Tag: College Basketball

Rumeal Robinson and the Temple of Doom

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FT

Bounce, bounce, bounce.

Twirl the ball backwards from fingertips to palm.

Bend your knees, make the T with your fingertips.

Aim just over the front rim. Release and follow-thru towards the hoop, not back.

You gotta hit your free throws.

Some purists, George Will types mostly, claim baseball to be the greatest of our sports, because it is untimed. Therefore, a team can and will trail but can never be counted out by the clock. They get their three outs to keep themselves alive. Yet in basketball the clock does stop and allow for free throws, the shots that salt away leads or chip away at deficits, and the game is reduced to its similarly pure form: one player, one ball, one basket. It’s both beautifully basic and terrifyingly naked. There’s no defense, quite literally, for a miss.

And tonight in San Antonio, there were plenty of misses and no defense. In the most tense, exciting, and dramatic NCAA Championship of the decade, the overtime spectacle really lasted only 40 minutes. For once the Final Four orphans Memphis and Kansas tipped off their five minute curtain call re-knotted at 63, the game was over before it began again. The look on the sidelines said more than enough. Kansas players pushed each other and fidgeted in their seats, eventually standing up and hopping with Benchanticipation. On the other sideline, the Tigers sat stonefaced, occasionally glancing up at the scoreboard like they were looking for a stolen wallet. Derrick Rose cramped up at the end of regulation and had to be helped off the court, only to be shoved back out there to save the season. It could have all been over with, if.

Carolina Blue and Westwood Gold suffered spankings on Saturday night, but their fates now seem much more preferable to the public gutwrenching of the Memphis Tigers and their two leaders, the All-America Chris Douglas-Roberts and the All-But-Gone Rose. The four missed free throws between them in the final 1:15, especially CDR’s no-for-two with 16 seconds left, opened the door on an improbable 9 point, 2 minute Jayhawk comeback a sliver of an inch. And, once Coach John Calipari’s goal of fouling to prevent chaos went down the drain (“We didn’t foul hard enough,” he offered), Mario Chalmers snuck around a Chalmershigh screen and launched a three point dagger (“Like I was in my own backyard,” he said to FOX Radio) that dropped through the net, the net of Jordan, Lorenzo Charles, Keith Smart, Scotty Thurman, and the other faded memories of NCAA titles long past. Memphis sleptwalked through the overtime, an eventual 75-68 final, and is now left to daydream about the nets they didn’t cut down.

The NCAA runners-up cap off the winningest season in college basketball history with the most painful loss in title game history. ??? ???? ??????? ??? ????? No team has ever blown such a large lead in a small frame of time. It takes a great deal to wipe Darius Washington’s agony off the list of the most painful charity stripe moments in a school’s history, but even as we speak these free throws are joining Bill Buckner at Shea, Jean van de Velde in the wee burn at Carnoustie, and Gene Mauch and the Phightin’ Phils, taking their seat on Scott Norwood’s 38 yard line. Memphis has had a fairly nondescript basketball past, with a couple of Final Fours and the receiving end of Bill Walton’s biggest day. ??????? ???? ????? Tonight they had their best chance to date to unfurl a banner, and oh, once you get one, they can’t take it away. The worst part is that no one–not Bill Self, not Mario Chalmers, not Billy Packer–no one took it away, either. In gagging on the sport’s most basic play, the Tigers simply failed to take what was rightfully theirs. It’s a sharp gouge to the basketball fan’s soul.

But it’s a hurt with blame attached to it. Even the aforementioned Rumeal Robinson, a Michigan man with the 64% touch, nailed down the 1989 championship (in overtime, no less) with two straight swishes to give interim coach Steve Fisher an interim one-point title victory. The free throw comes down to focus and mechanics; some kids have ’em, some kids don’t. And the two players that didn’t were the architects of this whole empire; everything this team had built rested on their shoulders. It was their right to go up to that line and cinch the glory. And they couldn’t do it. One more make and the story of the 2008 Memphis Tigers is of a breakneck, athletic, speedy and utterly dominating (nearly 19 ppg average margin) force, one of the great teams of the decade and maybe of all time (a win would have ended them at 39-1). But the result is what it is, and now the late-game woes will be seen as a microcosm of their season, a slow pendulum swinging all year long and waiting to rear its ugly head at an inevitably climactic moment. ??? ???? ?? ????? And it did, ball on rimand so shall it be.

Now Memphis has hit its head on the top of the curve, and away they go from grand pomp to dire circumstances. Rose and Douglas-Roberts are likely gone; Calipari’s road won’t get much easier anytime soon, and everywhere they go, the team will be hounded by the airing of their own hideous baggage. Teams from the non-power conferences don’t get many chances at the top; check out where Cincinnati or UNLV are right now, far removed from past glories. For 6 months, 38 minutes, and 9 seconds, the University of Memphis had just about the best basketball team in the country. Sometimes, though, you only get one shot to stand alone.

You’d better hit it.

“[NBA] playoffs? You want to talk about [NBA] playoffs? Are you kidding me?”

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Other people hear that Dallas was knocked off and cheer. I hear it and immediately say, “Wait – didn’t the NBA just have playoffs?”

I seriously cannot keep track of the NBA’s season. Baseball and football have traditional seasons associated with them (spring and summer in the former; fall and winter in the latter). But until the NBA starts playing outdoor games, I’ll never have a concrete sense of when it’s “basketball season.” However, you can get the latest and most up-to-date NBA picks when you need them most only here at NBA picks and predictions!

NBA.com tells me that the playoffs started on April 21st and could end on June 21st. That’s two straight months of playoffs. Consider that pre-season games begin in early October and you’ve got an 8-month season. Can you imagine if football started in July? Or if the first pitch was thrown in March? That’s the level of absurdity we’re talking about here.

So here’s my new and improved NBA schedule, designed using science and shit.

(1) You play everyone in your conference twice.

(2) You play everyone in your division an additional time (so, three times for them in total)

(3) You play eight games out of conference, I don’t care against who. Are the fans really dying for a Clippers / Bobcats match-up? I don’t think so. Read More

Virgina Wins!

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Virgina WinsThere is no I in team… or in the last syllable of Virginia apparently. The good people at “the other college basketball tournament” or N.I.T. as they like to be called made a little mistake on some championship t-shirts. Looks like the mountaineers have a new West Virgina shirt to bring home. Hey, it could have been worse, they could have been wearing some new West Vagina shirts.

I know, I’m not really one to talk about spelling, because I can’t spell my way out of last place in a Scrabble game. But come on people, they invent tools for this. Hell, Firefox has it built in so that, no matter what website I’m on, I can comment like I went to College, unlike the folks at the Not Invited Tournament who make the No I T-shirts. And that’s not the only thing the NIT does stupidly: scheduling game to happen at the same time as the NCAA games. You have to realize that you’re the second fiddle and that you’ll get much more SportsCenter air time if you have games on different nights.

Of course, you have to wonder (or you don’t, but I will): what about those lovely championship shirts that would have gone to second place Clemson if they had won? We all know that they immediately ship these shirts out to impoverished African nations, so we’ll never know if there is some child wearing a beautiful Clemson Tiggers shirt.

Hoya Saxa… not that it matters

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I’m a terrible gambler sports prognosticator. As mentioned previously, we do this little fantasy baseball league, and I’m solid middle of the road year-in, year-out. So it should hardly be surprising that my lack of picking prowess translates into other, equally venerable sports betting guessing arenas.

I entered an NCAA pool this year, giving in to that yearly sisyphean impulse. Imagine my dismay when I saw that Georgetown (and the combo of Patrick Ewing Jr. and John Thompson XV/V) and BC would meet in the second round! (If it helps the imagination, the most dismay I could experience was about five bucks’ worth.) What to do? Logically, I couldn’t pick BC over a bigger, more consistent Hoyas team with a fierce basketball pedigree… but if a team were to eliminate our Eagles, clearly I should pick them to win out. Read More