My writing desk is now thick with an odd and unlikely assortment of books and magazines, all of them relating in one way or another--and with varying degrees of profundity--to the subject of professional basketball. Sitting on a chair to my right, floating atop a stack of files and newspapers, is a giant green scrapbook into which I've begun pasting relevant clips from our local sports pages. And just last week, I started up a brand-new manila folder, christened "Sonics Paraphernalia & Other Stuff." Into this file went three important artifacts: my first ticket stub of the season, a glossy 2000-2001 program (with a picture of Rashard Lewis leaping off the cover), and a crumpled training-camp roster printed on yellow paper. All this, and the regular season has yet to start. I've only seen the Sonics compete once, in a topsy-turvy and mildly hopeful pre-season victory against the Sacramento Kings. Everything else I know about the upcoming season is "on paper," as the saying goes.So, on paper, among all these prognosticating indicators and number-crunching charts and theoretical polls pointing through the miasmic guesswork to Elysian fields of expertise--well, the Sonics look strong, sure. And yet nobody in the press knows quite what to do with them. I've seen them ranked anywhere from a lowly fifth in the Pacific Division (in the December issue of Slam), to a powerful fifth in the overall NBA standings (in the current Sporting News). Obviously, such wild divergence of opinion pertains to the league as a whole, especially in the tumultuous wake of an off-season in which approximately 150 players changed teams through free agency and cluster trades. According to The Sporting News, this amounts to "close to a 40-percent shift" from last season's rosters. It's all flux and flimflam, and anyone's educated guess necessarily hangs on the unsteady hinge of speculation. About the only thing everybody can agree upon--surprise fucking surprise--is the fact that the Hollywood Lakers will once again take the big cake. I find this so brutally and outrageously depressing that I refuse to think about it right now.

In all my Sonics-oriented monitoring of the pre-season press, I'd have to say that the most interesting thing I've happened upon is the "Crystal Ball," a sidebar in which various Sporting News staffers offer their particular picks for winners in the upcoming season. The predictive categories are sub-divided into division champion, then conference champion, then titlist--and finally, at the very bottom of the list, tucked away like an afterthought, there's a critical slot for the "dark horse," a single team that might-just-could-maybe coalesce into a serious challenger. The "dark horse" category, then, is a kind of fail-safe plan, an out for sports journalists. Into this category they can place that one team which, given the proper alignment of "intangibles," is capable of throwing the whole scheme out of whack. So here's the deal: Among the seven journalists polled, the Sonics are the only team that showed up in the "dark horse" bin more than once--in fact, not twice, but three times. You get the idea.

And one last thing regarding all these books and papers and magazines of which I speak: A few columns ago, after watching a Sonics open practice, I waxed poetic about the enormity of Ewing's hands. Then, just last week, before I attended a green-on-white scrimmage, I happened upon this passage in Spike Lee's basketball memoir, Best Seat in the House: "Patrick Ewing. Number 33.... Not a quick jumper. And his hands are small, not much bigger than mine...." So I took another look, and sure enough, Ewing's got some small mitts. I must have been hallucinating.