Basketball Game of the Day (Syracuse-Maryland)

There was a lot of basketball played yesterday, and a lot more will be played today, but the most important of these games was unquestionably Syracuse's victory over Maryland last night in the Carrier Dome.

What? Yes it's an NIT game, not an NCAA game. So what? They're the two teams I root for, and I've never seen them play each other before. That makes it the most important game of the day for me, and this is my blog. If you liked some other game, get your own blog.

Anyway, with the game taking place a mere two hours from here, and tickets not exactly being in high demand (there were a few people on the upper deck of the Dome, but not many), I decided to go see it in person. So, yes, I drove 260 miles round trip yesterday to watch an NIT game. I'm an enormous dork, I know.

I haven't watched a great deal of big-time basketball live, but it's a very different experience than watching on tv. The difference isn't quite as extreme as the difference between live and televised football (live football is much more boring than televised football) or baseball (live baseball is fun, televised baseball is nearly unwatchable), but it's a significant change. You have much less information at your disposal in the arena, which makes it a little harder to keep track of things like fouls, rebounds, and turnovers, but even at an NIT game, there's an energy to being part of the crowd that you don't get at home.

Another advantage of being there in person is that you get a better sense of the size of the guys involved. Syracuse's Arinize Onuaku is gigantic. Jonny Flynn looks like a midget out on the court, but is actually a hair taller than average (he's not six feet, though, no matter what the media guide says).

Our seats (my parents came up from Scenic Whitney Point for the game) were at the Maryland end of the court, about fifteen rows up. It's not the best angle for basketball, but we had a perfectly good view. The only real problem was that the near basket was in a place where it blocked our view of Jim Boeheim objecting to calls. We had an excellent view of Gary Williams going apeshit over an offensive foul call against Maryland in the second half, though.

The game itself was kind of a season in miniature, particularly for Maryland. They came out playing really well, led for most of the first half, and then just faded toward the end. This happened again and again in the games that I saw this year. I'm not sure if they got tired (physically or mentally), or if they just had a limited repertoire of plays that the other team could figure out as the game went along, but whatever the reason, their little score graphs on ESPN's game summary pages too often looked like saturation curves-- going up quickly early, then flattening out late.

The biggest thing that jumps out in the box score is that Greivis Vasquez only had 8 points for the game, less than half of his average. This probably had something to do with the fact that Eric Hayes was acting as the primary ball-handler for much of the game. This was a little unusual for Maryland, and I wonder what the reason was.

The thing that isn't entirely obvious from the box score is that Arinze Onuaku was a beast in the first half. Paul Harris, Donte' Greene and Jonny Flynn all got hot late, and passed him in the scoring column, but for much of the first half, Onuaku was the Syracuse offense. He can't really shoot from more than about four feet out, but he did a great job in the post, and that opened things up for the rest of the team later.

Anyway, it was a decent game, and a good time. I would've liked the final score to be closer, but one way or another, one of my teams was going to win... It was fun to be in the Dome again, and I was very briefly tempted to look into tickets for the next game.

Driving through snow in Utica on the way back pretty much killed that thought, though. Ah, spring in New England...