History of the Quest for the Ring

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.