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

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.