I’m also struggling to determine if there’s something about this particular Hoyas club that makes them more likable than any I can remember, or if that’s just my mind playing tricks on me because they’re good and have not yet suffered the type of late-season collapse they’ve endure in most recent years.

But if there is something extra about them that I’m enjoying beyond just that they’re my alma mater’s basketball team and they’ve been steadily ranked among the top 20 teams in the nation for the past two month, I think Nicole Auerbach gets at it here: They seem particularly good at playing together.

Last year’s team graduated its two best players, guards Austin Freeman and Chris Wright. Freeman typically did most of his damage from the perimeter and Wright was more apt to slash and drive to the basket, though neither was so offensively limited. Both seemed streaky, both could take over games, and, as seniors, both were assertive.

Their departure left the team with merely three upperclassmen: senior guard Jason Clark, junior forward Hollis Thompson and senior center Henry Sims.

Clark is a 6’2″ third-year starter with arms that go down to his ankle. He’s strong on defense, he can shoot from anywhere and he makes layups in traffic. Thompson hits nearly half of his three-pointers and does a little bit of everything everywhere else. Neither seems wont to force the issue on offense.

Sims occasionally does, which is exceptionally weird to anyone who watched him play a brand of confused, tentative and often downright lousy basketball in sparing minutes the last few years. Something happened to Sims this offseason — a long talk with his mother, most say — and now he’s awesome. He bangs down jumpers from 18 feet and hits turnaround fadeaways over opposing seven-footers. And, like most Georgetown big men, he’s an excellent passer.

I’m getting into too many details here and I never intended that. The Hoyas also roll deep for the first time in a while, with an impressive freshman class led by Otto Porter and featuring a bunch of other dudes that seem to have at least one strong asset and one notable weakness, none of which probably matter much to you.

Point is, I’m pretty sure this Georgetown team actually is more fun to watch than previous incarnations. And I don’t mean to say they’re better for losing Wright and Freeman, their two best players, like how the Mets should traid David Wright because he’s unclutch or anything. But I think the departure of the assertive stars, the emergence of more passive ones and the influx of depth make the Hoyas more aesthetically interesting.

Which is to say: They pass the ball well, and frequently. Oh, and they play awesome defense. It’s enjoyable.

Unfortunately, Syracuse is good at everything except having its players pass their classes and being willing to stay in the Big East. Plus, given how hostile the Carrier Dome environment is to opposing fans, I could only imagine how difficult it must be to play a road game there. So this could suck.

OHHHHHHHHHH!

Not sure if any of y’all saw the ninth-ranked Georgetown Hoyas come back from a 17-point deficit midway through the second half against No. 20 Marquette last night at the Verizon Center, but it ranks among the most awesome things that have ever awesomed.

The Hoyas, my alma mater’s basketball squad, are the only team I follow for which I currently maintain any legitimate short-term hope, what with the Jets embroiled in some Beltranian postseason locker-room turmoil and the Mets banking their offseason on Andres Torres, Corey Wimberley and a bunch of relievers that’ll probably be dealt in July if they meet with any success.

And being a Georgetown fan these past couple of years has been not unlike cheering the Mets in 2008, full of promise despite a clearly flawed team — but unencumbered the off-field fuss that has plagued the Mets since — and ultimately ending in heartbreak and disappointment. So when the Hoyas are winning as they have been winning since an early-season loss to Kansas in Hawaii — inspiring all sorts of fawning post-hoc analysis from around the Internet — I watch with some trepidation, knowing as I do that there are dozens of other college hoops teams off to awesome starts and hundreds of others vying for the ultimate prize, that fans of all but one will end up disappointed, that the Big East conference schedule is a bloodthirsty 1,500-pound grizzly of a bear and that all this dizzying post-holiday Hoya-fan exuberance can and likely will be destroyed at some point by a single injury to a key player or a prolonged shooting slump or one of those games where Seton Hall randomly refuses to miss three-pointers.

So though a loss to the nation’s 20-ranked team would hardly spell doom for my Hoyas in January, at some point in the second half I could hear the delusion train leaving the station last night with me still fumbling with my credit card at the ticket machine. I even took to my iPad for some NBA Jam, turning my attention briefly away from the chatter on ESPNU about the undersized Marquette team’s spirited play that somehow neglected to mention the obnoxious way those players seemed more dedicated to drawing fouls than making baskets.

Then, when all seemed bleak — and with Chris Paul heating up, no less — something… something just happened. After about 20 minutes of the Hoya freshmen playing like overwhelmed underclassmen, they yielded to the team’s few veterans.

And all of a sudden Jason Clark, a 6-2 senior guard with Inspector Gadget arms like a 7-footer, is grabbing loose balls and driving to the basket and the Hoyas are trimming the lead. Then Henry Sims, a 6-10 senior center and former top recruit who played laughable basketball until a stern talking-to from his mother refocused him this offseason, is blocking shots at one end of the court and hitting a beautiful fadeaway at the other, and the refs seem on to Marquette’s flop jig and now the difference is down to five. And now Hollis Thompson, a 6-8 junior forward who has never missed a big shot in his life, is nailing them down from all over the floor and the Eagles can’t get out of their own way, and the once-lost game is tied, and I’m punching the arms of my La-Z-Boy and making such a racket in my living room that my wife gets a little freaked out and leaves for a walk because it’s been a long time since she has seen me act this way.

By the time she comes back with cookies — cookies! — the Hoyas have won, 73-70.

Which is to say: OHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

That type of night. Let me enjoy this while it lasts, huh?

It turns out Kevin Durant playing flag football with a bunch of college kids looks about exactly the way you’d expect. My question is: Why would the opposing quarterback ever throw to the receiver being covered by the 6’9″ NBA star? Was he trying to prove something, or just trying to keep Durant in the action?

Via Seth Greenberg.

“We’ve been mulling this move for a long time, and we think it’s best for our program,” Athletic Director Daryl Gross probably said. “The truth is, the rigors of Big East play and Georgetown’s ever-looming presence made this decision easy for us.”

Syracuse’s departure clears the way for the remaining basketball-only teams in the Big East to form a new, way better conference unsullied by the ever-filthy, perpetually overrated, and utterly detestable Orange.

“I suppose this renders our conference’s future uncertain,” Georgetown coach John Thompson III could have said. “But at least I never have to set foot in that godforsaken hellhole again in my life.”

“I’m a big stupid jerk,” added Syracuse basketball coach Jim Boeheim, presumably. “Look at my jerk face! Waaaah! Waaaah!”

- Charles Barkley.

It’s either bad on me or bad on society at large that I’ve seen Barkley’s unfortunate mugshot about 100 times yet never before heard or seen this quote. Here’s a reason to like the man beyond his noted Taco Bell advocacy and remarkable rebounding skills. (Though it’s patently turrible that we still feel the need to laud people for taking stances that should be obvious.)

Click through and read all of Will Leitch’s piece.

Yet his retirement is forcing many Chinese to acknowledge that their country has relied on Yao alone for victory and national pride, ignoring shortcomings in the state sports system that leave China facing a future bereft of N.B.A. and Olympic basketball glory.

- Dan Levin, N.Y. Times.

I’ve probably mentioned here before that I spent a month in China in the summer of 2007 for grad school. Yao’s image was plastered everywhere, especially in his native Shanghai. One of the first Chinese guys I met asked me to “detail the extent of Yao’s genius and its influence on America.” I spotted basketball hoops inside the Forbidden City and at the base of the Great Wall at Badaling.

I should note now that I am a terrible basketball player by U.S. suburban kid standards. I’m a decent passer with a strong lower body and a good sense of physics so I’m vaguely useful grabbing rebounds, but I can’t hit a shot from outside 10 feet and I tend to dribble the ball off my feet. I never played any organized basketball at any level, and in pickup games I’m usually among the worst or the very worst player on the court.

But I played a few times with some dudes in Shanghai and felt like Allen Iverson. It was a small sample of both opponents and games, but it seemed like there was a certain baseline level of play and basketball coordination that came with growing up in the U.S. and playing regularly against better competition that made me a better player. Some of these kids clearly played pretty often. They all had better jumpshots than I did and several of them were better athletes, but even my rudimentary crossover dribbles beguiled them.

Again, it could just be that I happened upon one particularly terrible group of college-aged Chinese basketball players. But it stands to reason that if these guys grew up — according to Levin’s article — with no instruction at all, they’d hit a ceiling of sorts.

I’ll leave the sweeping discussions of Chinese economics to people who have studied them at greater lengths than I have, but in 2007, China was pretty clearly enduring frenzied change. I saw a shirtless man standing on a pile of rubble in the shadow of the Jin Mao Tower, holding a naked baby, talking on a cell phone, selling crabs out of a bucket. I don’t want to overstep my bounds as a sports and sandwich blogger, but I tend to figure once the pace of change settles a bit, that nation will come to things like youth basketball, and we’ll eventually see a huge influx of Chinese athletes in professional sports.

How awesome is Shaq? How awesome is it that now Shaq’s going to have tons of time to make silly Internet videos, without that whole pesky trying-to-stay-healthy-enough-for-pro-basketball thing?