Living a Dream

Everyone wants to be like the Spurs, right? They've been the model of everything for the past 20 years, and only recently has anyone come up with a style of play that San Antonio has had to adjust for, and theoretically, the Warriors can't sustain this for several years. One of the best things San Antonio does is rotate players. Greg Popovich is a master of getting guys minutes, balancing rotations, and creating/finding matchups that work. The Spurs have 35 lineups that average 4 minutes together per game, and frankly it feels like a lot more than that. They rotate their guys early and often, keeping people fresh and keeping starters on the floor at almost all times. What Pop does so well is pull a starter about 5 minutes in and reinsert that starter earlier than his opponents. Imagine if Cleveland tried this. The way they're currently going, LeBron and JR Smith play the whole first quarter, with Kyrie, Love, and whoever's at center often playing about 9 minutes in ...

Back when we spent a weekend in Madrid , we stayed with my college roommate, Parker. It was awesome. Since we both were living in Europe, it was just a matter of time before Parker came to us in Milan. As luck would have it, his train wasn't scheduled to arrive until about 9:00 on a Saturday evening, so Jenna and I decided to spend Saturday north of the city in a place called Bergamo. Bergamo only existed as an airport to us, as that's where the airport is which Ryanair flies out of (side note, they should've spelled "air" with a Y and made themselves a palindrome). We'd been there plenty of times, but never left the airport. The town - small city, really - is at the foot of the mountains and signifies the start of the massive valley that Milan rests in. We took a train to Bergamo and walked through the lower part of the city - Citta Bassa, in Italian - which is mainly modern. Many things are older than those you'd find in the States, but that doesn...