Portland 92, Seattle 88

A good effort for the Trail Blazers. They kept the energy up for the entire game even when the shots weren't falling, and Joel Przybilla (four blocks, 11 rebounds in just 31 minutes) was especially impressive. That said, Greg Oden's new haircut was the most interesting part of the game.

Before you rip me for my blatant love of the superficial, look to the right. That's a beautiful piece of work. Admit it.

Seattle's getting better, and it's nice to see a SuperSonics rotation that is relying almost exclusively on the young talent this team is trying to develop, but it was a pair of vets that wouldn't allow Seattle to turn the corner. Chris Wilcox could have fouled LaMarcus Aldridge out by the third quarter, but his head wasn't into it on Thursday, and Wilcox mustered only two points and two rebounds in 14 foul-plagued minutes.

Earl Watson tried too much, and while his 15 points, eight rebounds and nine assists helped; his five turnovers seemed to come at all the wrong times.

So, faced with a bit of a snoozer, I want to bring something up that flies in the face of what too many cable TV analysts keep turning to when they try to tell you how good or how bad specific teams are defensively: the field goal percentage a team allows its opponents.

Doug Collins is a fine, if exacting, analyst, but it was his turn to bring up this overrated stat tonight; talking about how Seattle (a usually crummy defensive team) is better than people think mainly because they don't let their opponents shoot a good percentage.

Yes, it's great that the SuperSonics hold opponents to a low field goal percentage (44.8 percent, eighth-best in the NBA), but what does that matter if the SuperSonics send teams to the line a lot (13^th-most in the league), and allow teams to shoot a high percentage from behind the three point line (37.5 percent, third-worst)?

In the second part of Seattle's home-and-home against Portland on Friday, the SuperSonics could hold the Trail Blazers to 41 percent from the floor, and actually lower their overall defensive field goal percentage. But what if Portland hits 12 of 30 (40 percent) from behind the three-point line? The overall defensive FG percentage improves, but the Blazers might be well on their way to a 110-point game!

Kelly Dwyer used an exclamation point! This could be con-ta-gious!

In another recent instance, the Chicago Bulls led the NBA in field goal percentage defense in 2005 and 2006, but they also sent their opponents to the line about 182 times a game, which doesn't affect that percentage a single bit. And, like Seattle, Chicago also turned the ball over a ton, which allowed the opponents more chances to not shoot well from the floor, but to ultimately put up more points. So while they were great defensively, leading the NBA (or, in Seattle's case, doing surprisingly well) in this particular stat isn't always telling.

You wouldn't call the player with the best individual field goal percentage (this year, Andris Biedrins) the best scorer in the NBA, nor would you assume him to be among the best just off that stat alone. So why do national analysts constantly do the same with defensive field goal percentage? It makes no sense.

Points allowed, people, normalized for pace. There's your answer.

Seattle IS improving defensively, they had a nice game tonight (about 99 points allowed per 100 possessions, ten points less than they usually give up), but this team is still 20^th in defensive efficiency.

(Did you see that gorgeous floater in the lane that Durant hit with about three minutes to go? Off the wrong foot? A close second to Oden's haircut.)

Houston 112, Miami 100

Unlike last season (or, worse, the 2001-02 run that saw a boring and lottery-bound Knick team televised twice a month), TNT's gotten pretty lucky with the lineups this year. But you're not going to win all of them, especially when you're in the business of picking late-February's entertainment the previous July, and tonight was an example of such.

Shaq was supposed to be backing down Yao in this contest, while Greg Oden was supposed to be swatting Kevin Durant's floaters into the 13^th row during the second pairing.

Good thing the trade deadline deals kept the Turner crew buzzing. Otherwise ... igh. That's right, "igh."

The Rockets got off to a hot start while the Heat adamantly refused to move their feet or talk in transition. Houston then spent the bulk of final three quarters impatiently waiting for the clock to end and the team's tenth-straight win to win itself. Miami wasn't good enough to do much about it, Pat Riley's crew got the deficit down to nine points a few times, but the Rockets were clearly better.

Rookie Carl Landry (19 points, five rebounds, zero turnovers in almost 25 minutes) had another solid game off the bench for Houston. Considering that he played his college ball about 10 minutes away from where I'm typing this, and that I hadn't even heard of this guy's name until he was drafted last June, I might want to start paying attention to this whole En Cee Ay-Ay-thing.

Nah.

San Antonio 100, Minnesota 99

Gregg Popovich probably isn't happy, but there are going to be games like this, and you can't expect Minnesota's record alone to ease the Spurs into a 25-point victory.

The Timberwolves have talent, lots of it, but youth and inconsistency usually leaves Minnesota coach Randy Wittman (I was halfway into typing Flip Saunders' last name out of muscle memory, but caught myself ...) with just one of his cadre of talented youngsters playing well alongside Al Jefferson.

Wittman's own rotation choices also hamstring his team at times, but that's a story for another, slower, day.

Tonight, however, saw most of the young Wolves were hitting shots. Minnesota's trio of point guard-sized wannabe shooting guards (Rashad McCants, Randy Foye, and Sebastian Telfair) each hit half their looks from the floor, while Jefferson (28 points) was his usual self.

The Wolves defense was pretty lousy. It wasn't the main reason why Manu the Monster went off for 44 points, but both the Timberwolves perimeter and interior defenders consistently tended to forget that Manu is, not sure if you've heard, left-handed. Even Minnesota center Theo Ratliff, who has been chasing after Manu for almost six years now, was still preparing for Ginobili to drive and finish right in the lane. Ridiculous.

Manu's a beast, though. Forty-four points on 18 shots. I should have saved the "ridiculous" line for this paragraph. So it goes.

Related: Behind the boxscore