Whose Lede Is It Anyway?

The Philadelphia 76ers won a game Tuesday night.

It was the first game they'd won this year.

Thanks For the Great Summer NBA TV!

Here we are.  The day before the NFL returns – which is my personal mark for the end of summer.  This is when the sports world gets interesting again (for me) as we have multiple sports with meaningful contests on a daily/weekly basis.  Normally in July/August, I spend way too much time following training camps, free agency, and reports from practice.  Watching the NFL Network in the summer can leave with that guilty feeling of wasting hours of your life and getting dumber, similar to the feeling to realizing that Nick at Nite has been on in the background for hours.

O-and-Seventy-Six-er

I suppose I should wait to write this until after the 76ers have tied the record for longest losing streak in NBA history - and rest assured, they will. 30th in points allowed, 20th in points scored, bereft of the vast majority of experienced players they started the season with, they're simply awful.

8 Things We Will See Moving Into The Sweet 16

• There are 2 AAC teams still alive in the tournament: UConn and Louisville. There is one ACC team: Virginia. Look for ACC fans to start pre-emptively claiming Louisville as one of their own, even though the Cardinals don't jump conferences until next year.
• Roughly 98% of the locals grousing about how all of the NC Triangle teams have been bounced from the tournament will mention Duke and Carolina. Some will mention NC State. Almost none will mention North Carolina Central, which, at 28-6, had the best record of any of the bunch.

On Basketball as a Winter Olympics Sport

To all the columnists suggesting that basketball be moved to the Winter Olympics because it's a "winter sport", we humbly respond with:

You're wrong. 

They Booed Bynum

They booed Andrew Bynum in Philly.
This is not a surprise. It is Philadelphia, after all, and while the legend of pelting Santa with snowballs has been blown out of all proportion, the fans do like to show their displeasure with enthusiasm. And Andrew Bynum is someone the formerly apathetic Sixers fanbase is mightily displeased with.

Because We Are Nothing If Not Timely...

Some thoughts on the NCAA basketball title game, courtesy of our own Sean Kiley...

So I don’t watch a lot of college basketball during the regular season. I just find regular season games to be boring as hell and all very similar. I have, however, in the past, taken the day off of work to watch the first day of the tournament. (I said I was “sick with March Madness.” I actually used that when I missed a class in college. The professor was Pakistani, and thought it was a legitimate illness until the other guys in the class started snickering.) I really think that the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament is the best sporting event of the year. No seven game series, upsets galore, and kids playing their hearts out, living and dying with every lead change. I missed out last year, not having the time to watch most of the tournament. I’ve had two reasons to get into the tournament more this year:

In the Cauldron of Cameron

Mason Plumlee, practicing telekinesis

So.

Duke-Carolina tickets.

I did not attend Duke. I did not attend North Carolina. My rooting interest in the ACC, such as it is, lies with Boston College, a school whose unseemly departure from the Big East I still find annoying and who, despite being closer to the actual Atlantic Coast than any other school in the conference, still gets crap for not belonging. (Dear Georgia Tech: It's a long drive from Atlanta to the beach. Trust me on this one.)

I won the tickets in a charity raffle. "You gonna sell them?" my coworkers asked. "They're going for six hundred a piece on StubHub."

I thought about it. I may be a writer, but I can do math, and that's a lot of money.

But it was Duke-Carolina. I've been living in the Triangle for thirteen and a half years. During that entire time, the sports conversation has almost entirely been dominated by Duke-Carolina. Carolina-Duke. Zellers and Montrosses and Duhons and Stricklands and Hensons and, God help us all, the occasional Zoubek. State, yeah, sure, it was there, but really only so people could chant "Herb Must Go" ironically or otherwise. No, it was the War of the Blues, something that seemed transcendent.

I'm never getting to a Super Bowl. I have no interest in the BCS championship game, or the Masters'. The AAA Championship Game I'd taken my nephew to was a rain-soaked flogging. The World Series seems an impossible dream, and the Olympics, well, I'd been in Atlanta in 1996 and they were largely a traffic nightmare.

But Duke-Carolina. To go, to take my father - who had never been to a college basketball game. That would be something.

Dad was feeling up to it. That decided me. We'd go.

***

Walk into Cameron Indoor Stadium for the Carolina game as a stranger, and you will be lost. This is a place of ritual, of carefully prepared chants and behaviors, of fluttering championship banners like shrouds for hapless opponents, of ritual call and response. Everyone who belongs there knows the proper answers. Everyone who belongs there knows the times and the places and the words to say. And you realize after a while, that this is not a basketball game. It is a sacrifice, with Coach K as high priest and a liturgy of thunderous catcalls, and Carolina is on the altar.

Right about then is when, if you don't have a dog in the fight, you start rooting for Carolina. Because it's always nice to see the underdog survive.

***

Duke's tactics are simple: wear you down. Make you run through pick after pick after pick. Play hard, physical defense (and offense), and push up to the line of what the refs will call. If that line budges an inch, push that inch further. Of the five guys on the floor for Duke in the last minute tonight, four had four fouls.

That's what happened to UNC tonight. They got tired. They got worn down. The jumpers that they were popping free for in the first half started falling a little bit short. Enough Mason Plumlee elbows in the solar plexus and it starts affecting your shooting stroke. And when those jumpers stopped going in, then Duke picked up the game and ran away with it.

The final differential was 5. It really wasn't that close, not in the end.

***

Mason Plumlee is Shaq moves in a Brad Miller body. His best play is to get the ball down low, then repeatedly drop his shoulder and square his elbow into the gut of the man guarding him. Watch carefully and you'll see him practicing his "I've been fouled!" face even when no one's within five feet of him. You can't blame the kid; it works, especially when he's up against a pipe cleaner like James Michael McAdoo.

When he gets to the NBA and tries that move, though, Dwight Howard is going to turn him into a pretzel.

***

The hardest working people at the Duke-Carolina game are the Duke cheerleaders. They are out there every time out, handspringing their way up and down the court with fearless and reckless abandon. One young lady managed thirteen consecutive during a television time out; I can only assume that if she hadn't had her way blocked by one of the baskets, she would have just kept on going.

***

Sound is a physical thing at Cameron. It comes at you in waves, roaring around the building again and again. It starts in the Crazies, wells up in the student section and whips around and around until it rises to the upper deck, populated by middle-aged men in tan slacks and their sons and wives. It hits the walls hard enough to bruise, bounces off the ceiling and comes crashing down on itself. The chants get muddied until it's all one wild roar, hammering your eardrums and making your sternum throb in time.

I know there's words in the chanting. They hand out carefully prepared cheat sheets to the Cameron Crazies. But by the time the sound has finish boiling itself into a maelstrom, it all sounds like "WAAAUUURRRRGGHGHHH". It's a unified "WAAAAUUURRRGGHGGG", but it's a "WAAAAUUURRRGGHGGG".

***

Attending a game at Cameron Indoor forces you to become a jerk. At every Duke basket, the crowd surges to its feet, and stays standing until the resolution of the next Carolina possession. If you do not stand, your view of the game looks suspiciously like the back of someone's knockoff Seth Curry jersey. If you do stand, congratulations, you've become a jerk by blocking the view of the people behind you. Who will now stand in order to see, which will block the view of the people behind them. And so on and so forth, up until you get to the very last row, and you bang your head on the rafters.

I saw the game with my father, who is not necessarily built for standing for a couple of hours on end. Nor is he set up for a synagogue-style up, down, up, down. So he sat. So I sat with him. As a result, large portions of Duke's decisive run early in the second half looked a lot like the back of someone's shirt.


***

Duke won by 5. They made a run about ten minutes into the second half, and when it was over they were up by 6 and Carolina's jumpers were clanging off the rim. The Heels shot two airballs in the second half, clear signs that these guys were just exhausted, but this year Coach Roy doesn't have the horses, and the big guns had to stay out there. Duke pushed the lead to 8, and that's pretty much where it stayed down the stretch. The game ended (after a little debate over a particular basket counted), and the fans streamed forth into the night, cheerful and exhilarated. Downstairs, the student section erupted out towards a rumored bonfire; the Cameron staff was friendly and polite and their shuttle service down to the handicapped lot where we'd parked was ridiculously efficient. As we rode down, a chopper flew overhead. "Probably looking for the bonfire", the driver cracked. Everybody laughed.

***

Love is blind.

The guy sitting in front of me is one of those fans who believes the next foul his team commits will be its first. Every Duke possession, he's up and shouting "Aww, come on!" at the refs while making the universal symbol for "hack" - right hand chopping down just above left wrist - so often I start wondering if he's actually David Byrne.

But that's fandom, which is love. The object of your affection is beautiful and perfect. All those who strive against it are twisted and corrupt.

And love, like the refs, is blind.

Duke-Carolina

Yes, they're real

For once, I will not be rooting for a meteor to hit the stadium.

Unless it's a very, very small meteor and it's going to buzz Dick Vitale.

Guest Post: Fix The NBA's Youth Problem

Guest post today from my brother, Sean Kiley:


I’m not a big college basketball fan. I watch during the conference tournaments and the NCAA tournament, and that’s about it. (Northwestern Pennsylvania is not exactly a Division-I hotbed.) I was struggling to figure out why I didn’t enjoy a sport that I love the professional version of, and I figured part of it out: college basketball games on TV all look the same. Seriously. They all play the same up and down the court offense with little variation. Defense is marginal at best.

I'm not helped by the fact that I don’t have the slightest idea who the players are, since anyone who is any good is gone to the NBA after a season. There’s no time to get to know the players like we could when I was a kid, and Clyde Drexler and Hakeem Olajuwon stayed at Houston, or Jordan and Worthy at UNC, or Laettner at Duke. It just doesn’t happen anymore. It’s to the point now where a player sticks around until his senior year, and you think to yourself “What’s his limitation? If he was any good, he’d have come out after his freshman or sophomore season.”

Very few of the players who come out early are instant stars in the NBA (there are a few, to be sure) but most would benefit from staying in college until they were a little bit more seasoned. There aren’t many who could succeed more at the age of 19 than they do at 18. There’s really not that much of a physical difference. They get to the NBA and have to get used to the more physical nature of the game. Basketball people call it “seasoning.” I just think that the kids would be better suited going to school for a few more years then sitting on the end of the bench for Sacramento watching them get blown out by Oklahoma City.

I have a solution!

The NBA needs to do what Major League Baseball does: You can declare for the draft right out of high school, and if you get drafted, you go pro, if they pay enough. If not, and you turn down the money and the pros, and decide to go to college, you have to stay in college for at least three years. (I’m not sure if there are redshirts in D-I. If so, then the redshirt year counts. I would think that it wouldn’t matter because anyone who was going to come out after their junior year would be good enough that the coach wouldn’t redshirt them. I digress.) Following your junior year, if you decided to come out, your original drafting team forfeits their rights to you. This rule would also mean that if a player leaves college after a year or two and goes, say, to Europe or China, they would have to wait until they would have been a junior to return to the US to play in the NBA.

This of course, would have to pass the muster of the NBA owners and David Stern, who would probably hate it because it wasn’t his idea, and he’s the most sinister commissioner in sports. (Goodell is the most power-mad, Selig the most senile, Bettman the most incompetent, and Stern the most sinister.) If the NBA and NCAA could get together and do that, I would definitely watch college basketball in February when the football season ends, instead of wishing there was hockey or waiting until baseball starts.

Sometimes, It Is the Coach

Mike D'Antoni stepped down as coach of the New York Knicks today, and it had the feel of a mercy killing. D'Antoni, as anyone who follows the NBA knows, ran an up-tempo mile-a-minute offense. At it's best, it's Westphalian, literally running other teams out of the gym and providing entertaining basketball. It's a system made, not for stars or guys who demand isolation plays, but rather for gym rats and guys who do one thing well, who can find a niche in the system and own it. When he has the players who fit his style, D'Antoni wins games. When he doesn't, the whole thing breaks down like a multiple-car pileup in a school zone.
New York is not a market for plucky role players and system basketball. It's a city that demands stars, wins be damned. And so when a spare part named Jeremy Lin took advantage of a temporarily star-less Knick team, filling the stat line and leading it to victories, he instantly became A Star, because, hey, that's the narrative the Big Apple pressure cooker demands. And when the team's real star, Carmelo Anthony, returned, the wheels fell off D'Antoni's scoring calliope as Anthony sucked the air out of the room.
But New York demanded Carmelo. It demanded a star, regardless of whether he fit in the coach's system, and so the Knicks mortgaged their future and ditched players who fit D'Antoni's system and just maybe listened to Isaiah Thomas' evil whisperings in owner James Dolan's ear to bring "star" Anthony to the big stage. It sank the team, but hey, the Knicks, who for years and years had wallowed in anonymous mediocrity, could at least reclaim the back pages.
But while they may have been more famous, they stopped being good. And the coach pays the price for that, regardless. D'Antoni was set up to fail. As a coach, he simply couldn't win with his system and these players. And so, unfair as it might be, that's why he had to go.

Then there's Western Kentucky, best known for being the only team in this year's NCAA men's basketball tournament (because as hard as it is to believe, the NCAA runs a LOT of tournaments - they just don't televise women's fencing) with a losing record. Not long ago, WKU was something of a mid-major terror, largely because it had a 7'2" center and a mascot who looked like a roided-out Grimace, but those days are gone. This year, they snuck into the Big Dance(TM) with a 15-18 record, even after winning the conference tournament.
Except, of course, that's not the whole story. They were 5-11 when they fired coach Ken McDonald. Do the math, and under new guy Ray Harper - a longtime success at lower levels - they went 10-7. Not great, no, but a winning record. And if you throw in the few games it took for Harper to get the team turned around, it looks like this ain't a bad team at all. Not great, maybe, but the same players who were cratering under McDonald are good enough to win a tournament play-in game over 20+ win Mississippi Valley State.
Sometimes, it really is the coach.

Really, It's the Lack of Parties

Earlier this weekend, I heard ESPN's J.A. Adande discussing why some of the luster was apparently off the NBA All-Star festivities this go-round. Bear in mind that I generally find Adande's commentary some of the most insightful stuff ESPN offers, and I will therefore willingly listen to him talk about things that I otherwise have no interest in.
But this time, not so much. One of the things he threw out there was that because the NBA season's schedule was so out of whack, there hadn't really been enough time for booking venues for parties and other festivities during the weekend1. And so some of the big parties weren't being thrown, and therefore the weekend wasn't as All-Star-Spectacular as it had been in years past.
Now, call me crazy, but I'm reasonably sure the reason nobody was excited about the All-Star Weekend, and particularly not about the 3 Point Contest and the Slam Dunk Contest, was due to a combination of two factors. One, nobody knew when the hell All-Star weekend was going to be. (Did it just happen? I don't know. I wasn't looking.) Two, the Slam Dunk Contest2, typically the only part of the weekend that non-hardcore fans care about, was populated by something called a Chase Budinger (who has played a grand total of 24 minutes in his team's last 3 games), a Paul George (averaging 12 points per game), a Derrick Williams (18 minutes and 7 points per game) and your winner, Utah's Jeremy Evans, owner of a career mark of 3.2 points per game. That's three backups and a fourth option. It doesn't matter how many glow-in-the-dark jerseys or two-ball slams get thrown, if nobody's heard of the guys throwing them down, nobody's going to watch. This is a league that's been hanging it's image on visuals of stars like Blake Griffin, Kobe Bryant, Amar'e Stoudamire, and Dwight Howard posterizing hapless D-League refugees. To promise that, and then deliver the guy on the end of Utah's bench? That, not the lack of parties that all blend together for those of us on the wrong side of the velvet rope, just might be why interest was down.





1If Nike can't figure out how to leverage its cash and resources to throw a party on only a few months' notice, Nike isn't that interested in throwing a party.
2Ironically, the 3 Point Shooting Contest, which traditionally gets as much love as Uwe Boll at the Oscars, had a couple of actual stars in it this year. I didn't know that, either.

14.2 Seconds to Glory

I was listening with UNC's Associate Athletic Director In Charge Of Media Or Something (also known as Minister of Propaganda For the Benevolent Blue Royocracy) of UNC called in to a local sports talk station to try to explain how exactly the sainted Roy Williams had managed to leave five kids and a couple of assistant coaches out on the floor when he pulled most of his team and staff into the locker room with 14 seconds remaining in Saturday's flogging at the hands of Florida State. To be fair, nobody questioned Williams for pulling his team; the FSU crowd looked ready to storm the court, UNC had suffered a bad experience earlier when a female manager was trampled by rowdy UNLV fans storming the court after an upset victory, and when you're in Tallahassee, there's always the danger of being mistaken for a chunk of turf and getting impaled with a flaming spear.

The problem was, the explanation given sounded, well, goofy. That Williams had talked to FSU head coach Leonard Hamilton and they'd agreed to let UNC go home early, that made sense. But then the story got wonky. Roy's instructions didn't get communicated. He didn't look at game film until much later, so he had no idea that five of his guys, plus some coaches, had been left out there. They went straight into the team prayer, so apparently noticed the guys who were missing, were missing, and, then a few days later, it was left to the assistant AD to call into 850 The Buzz to try to lay it all out for the masses.

You know, I believe it's possible that in the confusion, things got lost. Stuff didn't get communicated. Wires got crossed. And nobody got hurt, unlike in that UNLV game.

That being said, it's still not an excuse. If you think the situation is so dangerous that you have to get your kids out of there, you have to get all of the kids entrusted to you out of there, and you have to make sure that they all get accounted for. Elementary school teachers taking field trips grasp this concept; the ridiculously highly paid coach of a high-profile basketball program, a man who is known for his obsessive, meticulous attention to detail, ought to have it down pat, too. If nothing else, the fact that the refs were setting up for an inbounds play should have warned him that not everyone was down with the 14 second early dismissal; coaches are supposed to notice things like that.

So we're left with a couple of options here. One, it happened the way Roy Williams said it did, and he was guilty of sloppy carelessness. Two, Williams pulled his people off the court and didn't bother to check to make sure everyone made it out, then made up the "I didn't know story" later. That makes him careless and mendacious. Or three, he was interested in getting the key people - the starters - out of there, and the rest was smokescreen, with the AD sent to fall on his sword for the good of the program*.

I don't know which is the case, and I don't particularly care. As has been noted elsewhere, the Roy Williams era in Chapel Hill has been marked by high strangeness as well as spectacular success. And yeah, everyone makes mistakes once in a while, and that includes superstar coaches as well as workaday zhlubs. But no matter what actually happened - and we will never know, now that Williams has officially denounced anyone who dare question the official story - the fact remains that in a situation where the adult in charge decided things were dangerous, players somehow got left behind. One can only hope that next time it happens, Roy Williams takes the time, even if it's all the remaining time, to make sure everyone he's responsible is actually with him.

*Four, which makes even less sense than the rest of this, is that the guys who stayed out there, either coach or players, ignored instructions to get off the court to nab those sweet, sweet 14.2 seconds of PT. That being said, I don't see ignoring the coach's instructions in a potentially environment as a route to either more PT down the road or, in the case of the coaches, continued employment.