He Stats! He Scores!

That probably won't happen, Sterner says. Musselman is known for keeping his lineups intact, and in the current climate for NBA coaches -- 14 of 15 Eastern Conference teams have changed coaches since the end of last season -- few would venture any kind of bold experiment. "It would be a big change," Sterner says. "I don't know if you do that right now. I think each coach has a philosophy that he believes in, and there's no right or wrong."

"Unless you're losing a lot," he says. That day, the Warriors were seven games under .500.

The Warriors play the Utah Jazz one Monday evening in Oakland, and it's possible that the most interesting thing to transpire over the course of the game is the conversation in Section 111, Row 28. There, and continuing into the parking lot afterward, Beech and Basketball on Paper author Dean Oliver touch on: why Beech thinks the time will come when he can disregard "the notion of the assist"; the most effective way to razz a free-throw shooter (according to one study at Duke University); the proper trajectory of a jump shot (according to another study); and the fact that Beech's favorite player is Joe Barry Carroll. It's a retro night at the Arena, in fact, with the teams and some of the fans in throwback jerseys, and Beech jokes that he should've worn his Joe Barry Carroll shirt. Once or twice, we get an arched eyebrow from a guy in the row ahead of us.

The Warriors wind up winning, 101-85, a rare blowout, and Dampier plays one of his best games yet, scoring 18 points, grabbing a career-high 24 rebounds, and finishing with a plus-minus of +20. Still, Beech isn't impressed with these Warriors. As he sees it, the team on the floor tonight was built old and creaky, in the hope that an experienced group would capture a low playoff seed this season and thus "breed good will in the fan base" -- essentially mortgaging the younger players' development on a long shot.

If Beech ran the Warriors, this is what he'd do: He'd start by trading the veterans, some if not all, even the productive ones -- point guard Van Exel (plus-minus, as of Feb. 6: -8.3), forward Clifford Robinson (-0.1), backup Calbert Cheaney (+7.5), and, especially, Erick Dampier (-6.2), whose value around the league is likely as high as it'll ever be and probably more than a little inflated. On Beech's team, second-year forward Mike Dunleavy and rookie Mickael Pietrus would both play 36 minutes a game to "find out what the Warriors actually have in these two guys." Beech would play backup point guard Speedy Claxton 36 minutes, too. He would play Cardinal "big minutes." He would hand the reins to acrobatic shooting guard Jason Richardson and see how he responded. He would find out just what he had to work with. He would, to put it another way, probably be fired after a week.

But never mind that. Beech grew up a Warriors fan, and it's the sad lot of a Warriors fan to watch team after team scrap their rosters and rebuild before anyone determined what was there in the first place. So this would be his big experiment, the stathead revolution brought to bear on a dire situation. It's simple, really: make a good team by making a team that actually knows itself.