to this plan.

The second major change was bigger than the first. The particular teams chosen for specialization would be somewhat less important than before, because we decided we would increase the overall League focus even more so than we did in the fall 2008 changes. This would be done largely by radically increasing the focus on NBA playoff games. Only during a subset of the year (January through mid April) would the primary focus be on the two teams (selected in October). This focus would mostly go away beginning in mid April. From mid April until the end of December, the focus would be on how and why playoff games were won and lost.

What follows are some highlights of the May 2009 editorial plan for reports. For complete details, see the Mission and Objectives and also the Production Plan articles in this User Guide.

Reports are to vary by time of year. The year was to be divided into two parts: mid April through the end of December and January through mid April.

MOST IMPORTANT AND MOST COMMON PRODUCTION FROM MID APRIL THROUGH ABOUT THE END OF DECEMBER
In this time period playoff games are to be broken down in detail. There will be reports on every single playoff game.

The reports for the first round, which is really just a washout round, where a big thing which happens is that the teams with injuries are washed out, will generally be performance measure reports with no text article. The full set of performance measures for a game is called an "Ultimate Game Breakdown".

As of spring 2009, such Breakdowns were expanded. Along with Real Player Ratings, the Ultimate Game Breakdowns now include key team statistics that you can not find in box scores, such as team offensive efficiency, team defensive efficiency, effective (true) field goal percentage, and turnover percentage.

Starting in May 2009, there is also a completely unique set of three measures that tell you exactly how organized, effective, and efficient a team's offense was, both in potential and in actual result. These three can be easily located in the Breakdowns by looking for the descriptive word common to all three of them: "playmaking".

The heart of the May 2009 Editorial Plan was that for the second round (Conference Semis) the third round (Conference Finals) and for of course the NBA Championship, we would be producing both Ultimate Game Breakdowns and written article reports for each game. We would be doing this all the way from mid April until the end of December. Note that we don’t give a damn about violating the mainstream rule that you are not supposed to report on a game more than a day after it (if you are a newspaper) or a month after it (if you are a monthly magazine). We will be reporting on playoff games whenever we damn well please! The mainstream is often the “dumb stream”.

Other than "fast break" type articles, from May 2009 forward almost all of our full scale reports are between 2,000 and 5,000 words long. The typical post for a game you see on fan sites is in the range of 500 to 1,500 words. We do more because our objective is above and beyond that of a fan site, because there are a good number of myths regarding basketball that have to be continually debunked, and because basketball is more complicated than it seems. The one and only way to discover, to report on, and to explain exactly how playoff games are won is to produce reports of that length.

In summary, in May 2009 we decided to give the Quest a virtually unique, detailed focus on NBA playoff games, the games where the best players and teams play. We decided, quite frankly, that analyzing regular season games in great detail is sort of a waste of time if you are just one person. Assuming that you don't have enough time to do both detailed breakdowns of every playoff game and detailed breakdowns of some, many, or all regular season games of one or more teams, it’s better to forget about breaking down the regular season games and throwing all the resources you have at breaking down playoff games.

Breaking down both key regular season games and most playoff games requires at least 60 hours a week of work year round. Quest has roughly half that much time at best. So given the actual time resources available, we realized that it is much smarter to reverse the usual pattern of basketball sites.

Meanwhile, almost all and it honestly seems literally all other basketball sites, including ones that have multiple writers, are making the mistake of over covering the regular season and under covering the playoffs. The breakdown of effort is backwards: too much stuff is done for the regular season and not enough stuff is done for the playoffs.

Beginning in May 2009, instead of most of the writing and breakdowns being focused on the regular season, most of the writing and breakdowns at Quest for the Ring would be focused on the playoffs. Only from the first of January until mid April would Quest be focused to any extent on the regular season. But even during these three and a half months, we will seldom be doing game breakdowns of regular season games. Rather, we will be producing team reports for the teams we are specializing in, which will most often be the defending Champion and the most likely challenger, as explained above.

MOST IMPORTANT AND MOST COMMON PRODUCTION FROM JANUARY 1 TO MID APRIL
During this part of the year, the focus will shift to the regular season, but only to a degree. We will never lose the focus on how playoff games can be won. Regular season full reports will sometimes look at a regular season game to some extent, and there will be as many Ultimate Game Breakdowns of regular season games as we can produce, but we will still be mostly looking at what the team and individual players are doing right, and what they are doing wrong, with respect to the ultimate objective of winning playoff games.

In other words, the team reports during these four months will focus on the regular season itself only to what extent what is happening in the regular season matters for the playoffs beginning in April.

SUMMARY OF THE MAY 2009 EDITORIAL PLAN
In summary the focus of the Quest for the Ring will always be on the playoffs. This will be the World Wide Web's best "NBA Playoffs Site". From mid April until about the end of December, the focus will be on the actual playoff games that were played from mid-April until mid to late June. You will not be able to find out what exactly happened in those games in greater detail anywhere else other than right here. Then from mid December until mid April, the focus will be on how well teams, especially the teams we are specializing in, are preparing for the upcoming playoffs.

We hope you agree that this is by a good margin the best idea yet for the editorial plan for the Quest for the Ring. This was one creative brainstorm that should not and did not go into the trash can.

2009: A PROFESSIONAL ORGANIZATION COMES TO QUEST
Just before the 2009-10 season tipped, the very large number of features and links to important resources were strategically reorganized and placed within an easy to use and clearly labeled section system. So ended the era of the rapidly developed, sprawling and slightly disorganized Quest, and so began the era of the big but under careful control and extremely well organized and professional Quest for the Ring.

The Quest Home Page consists of numerous types of content, organized carefully into the new sections as of November 2009. Features can be any educational and / or entertaining thing you can think of, including everything from music players to videos to photos to breaking NBA news readers to top teams performance breakdown pages.

The 2009 Production Plan: What Quest for the Ring Produces, and When

2009-07-29T21:49:00.000-07:00

=======INTRODUCTION TO AND CHARACTERISTICS OF THE PRODUCTION PLAN=======
First, what is a production plan? It is a plan that details the types of reports produced, the number of each type of report that we would like to produce, and the planned calendar schedule for them.

Ideally, all such plans would be exactly met: the number of reports planned would actually appear, and they would appear according to schedule. Prior to this version, Quest Production Plans were based on this perfectionist ideal. During the first two years of Quest (which was born on the Internet in April 2007) there were three distinct Production Plans were produced, but each one was totally unrealistic, quite honestly.

In fact, those earlier Plans were ridiculous and were really not very useful, not only due to factors that continue on today that will be discussed shortly, but especially due to the inherent explosive instability of a brand new Internet site fueled in the early months by a large amount of ambition but few specific guiding objectives. Making production plans in the early months of Quest was equivalent to making plans for a garden party at a house while the house is on fire!

To be more specific, during the first two years of Quest, there was an explosion of report types and an explosion of available features for that exploding number of report types. Production planning in such a quickly changing context is obviously absurd. So naturally, all of the early production plans failed miserably.

BUT NOW WE CAN MAKE A PLAN THAT WON'T BE DEAD ON ARRIVAL....
It is strongly believed that the rate of new Quest content and features is permanently lower from now going forward, simply because most of the best possible stuff has already been created. A new era characterized much more by improvements of existing reports and features is now here to stay.

Therefore, and in light of the crucial value of production plans (more on this shortly) Quest is presenting this new 2009 What we Produce Production Plan.

THIS PLAN WILL FAIL TOO BUT IT WILL BE A LOT CLOSER THIS TIME
Unfortunately, although we expect this new production plan to be far more realistic than earlier ones, we do not expect this one will be closely achieved. But it will be achieved to some extent and much more so than the previous Plans. And the crucial importance of having a production plan that is as realistic as possible trumps not being able to meet it closely.

In real life, it will never be possible to exactly meet any production plan. The objective is always going to be to meet as many of the specific plans as possible, and to get as close as possible to meeting the plan overall.

Reasons plans can not always be met, even after a site is no longer exploding new types of content, are numerous. They include uncertainty about the overall time resources available.

Another major reason why this new production plan will probably not be closely achieved is that although we have adjusted as much as possible for the issue, Quest ambitions are most likely still out of proportion to available resources.

Due just to large-scale uncertainty about time resources alone, it can be argued that specific production planning is a waste of time. However, production planning remains very necessary, crucial really. Having no production plans leads to day to day confusion about what to produce.

More broadly, and in the longer term, having no specific production plans will eventually lead to the site losing focus, or in other words losing ability to meet preset objectives. Once the site loses focus on these things, the danger that the site will "die out" completely greatly increases. In summary, a site needs to keep this process going: mission >> objectives >> production plans >> focus >> meeting objectives >> Site continues indefinitely.

Therefore, for most of the reports, even though we know we won't be able to produce everything specified, we have to and do provide estimates of the number of each type of report that will be produced, and when they will appear. A likely length range is also given for most types of text reports (expressed in terms of the number of words).

So always remember, the production plan details are not strict quotas, are not guarantees, are not promises, and are too often not even good predictions of what production will be. On the other hand:

--We are virtually 100% certain that some of the specific production plans will be exactly met. For example, you can bet the ranch that NBA Real Player Ratings will be produced according to the schedule and specs shown.

--We are virtually 100% certain that at least half of the production plans will be largely met.

--We are virtually 100% certain that most of the production plans will be at least partially met, with "partially" defined as 1/3 or 33%.

A new Quest what we Produce and When Production Plan will be done at least once a year. It is obvious that each new Plan will be more closely met than the one before, because we will have more knowledge about everything involved, including for example to what extent our ambitions can simply not be met without additional resources, such as at least one additional writer. The possible eventual addition of one or more carefully chosen new writers argues against making the Plan cautious and conservative.

THE QUEST FOR THE RING PRODUCTION PLAN AS OF AUGUST 1, 2010
REPORT CATEGORY: TEXT REPORTS
As you might expect, Text Reports are considered to be the most important of all types, and this type of Report receives more production time than any of the others.
There are two sub-categories: Playoff Season Text Reports and Regular Season Text Reports. The Quest Regular Season runs from December 11 through April 19 each year. The Quest Playoff Season runs from April 20 through December 10 each year.
Many but not all types of Text Reports are produced only in one or the other Season, but certain types of Text Reports may appear at any time.

MULTIMEDIA ADD-ONS TO REPORTS
Some reports are accompanied by photos and, beginning in the spring of 2009, some Reports include video jukeboxes offering about 50 YouTube videos to choose from, with the subject usually being a team or an important player. Another video add-on can simply be the inclusion of one or more selected videos. Also, slideshows can and occasionally will now be added to some reports. Multimedia add-ons are due to become much more common beginning in the fall of 2009.

=======REPORT CATEGORY: REGULAR SEASON TEXT REPORTS=======
FAST BREAK
A Fast Break is a text report of less than 800 words. This is a fast break type of posting, a short post needed to be pushed out the door quickly to be timely. In the great majority of cases, a fast break posting is followed up by much longer articles that will contain a lot of proof for any points made in the fast breaks. Remember that many Quest reports have much more detail than this one; Quest for the Ring prides itself on game, team, and League breakdowns that are as long as necessary to make and prove the points. Fast Breaks are especially useful to comment on major breaking news in a timely fashion.

This type of Report can appear in either season (year round). In fact, this type of Report is just as common in the Playoff Season as it is in the Regular Season.

Approximately 30 such Reports are expected to be produced per year, or 2.5 each month.

REGULAR SEASON FULL REPORTS
(The regular season is from December 11 through April 19)
Regular Season text reports are at least 800 words long and can be up to 4,000 words long. Most Regular Season text reports are between 1,000 words and 3,000 words long.
The overall average length of all such reports is approximately 2,200 words.

Subject matter can be anything that relates to pro basketball, as long as it to one extent or another relates to discovering and explaining how NBA games, especially playoff games, are won. Quest reports are known for being loaded with at least as much proof as is needed to prove the points and the proof very often consists, at least in part, of custom, advanced statistical information.

TYPES OF REGULAR SEASON FULL REPORTS
ANNUAL TEAM REPORT
Annual Team Reports are short by Quest standards, although still longer than this type of report done by other general NBA writers. Annual Reports for the 21-24 non-contending teams are between 1,200 and 1,400 words. Annual Reports for the six to nine contending teams are between 1,500 and 1,750 words.

Each annual report focuses a lot on what the team players, coaches, and managers are doing right, and at least as much on what they are doing wrong with respect to the objective of winning playoff games.

One of these is done for each contending team, and other teams are selected such that the total number of annual reports is expected to be 20. The following year, any team that did not have an annual report the prior year will definitely get one.

These twenty reports are to be produced and released at the pace of one every three days, over a total of 60 days. These 20 Reports are to be produced and released between December 11 and February 8 of each year.

MAJOR CONTENDER TEAM REPORT
This is probably the most important single type of report appearing during the regular season (which you will recall is December 11 through April 19). Also, this is the one report which is most closely related to the conception behind Quest Reports in the first year.

There are usually only going to be two, three, or in unusual circumstances, at most, four major contenders. Quest specializes in two of the major contenders during the regular season. Quest is first and foremost about how teams win or lose NBA playoff games, so this type of Report is heavily focused on what the major contending team
is doing right and what it is doing wrong with respect to the prospect of winning playoff games.

Occasionally, specific games will be discussed in detail. More commonly, whether the team as a whole, managers, coaches, and key players on it are strategically and/or tactically correct is extensively discussed.

Team reports not only cover players and coaches, but also discuss the performance of managers with respect to what they have done right or wrong with respect to the team's prospects in the playoffs. Quest looks beyond the trees to the surrounding forest as a whole much more so than do most other basketball sites.

Expect about one such report per week between January 25 and April 18 of each year. So, for each of the two specialization teams, expect one such Report every two weeks during that period. Therefore, in total, expect about twelve such reports per year, six for each team specialized in.

Generally, this type of report will be between 2,000 and 3,000 words long. The average length will be about 2,500 words.

PLAYER REPORT
A report about how a very important player is doing in the current season, with a review of that players' entire career via Real Player Ratings by year.

Expect about four such reports per year, one in January, one in February, one in March, and one in April.

Generally, this type of report will be between 1,500 and 3,000 words long.

THIS YEAR'S QUEST REPORT
This is a special, very valuable kind of report. This type of report, as the name implies, discusses the current Quest for the Ring. Specifically, it covers which of the (between six and nine) contending teams are on the right track and why, and which are on the wrong track and why.

This Report focuses on the six to nine contending teams and especially on the two or three major contending teams. Exactly what these teams are dong right and exactly what they are doing wrong is covered.

Expect about three such reports per year, one in February, one in March, and one in April.

LEAGUE REPORT
This is a report about the NBA, often involving economics and how the NBA fits in with society as a whole.

This type of report is relatively uncommon; expect two or three of these per year. This type of Report can appear in either season (year round).

SOCIETY REPORT
This is a report about society and how basketball relates to it and what basketball can teach everyone.

This type of report is uncommon; expect one or two of these per year. This type of Report can appear in either season (year round).

REPORT CATEGORY: PLAYOFF SEASON TEXT REPORTS
(The Playoff Season is April 20--December 10)
PLAYOFF SEASON REPORTS FOCUSED ON A PLAYOFF SERIES
PLAYOFF SEASON FULL REPORTS
Playoff Season text reports are at least 800 words long and can be up to 4,000 words long. The average length will be approximately 2,200 words.

The subject matter is generally a single, specific playoff series. The focus is on how and why teams win and lose playoff games.

Although specific game coverage is important and is a major part of these reports, how and why teams win and lose is a subject which goes beyond particular games. Therefore, focus is often on factors that are wider than specific games, especially of course on various coaching and management factors.

Quest reports are known for being loaded with at least as much proof as is needed to prove the points and the proof very often consists, at least in part, of custom statistical information.

TYPES OF PLAYOFF SEASON TEXT REPORTS
CHAMPIONSHIP REPORTS
One report for each Championship game is produced. Such reports are produced and posted during the series. Unlike for other series, expect the Championship Reports to appear one to three days after the game. Obviously, since the Championship is in June, you can expect these reports each June.

Generally, Championship game text Reports will be between 2,000 and 3,000 words long.

Aside from the text report, there is an Ultimate Game Breakdown separately produced for each Championship, Conference Final, and Conference Semi-final game.

EAST AND WEST CONFERENCE FINAL REPORTS
One report for each East Final and each West Final series game is produced. Expect the reports for the East final games to appear between July 1 and July 25. Expect the reports for the West final games to appear between July 26 and August 19.

Generally, this type of Report will be between 1,500 and 2,500 words long.

Aside from the text report, there is an Ultimate Game Breakdown separately produced for each game.

EAST AND WEST CONFERENCE SEMI-FINALS REPORTS
There are four semifinal series, two in each conference. One report for each and every semi-final game is produced. Since there are approximately 23 such games, expect about 23 such reports per year.

Expect the reports for the East semifinal series (1 of 2) between August 20 and September 11. Expect the reports for the West semifinal series (1 of 2) between September 12 and October 4. Expect the reports for the East semifinal series (2 of 2) between October 5 and October 27. Expect the reports for the West semifinal series (2 of 2) between October 28 and November 19.

Aside from the text report, there is an Ultimate Game Breakdown separately produced for each game in each semifinal. Generally, this type of Report will be between 1,000 and 2,000 words long.

PLAYOFF SEASON REPORTS NOT FOCUSED ON A PLAYOFF SERIES
ANNUAL DRAFT REPORT
This is a planned new annual Report that strategically discusses the NBA draft in between 1,500 and 2,500 words. This is important, since it is very, very difficult to win the Quest while getting little from the draft and from younger players in general.

Expect this report to appear approximately July 5. It is not yet known how long this report will be.

ANNUAL TRADES AND ACQUISITIONS REPORT
This is a planned new annual Report that discusses the most important off-season roster moves made by teams, especially contending teams. In other words, this is largely a report about the roster moves made by the contending teams between the end of the last regular season and the start of the new regular season. Focus is most intense on the best players, the ones with Real Player Ratings exceeding .750.

Expect this once a year report to appear approximately November 5. It is not yet known how long this report will be.

FAST BREAK
A Fast Break is a text report of less than 800 words. This is a fast break type of posting, a short post needed to be pushed out the door quickly to be timely. In the great majority of cases, a fast break posting is followed up by much longer articles that will contain a lot of proof for any points made in the fast breaks. Remember that many Quest reports have much more detail than this one; Quest for the Ring prides itself on game, team, and League breakdowns that are as long as necessary to make and prove the points. Fast Breaks are especially useful to comment on major breaking news in a timely fashion.

This type of Report can appear in either season (year round). In fact, this type of Report is just as common in the Playoff Season as it is in the Regular Season.

Approximately 30 such Reports are expected to be produced per year, or 2.5 each month.

LEAGUE REPORT
This is a report about the NBA, often involving economics and how the NBA fits in with society as a whole.

This type of report is relatively uncommon; expect two or three of these per year. This type of Report can appear any time during the year.

SOCIETY REPORT
This is a report about society and how basketball relates to it and what basketball can teach everyone.

This type of report is uncommon; expect one or two of these per year. This type of Report can appear any time during the year.

=======REPORT CATEGORY: ADVANCED STATISTICAL REPORTS=======
ULTIMATE GAME BREAKDOWN
This is a statistical breakdown of a game, consisting of two main parts, Real Player Ratings and Real Game Ratings.

The Real Player Ratings are accompanied by the Real Player Production breakdown. You can see the exact level of performance of the players at a glance.

Real Game Ratings consist of about seven very important "advanced" statistical indicators, ones that are believed by top basketball people to be crucial with respect to how games are won and lost. Real Game Ratings also consist of three Quest custom-made statistical performance measures intended to show the offensive quality, power, and potential of NBA contending teams. These three custom designed offensive performance measures are called "play making identity," "play making quality," and "play making power".

In a Game Breakdown, there may be a short section for notes about how the game was won, but the vast majority of any discussion of a game will be in a text Report, not in a Breakdown.

Starting in 2009, about 95% of all Ultimate Game Breakdowns will be for playoff games. In the regular season, only a small number of crucial and interesting games, usually involving major contending teams, will be treated to a Breakdown.

Ultimate Game Breakdowns will be produced for all Championship games, all Conference Final games, and all Conference Semifinal games. Also, Ultimate Game Breakdowns will generally be produced for a limited number of carefully selected Conference Quarterfinal games (The Conference quarterfinals are the first round of the playoffs). Resources are not currently adequate to provide Breakdowns for more than about 15% of quarterfinal games. 15% of them would be about seven.

Scheduling of Ultimate Game Breakdowns of playoff games is parallel to the scheduling of text reports for those games. In the first 18 months of Quest, text reports and Ultimate Game Breakdowns were combined into huge reports that eventually grew to be more than 9,000 words long!

Championship Breakdowns are scheduled for June. Unlike for other series, Breakdowns for the Championship are intended to be produced and reported out within a day or two of each game.

Breakdowns for the East final series are scheduled for between July 1 and July 25. Breakdowns for the West final series are scheduled for between July 26 and August 19.

Breakdowns for the East semi-final series (1 of 2) are scheduled for between August 20 and September 11. Breakdowns for the West semi-final series (1 of 2) are scheduled for between September 12 and October 4. Breakdowns for the East semi-final series (2 of 2) are scheduled for between October 5 and October 27. Breakdowns for the West semi-final series (2 of 2) are scheduled for between October 28 and November 19.

Breakdowns for a small number of selected semifinal games are scheduled for between November 20 and December 10.

REAL TEAM RATINGS
This is an advanced, custom-designed statistical report based on an algorithm intended to reveal the playoff performance potential of all NBA teams, but especially, of course, of contending teams. Each team's Rating is based on close to a dozen factors that impact a team's playoff potential. Similar to as with Real Player Ratings, the individual factors are strategically combined together to yield what is intended to be an accurate and easy to use playoff projection tool.

There are between six and nine contending teams in any season, and between two and three major contenders. Teams that are contenders but not major contenders are nicknamed "wild card contenders".

Four Real Team Ratings Reports are scheduled as follows: Dec. 20, Jan. 31, March 10, and April 20.

REAL PLAYER RATINGS
There are several different types of reports featuring these ratings….

REAL PLAYER RATINGS FOR THE NBA
All players who have played at least 300 minutes are rated according to their Real Player Ratings in a League-wide listing. Although each player's team is shown, players are not grouped by team in this version, but by evaluation scale category. So this is where every NBA player is rated and ranked in one place.

Other than the keynote Real Player Ratings, there are three other important ratings shown in this type of report: Total Real Player Production, Offensive Sub-Rating, and Defensive Sub-Rating.

Hidden Defending adjustments are made to three of the four series. These adjustments are not applicable to the Offensive Sub-Rating. Note that hidden defending adjustments are not possible for Real Player Ratings in Game Breakdowns. Nor are they possible for Ratings for a team for a single month. The adjustments are possible only where every significant player has played for 300 minutes or more.

Twice a year, Real Player Ratings are done for the entire NBA. This report appears AFTER all of the by team versions are rolled out (see the schedule for them just below). The two NBA-wide Reports are scheduled as follows: between March 27 and March 31, and between May 27 and May 31

REAL PLAYER RATINGS BY TEAM
In this report, all players who have played at least 300 minutes are ranked according to their Real Player Ratings broken down by team. Players are grouped by team in this version, and so there is no NBA-wide ranking here.

Other than the keynote Real Player Ratings, there are three other important ratings shown for the individual team: Total Real Player Production, Offensive Sub-Rating, and Defensive Sub-Rating.

Hidden Defending adjustments are made to three of the four series. These adjustments are not applicable to the Offensive Sub-Rating. Note that hidden defending adjustments are not possible for Real Player Ratings in Game Breakdowns. Nor are they possible for Ratings for a team for a single month. The adjustments are possible only where every significant player has played for 300 minutes or more.

Twice a year, Real Player Ratings are done for the entire NBA. The team by team versions are presented BEFORE the overall NBA version. The objective and plan is for one Team Real Player Report to be released daily over a 30-day (1 month) period. Specifically, Team Real Player Rating reports for all teams are to be produced and released as follows:

--Data is collected as of February 22, and by team reports are posted starting on February 24 and finishing March 25.

--Data is collected as of the end of the regular season and by the team reports are posted starting on April 24 and finishing May 23.

QUEST MAJOR CONTENDER MONTHLY REAL PLAYER RATINGS
This is a very useful Report which summarizes for you the quality and the quantity of the players on the major contending teams during specific months. You might be surprised about how much players can differ from one month to the next.

This type of report is especially useful for evaluating coaching, for example, rotation and starting lineup changes. Similarly, this type of report is very useful for determining who if anyone steps up after one or more players are not playing due to injury. Generally, this type of report, which straddles the very wide gap between Game Breakdowns and Seasonal Breakdowns, is extremely useful in seeing how things change when coaching and/or when the available roster changes.

For each of the two major contending teams that Quest specializes in, the objective and plan is that a monthly Real Player Rating Report is produced and posted for each regular season month. Specifically, expect a pair of such Reports in early December (for November) in early January (for December) in early February (for January) in early March (for February) in early April (for March) and in late April (for April). Therefore, expect twelve such reports per year, six for each major contending team.

Each such Report will feature ratings for the most recent complete month, and also regular season to date ratings. Other than the keynote Real Player Ratings, there are three other important ratings shown: Total Real Player Production, Offensive Sub-Rating, and Defensive Sub-Rating.

Since hidden defending adjustments require a minimum of 300 minutes of playing time, monthly Real Player Ratings for major contending teams do not include them. Therefore, these reports feature the legacy Real Player Ratings, which are technically known as "Basic Real Player Ratings".

=======REPORT CATEGORY: OTHER REPORTS=======

REPORT CATEGORY: SPECIAL REPORTS
Special Reports are either general or formatted.

GENERAL SPECIAL REPORT
General Special Reports are investigative journalism for pro basketball. Such journalism is rare and, unfortunately, Quest time resources for Special Reports have proven to be very limited. That might change in the future though.

Special Reports are posted on the Special Report page, and also on the Home Page.
Production of General Special Reports is highly variable and unpredictable. Anywhere from zero to twelve general Special Reports might be produced in a year.

Currently: there are two uncompleted Special Report series.

"Allen Iverson, What Could Have Been," is a long-term project that is roughly 30% done.

The other uncompleted Special Report Series is "The George Karl Fiasco". This is roughly 80% done, and so obviously it would not take a huge amount of time to finish it. Interestingly, the surprising 2009-10 Denver Nuggets season casts some new light on Karl and yields new, valuable information about him. So when the surprising 2008-09 Nuggets season happened, it was actually fortunate that the Series was not considered over and done.

FORMATTED SPECIAL REPORTS
Currently only one kind of formatted Special Report exists:

HERO OF THE QUEST REPORTS
Ten "Heroes of the Quest" are recognized each year. See the applicable User Guide article for selection criteria. Each Hero of the Quest designation will be accompanied by a posting which will feature important informational links, pictures, videos, a video player, and such other features as may be appropriate and available. The text will be short, less than 800 words.

Since most heroes are basketball players, and since many of the recognitions are mostly based on Real Player Ratings for a season, the recognition time frame is not calendar year, but rather from July 1 of one year through June 30 of the next year. The ten reports are to be produced and posted variably throughout the year starting after the reference year is over. So, for example, heroes recognized for 2009-10 will be reported out in the next time frame, between July 1 2010 and June 30 2011.

REPORT CATEGORY: MULTIMEDIA REPORTS
MUSIC BREAK
This will feature music videos that highlight usually one, but sometimes more than one high quality music artist or rapper. Music Breaks are sometimes started off with notes about site developments. Music Breaks are year-round. Expect roughly one per month but there is no regular schedule. It is possible that the frequency of the music breaks will occasionally be much greater than this, and/or that these will become more numerous in the future.

LATEST VIDEOS
Recent advances in internet capabilities allow for this new type of report, which generally consists of one or more video jukeboxes for an important team and/or an important player. An example of this type of multimedia report is the March 20 one for Rajon Rondo.
Latest Videos are year-round; expect roughly one per month but there is no regular schedule.

Videos and video players are also increasingly being included, with many kinds of text reports; they will be found after all of the text.

REPORT CATEGORY: SITE REPORTS
INTRODUCING
This is a generally relatively short announcement for and detailed description of a new site feature, or of a major improvement of an existing site feature.

SITE USER GUIDE ARTICLE
This is information for visitors about site content and features and how best to use them. These articles are especially useful for regular visitors.

The most important User Guide Articles are updated from time to time and/or are completely reissued whenever a major update, planned or unplanned, occurs. Articles regarded as less important are updated if necessary but not reissued unless there is a rare change requiring this. Still other articles become legacy, and so notice is inserted that they have sunset. The ones that sunset are not deleted, however, in order to preserve Quest for the Ring history.

Most new User Guide articles and all important updates to existing articles are posted both to the Quest Home Page and to the User Guide page. For maximum reference convenience, there is a Site User Guide reader on the Site User Guide page and also on the Quest Home Page. Generally, the most important Site User Guide articles are found near the top of the reader (and also among the most recent posts) at the User Guide page.

REFERENCE USER GUIDE ARTICLE
Keep in mind that there are two kinds of User Guide articles. Site User Guide articles (such as this one) are on the Quest User Guide Site. Meanwhile, Reference User Guide articles are on the Reference Site.

As the name implies, a Reference User Guide is for explaining key content features. How and why the feature was developed and how best to use it are among the things included in a Reference User Guide.

One of the most important and the longest Reference User Guide is the one for Real Player Ratings This one is updated and added to on a regular basis.

FOR MORE INFORMATION...
The Quest User Guide page has many articles (including this one) that give you details about the site and tips about how to best use reports and features.

See the Real Player Rating Reference User Guide for complete details about the crucial Real Player Ratings and the other associated ratings.

======= PLEASE CONSIDER THE FOLLOWING OPTIONS =======
You Can Post Your Response to Anything on Quest Here

The User Guide for Real Player Ratings, and for the Defensive Adjustments, is located here. You must consult the Guide in order to fully understand the ratings and the value of them, and to understand how to make the best use of them.

Unedited, Raw Game Notes are Here
DIRECT CONTACT ADDRESS
thequestforthering1 @ gmail dot com [Remove spaces and replace "dot" with an actual (.)
Use this address for the following:
--Private responses to Quest content
--Requests for free advertising (Advertising on Quest is free until at least the end of 2010)
--Link exchange
--Requests for Use of Quest Reports on other site(s)

You Can Post Your Response to Anything on Quest Here

The Quest 2009-2010 Traffic Promotion Plan

2009-07-17T08:39:00.000-07:00

Editorial Note: This is a new Site User Guide article which explains the Quest for the Ring policies and plans, for at least the next year, regarding traffic development, including for example how much and where we provide Quest content to other sites. This is NOT a basketball content report. However, there is important information here regarding Internet traffic. And there are several valuable opportunities for Quest visitors explained below, such as free advertising, link exchange, and several content support platforms offered by Quest Internet.

Although this is apparently true for every single independent Internet site, the traffic to Quest for the Ring has not met expectations and is much lower than one might think it would be. We do have a non-trivial, fairly substantial amount of traffic. And we do definitely have visitors who spend quality time at Quest, which is a major achievement in itself, but the overall traffic counts and especially the returning traffic counts are much lower than we want them to be.

There is much evidence that virtually all independent Internet sites have much less traffic than the average non-webmaster person might think, and have far more difficulty in generating that traffic.

The objective of the Quest for the Ring Traffic and Publishing Plan is simply to build traffic, especially returning traffic, while taking into account the realities.

There is a lot of evidence that building traffic is so difficult that for all practical purposes it is not possible, at least not possible for a good number of years:

FACTUAL BASIS OF THE QUEST TRAFFIC DEVELOPMENT PLAN
1. The “Internet (or technology) bubble of the late 1990’s was followed by a bust much worse in real terms than even the ongoing “housing bust”. So the Internet has seemingly from day one always been a place where the actual potential is far less than the perceived potential. The gap between perceived potential and actual potential is so large (or huge even) that it is actually mysterious.

2. There are numerous scam type offers on the Internet and via e-mails where the come-on is a false claim about how much a site’s traffic will go up if only it sends a little money to the scam.

3. Google and other search engine policies are substantially secret, made extremely difficult to understand with arcane and confusing terminology, and subject to continual modification as well. It is simply not reasonably possible to study search engine policies and “tailor” your site to maximize search engine response, regardless of what Google or any other search engine tells you publicly.

4. To the extent that search engine policies are not secret, they are generally difficult to understand, complicated to work with to produce higher traffic, and subject to continual change. Believe me, Google does not want you or I to know exactly how they do what they do.

5. There are several major “catch-22s” involved. The biggest one is that to the extent you spend large amounts of time building traffic, you are neglecting the content, which of course means you are less likely to see loyal, returning traffic from any traffic you generate. Generally speaking, the vast majority of the traffic you get from most traffic generating activities is one time only traffic.

6. Experience shows that direct traffic generation, such as through content placement on aggregator sites such as Yardbarker or BallHype generates much less traffic than most people would think. And again, such traffic is overwhelmingly one time only traffic. So the idea that you can spend a few months on traffic building and then sit back and watch your traffic grow is generally false.

7. Similar to (6) experience shows that any traffic that is generated through content placement on other sites is temporary traffic that generally does not come back and is not loyal. In other words, traffic generated in this way does not result in any continuing or long-term benefit, so that you would have to continually spend a lot of valuable time cross posting content in order to improve traffic counts, which in turn would reduce the quantity and very possibly the quality of the content.

8. Evidence shows that the overall traffic pattern on the Internet is extremely unequal to say the least: there are a tiny number of sites that get a huge amount of traffic, and a huge number of sites that get essentially no traffic at all.

9. Independent sports (and presumably other) sites that are linked to or “sponsored” by huge corporate sites, such as ESPN, get much less of a boost in traffic than you would think; even those sites do not get anywhere near 1,000 visitors per day, which is probably the benchmark for traffic to be considered substantial from the economics and advertising perspective.

10. Traffic seems to be much more dependent on what the site starts out with than many people would think. In other words, how many friends and associates the site owners bring to the site from day one is a primary determinant of traffic not only in the early days, but for many years after the site has been launched. In other words, a site owner can not depend on the Internet itself for traffic, but rather needs to have a following outside of the Internet in order to get more than a small number of visitors per day.

11. Judging from extensive review of traffic counter details, most Internet traffic is simple people looking for simple things, such as nice pictures or simple opinions. Although Quest is fiercely multimedia and sometimes relatively simplistic, it is generally fiercely sophisticated, fact based, and controversial wherever called for, which means simple people looking for a quick fix are not going to be interested. The Quest audience is clearly limited to people who take basketball very, very seriously, either because they make their living from it, or because they are the kind of intelligent people who always gravitate to the most sophisticated or “advanced” sites.

12. Due to the remarkably limited and problematic nature of RSS traffic counting, Quest is unable to determine the number of readers it has via RSS. Moreover, we are in the dark about the overall reader preference breakdown between Internet site and various RSS options. Nor do we know what actual readership is via cross posting, which is another reason by the way we have severely cut back cross posting. For all of these reasons, although we know exactly how many folks visit the Quest sites themselves, Quest is actually unable to determine what its total readership is.

In light of the above and possibly other related facts, and with the need to reduce confusion and counterproductive time expenditure, Quest adopts the following Internet traffic and publishing plan:

2009-2010 QUEST TRAFFIC DEVELOPMENT PLAN, (Effective August 1, 2009)
1. In general, you can conclude from everything above and below that Quest needs its visitors to help us improve traffic counts, because we have concluded that it costs us more than it benefits us to spend a lot of valuable time on activities intended to improve traffic. Therefore, we request anyone who likes or who benefits from Quest content to exchange links, and also to give us a shout out on any Internet site where they think basketball people are who will like or benefit from Quest. Email questforthering at Gmail .com whenever you act to help the Quest, and we will subsequently help you out as well.

2. Quest will NOT any longer cross post a large percentage of content on other sites.

3. Approximately 25% of content MAY be reproduced on other sites, with an absolute limit of 33% of content.

4. The primary site for content sharing will continue to be http://www.sportstwo.com. Like all sites other than major corporate sites such as ESPN, SportsTwo is also subject to ultimately surprisingly limited traffic. There was discussion about moving to a somewhat higher traffic sight, but in the end it was decided that since the objective is to build traffic to Quest for the Ring, and since the objective is not met regardless of where content is posted, that it doesn’t matter much where cross posting is done. Although SportsTwo is not in the highest traffic tier among independent sports communities, it is not in the lower tiers either. Finally, even the highest traffic independent sports sites are still surprisingly limited in traffic, at least when you break down their traffic to actual relevant areas, such as a specific team forum. So more for the sake of tradition than anything else, SportsTwo has been renewed so to speak under the present Traffic Plan for most but not necessarily all cross posting.

5. Limited additional cross posting at other sites is under consideration and may be done on an experimental basis.

6. Quest may visit totally independent team forums once or twice a year. From now on, the conversations on such sites will be reproduced in real time on Quest, and not after a delay of weeks or months.

7. Links (without any content) to Quest content will be provided on certain sites that invite them, most notably Yardbarker, but only on an as time permits basis. It is expected that the percentage of reports for which links are provided will be between 20% and 50%.

8. Other than active forum discussions (see(6)) Quest content posted at SportsTwo and occasionally at other sites will be posted at those sites only after a delay of about 30 days, meaning that those who want or need immediate access will have to visit Quest even for the limited (see(3)) amount of content that does eventually appear elsewhere. This will completely reverse the bad habit we have sometimes had of posting content elsewhere and then not posting it on Quest until weeks or even months later.

9. The policies being adopted here represent a major cut back in time spent on tasks intended to build traffic. Quest is now 32 months old in terms of content and is now 26 months old as an Internet site. In light of the above facts, Quest will not, as was the case in many of the first 20 months of its Internet existence, spend large amounts of time on various things intended to build traffic. Roughly speaking, in the first 20 months, 35-40% of total working time was spent on such activities, with the other 60-65% on the content. Under the new plan, the amount of time that can be spent on activities intended to build traffic will be capped at 15%, with a target of 10%.

10. The cap described in (9) will ensure the continuing improvement in the quality and quantity of Quest content, something which as already occurred during the phase in of the change. For example, the Real Player Rating system was upgraded a year or two more quickly than it would have been had we been still spending close to 40% of time available on activities intended to build traffic.

11. Quest has decided, in other words, that given the choice between a very small amount of traffic and a moderate quality and quantity on the one hand, or a very small amount of traffic but a high quality and quantity of content on the other hand, that the latter combination is better for us. What this means is that the “chosen few” who do make the effort to bookmark and visit Quest, or at least to read Quest in an RSS or My Yahoo page or the like, will be treated as royalty more so than ever, as they will get the high quality and high quantity basketball content that is unique on the Internet and that (as has been explained) the vast majority are missing.

12. In conjunction with (11) and in conjunction with this plan as a whole, Quest is planning and in some cases developing new ways for treating our actual small audience base to even more features not found hardly anywhere else, such as Blog Talk Radio, an almost Real Time Real Player Rating database, and free or virtually free custom Real Player Rating and Basketball Winning Consulting Reports.

13. Quest continues to offer link exchange to any basketball site as long as it passes a basic qualification test. Any even half serious basketball site is invited to email Quest at questforthering at Gmail .com to get the link exchange. Such links will go somewhere in the top quarter of the Quest home page.

14. Quest continues to offer free advertising until at least June 30 2010. For details, see the User Guide article on the subject that is located here: http://thequestfortheringuserguide.blogspot.com/2009/03/free-advertising-program.html Any one who has a basketball related good or service that they would like to advertise for free is invited to email Quest at questforthering at Gmail .com

15. Quest has set up a “Ning Site” and invites participation in it. The address is http://thequestforthering.ning.com/

16. Quest has disabled the comment by post system and has established a centralized discussion page, where comments for any and all posts can be made. We are waiting and will apparently have to wait until the cows come home for participation in this. The discussion page is at http://thequestfortheringdiscussions.blogspot.com/

17. Aside from the basic discussion page described in (14) Quest also has established a relatively unique site called My Quest for the Ring, which is best described as a “public blog”. Anyone who has posted a few non-trivial comments on the discussion page can apply and be approved to be able to make posts on My Quest for the Ring which, were it ever to develop interest, would be an unusual, truly fun, and interesting basketball spot.

18. Those who outgrow My Quest for the Ring explained in (15) can get their own full scale site with any number of Quest features and with substantial support from the Quest Internet Service, which at this time has created and maintains more than 200 content rich Internet sites. Some of them are maintained and improved much more often than others of them.

19. The sites described in (15) (16) and (17) represent a truly comprehensive and state of the art social community system which, however, is so far lacking participation. Quest has done more than its duty in this area, and will simply have to wait indefinitely for participation. We can actually live with no one ever participating, and a case can be made that it is actually better long term if there is very little or no participation, since heavier participation would drain valuable resources from the production of primary content.

20. If someone wishes to post Quest content on another site, they should write to questforthering at Gmail .com with their proposal. We are more likely than not to gladly approve such requests as long as you follow a limited number of requirements, most notably a requirement that you credit and link back to the content posted.

21. Posting Quest content elsewhere without permission and/or without attribution and link back is an illegal violation of copyright law and will be contested legally. Quest actually spends a little time now and then to search for those violating our copyright. All Quest content is copyrighted in the year it is produced, and all copyright rights are reserved.
================

The User Guide for Real Player Ratings, and for the Defensive Adjustments, is located here. You must consult the Guide in order to fully understand the ratings and the value of them, and to understand how to make the best use of them.

You Can Post Your Response to Anything on Quest Here

Unedited, Raw Game Notes are Here

You Can Post Your Response to Anything on Quest Here

The Mission and the Primary Objectives of The Quest for the Ring

2009-05-25T17:34:00.000-07:00

This version was updated to a new version.

Classic Welcome: The Quest for the Ring Welcomes You to the Real Zone; Have a Nice Visit

2009-03-13T12:13:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the Quest for the Ring. You have left the Hype Zone and arrived in the Real Zone. Please check any rose colored glasses at the door. Here we post as much truth as we can 24/7. Please have a productive visit, and a nice trip back to the Hype Zone when your visit is over.

A SMALL SAMPLE OF CURRENT AND SOON TO COME QUEST FOR THE RING REAL ZONE TOPICS
--How and Why the 2009 Detroit Pistons Win or Lose in the 2009 Playoffs
--How and Why the Nuggets Franchise Has Repeatedly Fooled and Committed Fraud on the Public
--How and Why Much of What You Think You Know About Allen Iverson is Wrong (Continuing, much done already)
--How and Why Carmelo Anthony Has Been Downsized and Why This is Really Bad (Continuing, much done already)
--How and Why the Owner of the Nuggets Shortchanged and Cheated His Team (Continuing, much done already)
--How and Why the Pistons Maximize Their Playoff Chances, and why Joe Dumars is One of the Best GMs in the Game
--How and Why the Playoffs are Something Completely Different From the Regular Season

A SMALL SAMPLE OF ALREADY COMPLETED QUEST FOR THE RING REAL ZONE TOPICS
--How and Why George Karl is Doing More Harm Than Good With Respect to J.R. Smith
--How and Why George Karl's Obsession With Personalities is Wrong and Bad for Any Team
--How and Why George Karl and the Nuggets Can Not Win in the Playoffs (2007, 2008, and now 2009)
--How and Why George Karl Cheats the Fans and the Franchise Out of Performance and Development of "Reserve" Players
--How and Why Playmaking is So Important, and How You Manage Playmakers Correctly.
--How and Why You Have Probably Been Fooled Regarding the Nuggets' 2008 Off-Season and Their 2008-09 Defense
--How and Why So Many Nuggets Fans Hate Camby, Allen Iverson, and Antonio McDyess For False Reasons

Complete Directory of all the Ways to Find and Read Reports: The Readers are in Command at The Quest

2009-03-12T12:30:00.000-07:00

THE READERS ARE IN COMMAND AT QUEST
Quest for the Ring has graduated from the "read everything we write or else" page format. Furthermore, we have now graduated from the boring, traditional "content rules" that most blog type web sites follow in general.

There are at least six ways to find, choose, and read reports at Quest. If you insist, you can read reports off our pages, by using RSS readers, personally configured browsing home pages such as i Google, or by email if you prefer. But by giving you as many options for choosing and reading reports as possible, we are doing everything we can to persuade readers to read reports at the Quest itself rather than elsewhere. We want as many people as we can get to come to our pages. We have no way of knowing how fast outside readership is growing. And if you read the content elsewhere, you will miss out on having access to all kinds of other pages and content.

So in hopes of getting as many people as possible to read reports here rather than elsewhere, we have six reading options rather than just one or two....

OPTION ONE: REPORT READERS: As you scroll down either the Quest for the Ring home page, or any of the Quest report reader pages, such as The Quest for the Ring 2, and so forth, you will come upon many separate content readers, with 20 titles appearing in each one. Each one will be labeled with the posts that are contained in that reader; the latest post is #1, the next to the latest is #2, and so forth. The reports are not actually numbered; the numbering in the reader headers is only a temporary numeric description of how each report ranks chronologically. Whenever a new report is published, the "number" for all other reports increases by one, and the readers change accordingly. Every time a new report is published, each reader will have a new report appear at the top, and what was the oldest report in each reader will disappear from the bottom, to appear now at the top of the next oldest reader. Both for the readers by page as a whole, and within each reader, the order of the reports is always from newest at the top to oldest at the bottom.

By using any of the readers, you can quickly choose between and access any of the reports within the reader, right here right now. Please note that if you read reports in the readers, you usually must use the vertical scroll on the side of the reader to be able to see all of each report.

To read a report, simply click the title, or icon on the left, and the report will appear. To close an article you have opened, click the title again or the icon on the left next to the title. The titles and the icons are like an on-off switches. When the article closes, you are ready to pick another article to read.

Here are quick links to the pages containing the report readers:

Reports #401 to #500

OPTION TWO: QUEST FAST BREAK: THE LATEST 100 REPORTS INSTANTLYGo to the Fast Break Page if you like the readers, are not interested in anything other than Quest Reports, and/or if you are in a hurry.

OPTION THREE: QUEST EXPRESS VERSION: THE REPORTS ONLY ON A FAST LOADING PAGE IN THE STANDARD, PURE BLOG FORMATGo to the Quest Express Version Page if you need quick access to reports in the well known blog format, and you do not need any of the features and resouces available on the main home pages.

Even if you usually come to the main home page, you may wish to visit either Fast Break or Express when your time is limited.

OPTION FOUR: COMPLETE CONTENT DIRECTORY: You can use the complete Quest For the Ring Content Directory. This is a separate page which has links to every single report ever posted at Quest, all in one place. Each report link will lead to the Quest Express Version, which means it will load instantly and no scrolling will be needed to read it.

On your first visit to the Complete Directory page, please read the short User Guide that is right at the top. One of the notices in that Guide is that the index will probably not load in the Internet Explorer Browser. You will probably have to use Firefox, Safari, or another browser to be able to use the Complete Directory.

OPTION FIVE: THE GOOGLE ARCHIVE: You can use the Google archiving system. The Google archive has every single report ever published. We have our reports indexed by week which makes the archive as easy and convenient to use as possible. You will find the Google archive not far above where the reports start on The Quest for the Ring home page.

In the Google archive, the small triangle icons are "switches" that open and close title lists according to the weekly date ranges. In other words, each small triangle opens (or closes) all of the reports that were published in a particular week. If you click on the date range itself, all of the reports that were posted in that time frame will be loaded.

If you click on any title in the archive, the home page will reload with that article only. Once the home page is reloads with your selection, click the yellow Jump to Reports link near the top of the page to avoid having to scroll past everything above the report.

OPTION SIX: TRADITIONAL ON THE HOME PAGE: On the main home page, you can access a huge number of features, and you can use the traditional blog way to read reports. (See option #3 above for the traditional format with no features.) This may be your favorite way of reading if you do not wish to pick and choose among many different kinds of reports, and among many different reports. You can simply immediately go to the latest report and start reading: simply and quickly. This jump link will take you directly to where the traditional format is found.

Or, when arriving on the home page, click the yellow Jump to the Reports link near the top of the page to avoid having to scroll down past everything that is above the latest report.

To be totally clear, and helpful to those who are unfamiliar with the Google blog presentation system, a quick explanation of it is in order. At any time on the home page, either a particular, single report is loaded or, if the home page in general is loaded, the Google traditional post presentation format is in effect. In this format, the webmaster chooses how many reports he or she will show with each page load. We have chosen to show four reports in full. The newest report is at the top of all reports, the second newest report is below the newest, and so on.

At the bottom of these four, you click on "Older Posts," to load the next oldest four. If you click "Older Posts" over and over again, you will be loading older and older reports, four at a time. Every time you click "Older Posts" you can click the yellow Jump to the Reports link near the top of the page to avoid having to scroll down past everything that is above the reports on the home page.

The Quest for the Ring is Copyrighted, and all Rights are Reserved

2009-03-10T12:34:00.000-07:00

THE QUEST FOR THE RING IS COPYRIGHTED. ALL RIGHTS ARE RESERVED. No content appearing on either the main home page or on any other page operated by the owner, Basketball Winning, a non-profit organization, may be reproduced without prior approval. All copyright law rights are reserved. However, since we want to increase knowledge about this website, we are likely to grant certain reproduction rights upon written request, provided that you agree to give attribution and to exchange links. If you operate a website and want some of our content for your site, simply get approval and instructions by emailing your request to: nuggetsone @gmail

A Complete and Always Updated Directory of Quest for the Ring Reports

2009-03-09T13:21:00.000-07:00

COMPLETE CONTENT DIRECTORY>>> CLICK HERE TO SEE LINKS TO EVERY REPORT EVER POSTED.

Why Not Exchange Links With The Quest?

2009-03-08T13:25:00.000-07:00

You can link to the Quest site with no permission needed. To link to this site, copy and paste the code below into your site. Thanks, and you can email nuggetsone@gmail.com with your site address, and we will link back. Your link will go in the right column in the same area where the other already existing such links are. You may wish to, for convenience, use the following code when you construct the link.

Watch and Listen to Live NBA Games, and Download Completed Game

2009-03-07T13:22:00.000-08:00

LIVE GAME STREAMS
For the internet's best directory of internet sites which can give you access to radio and television boradcasts of live NBA games, visit our friend's site here.

DOWNLOADS OF ALREADY PLAYED GAMES
For the internet's best directory of videos and recordings of radio broadcasts of already played NBA games that you can download, visit our friend's site here.

RADIO BROADCASTS ARE ESPECIALLY EASY TO OBTAIN
If you miss the most recent game of a team, and want to listen to the radio broadcast of it, you can access that broadcast 24/7. At any time, the radio broadcast of the last game played is available. You will find that the pregame and postgame coverage of the game are included.

The Quest for the Ring Email Address

2009-03-06T13:28:00.000-08:00

SITE E-MAIL
The site email address is the webmaster email address: nuggets1nuggets. This is a gmail address, so you add @gmail.com after the nuggets1nuggets. Use this email address to contact Nuggets 1 for any reason. If you are smart enough to know how basketball games are won, and you want to get promoted, nicely formatted space for you to publish your winning in basketball writing, by all means write to the above address. Alternatively, you can also comment or instantly publish your writing, by visiting and posting here.

Qualifications of the Primary Writer

2009-03-05T13:30:00.000-08:00

The basketball expert and maniac who writes most of this site doesn't know how to stop until he has said and proved it all. So we are simply in a League of our own, and much of this unique content is for truly serious basketball people. The Quest for the Ring primary writer has two college degrees, one in Economics and one in Accounting. Both were with high honors and straight A grades. He played basketball in high school mostly because he was so tall at an early age but, unfortunately, he didn't have squat for athletic skills. Is that why he respects players more than other writers do? Probably so. In any event, he has been very closely following pro basketball for more than a dozen years. He has been extremely closely following the NBA in general and the Denver Nuggets in particular for over 4 years now. He has been learning the Detroit Pistons in great detail since the Iverson trade. He learns fast.

Free Advertising Program

2009-03-04T13:31:00.000-08:00

FREE ADVERTISING PROGRAM
The depression, or recession, or great heist, or whatever it is, means that we should work together, or else we will sink together. Therefore, the Quest is offerring free display advertising on this site until at least June 30, 2010. The program is for anyone who has a basketball related product or service. If the free program is not extended beyond that date, we will be offerring advertising at extremely low rates. The free display ad program is currently limited to four advertisers, on a first come first serve basis. Each advertiser gets 6 months free though if we think your product or service is especially important we will extend that indefinitely.

This program is not for large corporations; it is intended for small enterprises, especially newer ones. Nor is this program for those already affiliated with a major internet commercial site, such as ebay.

To advertise for free, email a request giving your web address and some basic information about your product or service. If you get approved, we will email you back. You will be approved unless you don't really have a basketball product or service, or unless you are a big company, or unless you are already getting a large amount of traffic. After you are approved, you can email your ad. Your ad should be sized to fit either in the User Guide or the right column. For User Guide ads, the width should be close to but nor more than 675px. The height should be 100px maximum. For sidebar ads, the maximum size is 240px by 240 px. We will even make a simple but nice looking ad for you if you want.

The email address to use is nuggets1nuggets@gmail

Quest Loading Times, Reloading, and Browser Usage

2009-03-03T13:33:00.000-08:00

LOADING OUR LOADED PAGE: The Nuggets 1 Main Page is chock loaded and needs time to load from sometimes sluggish or clunky Google servers. You may not be able to scroll properly while the page is loading. Links, including unfortunately the jump link to the latest content, may not work until the page is done or almost done loading. Please be patient and let it load. Your own computer system contains many variables that also determine how long it takes for Quest for the Ring to fully load. For example, how many programs and other sites are already up and running on your computer, and whether you have recently cleaned your temporary internet history and related caches will help determine how long it takes for the page to long.

Despite great variations, we will make estimates of how long the Quest home page will need to fully load. The following time are for those with reasonably healthy and not overburdened systems. With a fast broadband connection, generally a cable connection in the USA, the page will load in full in about 30-60 seconds. It will take 50-120 seconds to load with slower broadband connections, generally dsl in the USA. In Europe and Japan, my understanding is that dsl connections are frequently much faster than they are in the USA, so it would be less time for dsl in Europe and Japan. With a dial-up connection, the Quest home page might take 1-2.5 minutes to load, so just go on to something else and come back in about 2 minutes would be my advice if you are loading the page with a slow dial-up connection.

However you are assessing Quest, it is well worth the wait, so please try to be patient and let it load. Remember, most good things require at least a little bit of patience.

RELOADING WILL BE NECESSARY SOMETIMES
Every once in a while, parts of the page will not load. You will notice some things missing. If this happens, normally, if you click refresh and reload the page, you will get a complete loading and it will be a quicker loading than the original loading was. Having said that, you will find if you are a very heavy internet user that at any given time, if you have more than one browser available to you, that different browsers may load a loaded page such as this differently, with perhaps only one browser loading the page in full and other browsers failing to load one or more elements.

BROWSERS
All major users of the internet eventually realize that they must have at least 2 browsers, because browsers gradually become less reliable as time goes by, and because even if a browser is freshly downloaded, it may not properly load certain internet pages, whereas another browser will. If you notice open spaces on Quest (or any other website) even after reloading the page, you may need to try a different browser in order to more fully view that page. At this time, the Quest finds that any of the following browsers are able to fully, or at least almost fully, load Quest for the Ring pages: We recommend all of the following equally:

Internet Explorer
Mozilla Firefox
Safari

Directory of Quest for the Ring Reports

2009-03-02T13:39:00.000-08:00

DIRECTORY OF WHAT WE PRODUCE AND WHEN
Updated as of December 16, 2008
The Quest for the Ring produces reports about NBA professional basketball. Specifically, our primary objective is to determine and report on how games are won and how franchises become able to advance far in the Quest. We started out in 2007 as just a fan site for the Denver Nuggets and have expanded our mission now. Here in 2008-09, we are intending to produce by far the World's biggest and best game and team reports for the Denver Nuggets and for the Detroit Pistons.

We started out with the simple concept of doing one report for each Nuggets game. But after we came up with numerous sub-reports that we wanted to do, the legacy reports grew and grew until they were almost 10,000 words long! So it was necessary to break them down into parts, which are:

--Game, Team, and League Report
--Ultimate Game Breakdowns-Players
--Ultimate Game Breakdowns-Coaching
--Fast Breaks
--Special Reports
--Real Player Ratings for the best 330 NBA players
--Real Player Ratings by NBA team
--Real Team Rating Reports
--Real Coach Rating Reports

A full "Total Report Set" consists of these three reports:
--Game, Team, and League Report (GTLRs)
--Ultimate Game Breakdowns-Players
--Ultimate Game Breakdowns-Coaching

Game, Team, and League Reports (GTLRs): The emphasis and topics will differ depending on the team and it's situation. Whatever is most important for the team in question is what we want to cover. Topics will most commonly be as follows: the real story of what happened in the game or games and why; the state of the team and why it is in that state; fact-based looks at players, positions, coaching; key developments on other key teams; key NBA developments.
Ultimate Game Breakdowns-The Players: How the players did in accurate, total detail, as shown by the Real Player Ratings. Every year the Quest for the Ring will be covering two NBA teams extensively, one in the East and one in the West. For 2008-09, the teams are the Denver Nuggets and the Detroit Pistons. Look for 35 of these reports for Nuggets games, and for at least 35 for Pistons games for the 2008-09 season. We try but do not always succeed to have these reports available by the afternoon of the day after the game.
Ultimate Game Breakdowns-Coaching: How and why the coaching succeeded or failed, in groundbreaking detail and focus. Look for about 25 of these reports for Nuggets games and about 25 for Pistons games for the 2008-09 season. These reports should be available by the afternoon of the 3rd day after the game (within about 64 hours after a game.)
Fast Breaks: Fast Breaks are short articles; most of them are on key topics. They are especially useful when important news breaks and you don't want to remain silent on the subject until a Full Report is finally completed. Virtually all other blogs limit themselves to what we call here Fast Breaks; they do not ever do lenghty articles loaded with evidence, proofs, and statistics like we have here. After we decided to do fast breaks, we have been struggling to figure out how to treat them editorially, and we have latched onto and then later rejected 3 different plans before arriving at the current one, which we expect will be the permanent one.
December 16 Editing Changes: As of December 16, two very important changes were made in the editing plan. These changes are most likely the finishing touches for a plan which has gone through many developmental phases during 2008, and now is ready to be the operational plan for 2009 and for hopefully many years thereafter. We went from complete chaos to a finely tuned editing plan ready for prime time. It took many, many hours or work and iterations.

First, the tight tie-in between Fast Breaks and Game/Team/League Reports (GTLRs) was relaxed. For several months, the evolving editing plan was envisioning that all Fast Breaks would be incorporated in full in ensuing GTLRs. The new plan is that some of the Fast Breaks will stand on their own.

In conjunction with this change, it was necessary to adobt a new production measurement system. We decided to use number of words for this. Despite this change, the majority and probably the great majority of Fast Breaks will still be picked up, expanded upon, and improved to some extent in ensuing GTLRs.

An implication of this change is that we are no longer going to be promising a specific number of GTLRs anymore. But we are now pledging to produce 20,000 words or more a month during the NBA season. And we are still going to be pledging a specific number of statistical reports, such as Ultimate Game Breakdown: Players reports, Real Team Ratings reports, various kinds of Real Player Ratings reports, and so forth.

The other big change is that GTLRs will no longer automatically cover the particular game they are tied to to any extent. Really good or important games will still be covered in detail. Other games will be covered briefly, as has been increasingly the case in recent months and years. The new change is that now, the details of some games, usually near routs or routs where the larger issues being discussed on Quest played out, will hardly be mentioned at all.

When non-game topics are considered more deserving of the limited editorial space and time available, they will get the coverage instead of relatively lopsided particular games. Technically, within the editorial plan, all GTLRs will still be tied to individual games, all of which have been carefully chosen in advance to be the most important games for the team.

An implication of this change is that I will no longer automatically reference a game score in GTLR titles. If there is a score in a title, it means that the game will be covered in some detail. If there is no score in the title, it means that the report will be one that skips the individual game and goes into topics that are broader than any particular

The games that will be covered in total detail are all carefully chosen games between the Nuggets or the Pistons and mostly the best teams of the NBA. None of the full coverage games will be where one of the teams is at a disadvantage because it is playing on back to back nights, whereas the other team is not. Nor will we waste time doing extensive coverage of any game where both teams are playing on back to back nights. There is a reason why the NBA does not allow any team to be playing on back to back nights during the playoffs.
What about the playoffs? Look for about 20 sets (60 GTLR reports) during the playoff season. As long as the Nuggets and/or the Pistons are in the playoffs, we will cover as many of their playoff games as possible. If the combined total of Nuggets and Pistons playoff games is less than 20, which is likely to be the case, we will choose what we think are the best playoff games between other teams for the full coverage. We will of course do full coverage of at least some of the NBA Championship games.
Wild Card Total Report Sets During the regular season, there will be about 4 "Wild Card" Total Report Sets. These will total 12 reports. We will choose four of the most interesting and important games of the NBA not involving the Nuggets or the Raptors for these.
Additional Ultimate Game Breakdown-Players Reports During the regular season, 10 Ultimate Game Breakdown-Players Reports, in addition to the 25 described already, will be produced for the Nuggets and the same will be true for the Pistons. So in total, there will be 35 Nuggets and 35 Raptors Ultimate Game Breakdown-Players Reports.
Special Reports: Special Reports are, as the name implies, about subjects that go beyond the usual. These are creative and controversial magazine style stories usually divided into parts. 8 such reports per year are planned. Look for one report at the end of every month except that their will be no special reports during the playoff months of April, May, and June, and no such report in November. All special reports in full are on both the Quest home page and on Nuggets 1 Special Reports.
Real Player Ratings-All NBA Reports: A very important Special Report that tells you how well and how much each player is really doing. The main report, showing how well each player has been playing, or in other words the quality of that player, will starting in March, 2009, be accompanied by a "Real Player Production Report" for NBA players, which as the name implies, tells you how much a player did, or the quantity. Quality and quantity are approximately equally important if you want to get the best possible view of the value of the NBA players. These NBA wide reports, consisting of the two sub reports of quality and quantity, are scheduled for the middle of March and for the middle of July of each year.
Real Player Ratings by NBA Team Reports Real Player Ratings are now also going to appear in a great new team format. The team reports will come out at the pace of 1 every 2-3 days during two periods during the year: from early January until mid March, and then from late September until late October. Additional and very important Real Player Ratings by Team, for the 8 best teams in the NBA, as the playoffs get underway, will be issued in late April.
Real Player Ratings-Supplemental for the Nuggets and for the Pistons: Two extra Real Player Ratings by Team reports are planned for the Nuggets and for the Pistons, to be issued in late December and in early July. So for these two teams, four Real Player Ratings Reports by Team are scheduled, for late December, for between early January and early March, for early July, and for between late September and late October..
Real Team Ratings-for the 30 NBA Teams These are more accurate and more sophisticated versions of various team ranking lists that you see on the big corporation internet sites. Our system was dead on accurate this past spring in predicting that it would be a Celtics-Lakers Championship and that the Celtics would win. Look for these very valuable reports to come out 6 times per year: on about November 28, December 26, January 24, Februay 22, March 20, and April 18.
Real Coach Ratintgs-for the 30 NBA Head Coaches: This is an annual (in late October) report which gives you total detail on each of the thirty head coaches heading into the new season. There is a total rating and three very interesting and important sub-ratings. As with more and more of our reports, the complete underlying data spreadsheet is available for readers to view on a web page hosted by Google Documents.
Forum Discussions: Nuggets 1 keeps tuned in to the fan base by actively participating in forum discussions. The content you will find in a posting of such discussions will often be a sneak preview of some of the topics and points that will appear in later, full game reports. Discussions are sometimes rude, sometimes funny, lightly edited or even completely unedited, and generally a lot of fun. Forum discussions will go on Quest for the Ring, which will always have every word of original content on it. But forum discussions will be featured prominently on Nuggets 1 Fast Break as well.
Historical Note: The old organization, in the early days of Nuggets 1, was that everything above except for the new forum discussions was combined together into reports that grew to be almost 10,000 words long! Change was needed

DON'T LOSE OUT: BOOKMARK NUGGETS 1 NOW--CLICK HERE

How and Why the Quest is Different

2009-02-27T13:43:00.000-08:00

A SUMMARY OF WHY QUEST FOR THE RING IS DIFFERENT AND WHY YOU SHOULD BE HERE
QUEST FOR THE RING: Knew that the Martin benching in 2006, the tormenting and benching of J.R. Smith in 2007, and the point guard fiasco in 2008, all the fault of George Karl, would go a long way to dooming the Nuggets in the playoffs in those respective years. We knew that J.R. Smith was going to be a great guard all along.
OTHER WRITERS: Most during 2006, 2007, and even into 2008 thought that J.R. Smith would always be a loser, and the specifics of the 2008 PG disaster generally blew right by them

QUEST FOR THE RING: Only who deserves the blame gets the blame; we don't rip players for a small number of poor games, or if the responsibility for how they are playing lies elsewhere. We are more pro player and more anti-basketball establishment than are other writers. We tell you about how basketball should be and about how games are won and about how franchises stay on the winning track.
OTHER WRITERS: They do rip players for a few poor games, and they frequently don't put responsibility where it really belongs. They rarely or at best just once in a while go after anyone other than the players themselves. They like to think that if the players just "tried harder" the results would be more wins, which is not true, not only because it assumes incorrectly that the players are not doing about the best they can in the context they are in, but also because winning and losing is determined by many, many other factors than "how hard" players are "trying". There is virtually no such thing as a pro NBA player who doesn't "try hard"! If a player doesn't try his very hardest, it's more than likely due to a perception by that player that the team coaching or management is inferior or incorrect.

QUEST FOR THE RING: Knew that George Karl was never going to succeed with the Nuggets from day 1 and we won't forget it.
OTHER WRITERS: It took them a long time to come around to agreeing that George Karl is a failure at coaching the Nuggets, and many of them will more or less forget about their discovery next season. Update: Most if not all of the other site owners dropped any objection to George Karl following the surprisingly successful 2008-09 season, wheras of course Quest remained critical.

QUEST FOR THE RING: Opinions that are really facts that very few know; everything we write is fact based, nothing is said just to start an argument and get ratings. If you don't like facts, statistics, and logical proofs, you won't like Nuggets 1.
OTHER WRITERS: Loaded with light and fluffy opinions, and also "false flag" emotional, extreme opinions that the writer may not believe, but that are so provocative that they boost traffic to the site, because fans feel the need to comment on the site after they read the extreme opinions. Sports radio broadcasters do the same thing; they don't really believe some of the things they say; they are out for ratings

QUEST FOR THE RING: We don't waste our time on speculations about trades that never happen. Potential trades are covered only if they reveal things about team managment.
OTHER WRITERS: They do waste their time on speculations about trades that never happen.

QUEST FOR THE RING: Always loaded with facts, stats, and insights about how and why basketball games are won that you can't find anywhere else.
OTHER WRITERS: Depending on the writer, the facts, stats, and original insights about how and why basketball games are won are kind of hard to find or impossible to find. Some writers do however, do more specific play analysis than Quest did through at least 2009. More specific play analysis is planned for Quest for 2010 and beyond.

QUEST FOR THE RING: All original content; we hardly ever put links to big Corporation and other sites in our content; we are not ever going to simply read other stuff and report on and link to it here.
OTHER WRITERS: Some of them often do this, and it's kind of insulting to both the reader and the writer when you think about it.

If you have a brain and you are tired of the ordinary fluff and emotional baiting of other writers, you will like Quest. If you do like the Quest for the Ring serious but at the same time entertaining approach to basketball, and you are smart instead of emotional and fluffy, please consider teaming up; if you really know some things about how basketball games are won, we can set you up with a blog like this for your team at no cost.

What You Will Miss if You do not Bookmark The Quest for the Ring

2009-02-26T13:45:00.000-08:00

IF YOU FORGET TO BOOKMARK QUEST FOR THE RING AND YOU DON'T COME BACK, THIS IS WHAT YOU WILL MISS:
Simply the Biggest and Best Game and Team Reports on the Nuggets and the Pistons on the Planet, Including Real Player Ratings, Available Here Only, for the Nuggets, the Pistons, and for the Whole NBA

SPECIAL REPORTS--2007-08 SPECIAL REPORTS:
The J.R. Smith Fiasco
The George Karl Fiasco
Allen Iverson: What Could Have Been
DON'T LOSE OUT: BOOKMARK NUGGETS 1 NOW--CLICK HERE

A VERY, VERY PARTIAL LIST OF WHAT CAN BE FOUND IN THE QUEST FOR THE RING GAME REPORTS AND GAME BREAKDOWNS
--The Famous Real Player Ratings
--Real Team Ratings
--Real Coach Ratings
--Controversies that are swept under the rug and that no one else goes into because they are, well, under the rug
--Why and how the Nuggets, the Pistons, and other NBA teams are winning or losing
--Why and how some franchises are managed a lot better than other franchises are
--Projections of playoff seeds and playoff results based on carefully selected and proven statistical measurements; we intend to continue to tell you who will in the playoffs before they take place.
--The Alert System-Check on the Real Status of the Nuggets and the Pistons
--Fast Breaks--The Quest format for blogging the way everyone else does: short and to the point postings
--Way too much more to mention

LINKS FOR:
NBA games live
NBA games and basketball movies available for download
Radio broadcasts of the most recent Nuggets game available 24/7
Advanced statistical breakdowns for Nuggets players, Pistons players and, by extension, all NBA players current and past
Quest for the Ring Nuggets and Pistons players pages
Way to much more to mention

AND MUCH, MUCH MORE:
Videos, More Videos, Photos, & More Photos
Nuggets News, NBA News, Nuggets Rumors, & Other Takes
Live Scores, Stats, Standings, and Results
The Nuggets 1 Basketball School
The Nuggets 1 Basketball Magazine, Sports Articles, & Nuggets 1 Extra
Hundreds of Nuggets Items for Sale at Nuggets 1 Buy and Sell
Colorado Sports, Colorado College Sports, Colorado News, & Colorado Weather
Coming Soon: Real Team Ratings-Find out how the 30 NBA teams stack up

From here on out, don't say you have not been warned about what you will miss if you don't bookmark the Quest.

DON'T LOSE OUT: BOOKMARK NUGGETS 1 NOW--CLICK HERE

The Quest for the Ring Either Produces or Links to Every Basketball Information Site You Will Ever Need

2009-02-25T13:48:00.000-08:00

CONTENT OTHER THAN OUR REPORTS, WITH A QUEST FOR THE RING EDIT AND TOUCH:
There is way to much to cover all of it, but we can summarize. Start your investigation of this content with the Main Menu, which is not far from the top of this page in the right column. Here you will find pages designed by Quest that get you the basketball, sports, and even other information you need and want quickly and easily. For example, there is a page for every Nuggets player and one for almost every Pistons player. There is a relatively popular rumors page. And there are many others. Further down the right column, you will see links to the very best sources of basketball information and data. And there will also be links to photo sets, Colorado news and information, and even the Quest for the Ring formatted radio stations!

In what has been an unexpected but pleasant surprise, among the Quest main menu pages, the Nuggets 1 Basketball School has been the big hit on the internet traffic wise. As a result, we are pouring more resources into developing this site during 2008. You see, there are a lot of players out there who know that being able to win is not enough; you have to know how to win! You might want to pay a visit:

NUGGETS 1 BASKETBALL SCHOOL

Whether in season or off season, there will always be something great appearing at Quest for the Ring. Something that you can use to learn how to win. So visit year round y'all!

Classic Nuggets 1 Promotional Introduction, an Interesting Promotional Item

2009-02-24T13:52:00.000-08:00

The Quest for the Ring was originally Nuggets 1, and this is a classic 2008 promotional introduction to it:

Welcome to the brand new home built especially for Denver Nuggets, basketball, and Colorado sports fans in general. We come locked and loaded. Everything you could need to follow The Nuggets can be found here. You will find that you can use Nuggets 1 as your ultimate Nuggets internet reference. This is the most complete multimedia directory to all content on the Internet that involves the Denver Nuggets. Anyone who uses the Nuggets 1 main menu will get to the content he or she wants in less time than any other way. Keep watching Nuggets 1 and the Nuggets as they both get bigger and better. Peace.

Only about 1 in 200 basketball fans are fans of the Denver Nuggets. It is a longshot that this small market franchise will ever win a Championship in our lifetimes. If you are among the few, the proud, the Nuggets fans, this is your site. You can find out what the Nuggets would have to do to be able to have a real chance of winning a Championship. If you want light and fluffy opinions, go elsewhere. Although we always keep it very entertaining, and although we add jokes wherever possible, our reports are the hard truth, the real truth, the ugly truth sometimes, and the factual truth, with smoking gun evidence always provided to prove the case. So if you want and can handle the truth, this site is for you. We are eventually going to have more writers on here, and they will without a doubt be hard hitting and smart also.

Introductory Nuggets 1 Material From Early 2008: More Interesting Quest History

2009-02-23T13:59:00.000-08:00

How about an interesting blast from the past? Before it was The Quest for the Ring it was Nuggets 1. This was introductory material on the Nuggets 1 home page in 2008:

WE DO NOT LIKE GEORGE KARL'S COACHING TO SAY THE LEAST, AND NEVER HAVE

Want to know why the Nuggets are in great danger of not making the playoffs even though they are one of the most talented teams in pro basketball, and even though some top commentators forecasted them to at least reach the West finals in 2008? Most and probably all of the reasons are here. And Nuggets 1 was calling for George Karl to be replaced as soon as he was hired. As Aristotle said many, many years ago, "He who can not be a good follower can not be a good leader." Karl is not a good follower, he sees only his way and is unable to come up with ways to manage the Nuggets that follow the skills and playing styles of individual players, warts and all. You have to follow before you can lead, in other words you have to adjust your ways to reflect what you are working with, and GK can not or will not do that.