I caught the Jazz-Spurs game last night. Deron Williams is a very special player. He is very different from John Stockton (with whom Williams trained last summer). Stockton had court vision and the ability to read defenses very well,  making him seem both fundamentally sound and creative in the pick and roll offense. Williams has an amazing knack for getting his defenders off-balance by penetrating and alternating between a layup and a pull-up jumper. The thing they have most in common is a killer instinct and the will to take over a game when their teammates are fading.

Too bad the Jazz couldn't overcome Manu Ginobili's performance of 22 points, 18 flops, 6 rebounds 4 dives and 1 bald spot. A bravura performance. Is it prejudiced of me to assume that the refs must have been pretty bad not just by the huge disparity between free throws attempted but also because a mostly Mormon crowd began throwing things onto the court in protest? That's always been a lively crowd but I've never seen anything like that from them before.

You may have noticed there are going to be some changes around here. I've added social bookmarking links to each post. I use Ma.gnolia myself. I've also been updating and adding links. Be sure to check out great blogs by conservative Shawn Macomber, New York libertarian Todd Seavey, the transatlantic Alex Massie, and two young liberal bloggers that I really enjoy: Michael Corcoran who is working at The Nation right now and the irrepressible and prodigious Matt Zeitlin.

In the future we will be seeing less in the way of pictures here and more in the way of content. I've let concerns about visual uniformity between posts prevent me from writing this blog. That ends today.