Category Archives: Other basketball
You’ll have to indulge me for a second:
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?
The Knicks signed Baron Davis today. Tommy Dee likes the deal, which is cool. I haven’t followed the NBA all that closely in years so I can’t tell you anything about it other than that Baron Davis is clearly that league’s foremost beard pioneer, so for that he should be celebrated. I saw him hailing a cab in Chelsea once and his beard was spectacular. It looked like this:
Kevin Durant tweeted that he was looking to play flag football in the Oklahoma City area. An Oklahoma State fraternity obliged.
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.
Fearing embarrassment in forthcoming conference matchups with the mighty Georgetown Hoyas, the pathetic Syracuse Orange will flee the Big East like petrified children.
“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!”
I’d rather have a gay guy who can play than a straight guy who can’t play… Any professional athlete who gets on TV or radio and says he never played with a gay guy is a stone-freakin’ idiot. I would even say the same thing in college. Every college player, every pro player in any sport has probably played with a gay person … I’ve been a big proponent of gay marriage for a long time, because as a black person, I can’t be in for any form of discrimination at all.
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.
For nearly a decade, China has been enthralled by the cult of Yao spun by Communist Party propagandists and corporate sponsors: the winner, the gentle giant, the favorite son. His image was ubiquitous here, and the public basked in his glow even as other Chinese players in the N.B.A. sputtered.
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.
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.
This is old, but it’s still funny:
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?
After a 19-year NBA career, Shaquille O’Neal is announcing his retirement… via home video.
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