Basketball
drorzel | August 31, 2009One of the nice things about being a parent is getting to introduce SteelyKid to my own obsessions. Like, for example, the great game of basketball:
"You want me to throw this how high?"
Maybe we'll stick with something a little smaller for now:
(Hey to Todd Clark, who gave us the toy hoop...)
razib | July 22, 2009In China, a Rocky Ascent for Basketball. I love this quote:
Chinese players like Wang Yong of the Dongguan Leopards support the increased participation of foreign players. "Chinese and foreign players are a harmonious blend," he said. "I've learned a lot from them this season and feel I am a better player."
drorzel | July 10, 2009If you're desperate for something to fill your Friday afternoon, and not the comment-leaving sort, you could do a lot worse than spending an hour and a half (give or take) with Chuck Klosternman and Bill Simmons in their two part ESPN podcast. It's nominally about sports, but they spend a good bit of time talking about Michael Jackson (in a sensible way, not a vapid-entertainment-reporter way), the effects of fame, the effect of writing for an audience, and a bunch of other interesting stuff.
It's about a week old, but I only got around to it yesterday. It's worth a listen, though. It also…
drorzel | May 27, 2009It's that time of year when I check in to the giant methadone program that is the NBA, to help ease my way from college basketball season into the long, dull, summer when nothing worthwhile happens, sports-wise. Thus, I watched the second halves of most of last week's playoff games (I didn't get back to the hotel room until roughly halftime), and have been putting the games on in the evening here. From this, I have learned that:
1) Cleveland's entire offense consists of passing the ball around and hoping that LeBron James will do something spectacular. Nobody else appears to want to shoot the…
drorzel | May 15, 2009Malcolm Gladwell has a number of public responses to the sort of thing I ranted about the other day-- not to me specifically, mind, but to the same general points-- on his own blog and on ESPN's Page 2. It's pretty much the same argument others made in the comments to my post. Taking a fairly representative bit from his blog post:
The press is not for everyone. But then the piece never claimed that it was. I simply pointed out that insurgent strategies (substituting effort for ability and challenging conventions) represent one of David's only chances of competing successfully against Goliath…
drorzel | May 5, 2009I'm never quite sure what to make of Malcolm Gladwell. Lots of smart people seem to be favorably impressed by his writing and ideas, but whenever I actually read anything by him, there doesn't seem to be much there.
Take, for example, this New Yorker piece on basketball as a metaphor for innovation. As seems to be his general practice, Gladwell frames the whole thing around an engaging anecdote, about Vivek Ranadivé, a Silicon Valley businessman who coached his daughter's team of twelve-year-old girls in a National Junior Basketball competition:
Ranadivé looked at his girls. Morgan and…
drorzel | April 7, 2009Between the sleep deprivation caused by being home alone with the baby, and the new Jim Butcher book, I realized that I almost forgot to mention North Carolina's defeat of Michigan State for the NCAA basketball championship. I'm glad to see it for two reasons: their victory let me win two of the basketball pools I was in (neither involving money, alas), but more importantly, I like Roy Williams and I like this team. They play some really good basketball when they're clicking, and they absolutely dismantled the Spartans last night.
They're not going to displace Syracuse or Maryland in my…
terrasig | April 7, 2009Great timelapse video of the crowd converging on Franklin St at Columbia just below the Top of the Hill Restaurant and Brewery and the evolution of the bonfires that I still just do not understand.
But the best part of yesterday's game for me was reading Ed Brayton's recollections of his connections to the 30th anniversary of the 1979 Michigan State national champions:
So watching them win the national championship was a huge deal to me. I still remember every name, not just Magic and Greg Kelser and the stars but all the role players too - Terry Donnelly, Mike Brkovich and his brother Don,…
drorzel | March 30, 2009Last week, the more annoying yelling heads on ESPN and its affiliates were all making a big show of brushing off the complaints of NCAA fans who felt the tournament was missing something due to the lack of a "Cinderella" team from a small conference making it to the round of 16. This was just foolishness from people who know nothing about basketball, they said. The chalk-y nature of the tournament was a Good Thing because it produced "compelling match-ups" in the second weekend.
And ten of the twelve games just sucked. There were really only two games that had any drama at all, both involving…
drorzel | March 21, 2009The good news is, I'm solidly ahead of Barack Obama in my NCAA pool. The bad news is, the success rate of my serious picks is distressingly close to that of the Physics Grad Programs backet...
Various and sundry thoughts on the first two days of NCAA tournament action:
-- Not that many big upsets, and six of the ten lower seeds to win were from power conferences, and thus deficient in charm. The USC win over Boston College, in particular, was quite possible the dullest close win by a double-digit seed that I've ever seen. Even the crowd seemed bored.
Compare that to, say, East Tennessee State…
drorzel | March 20, 2009I carry some of my gear to and from the lunchtime basketball game in a red and white canvas-and-mesh bag. The zipper doesn't work, and hasn't for years, and the logo on the side is almost worn off, but if you look closely, you can still make out the New York State Public High School Athletic Association logo.
The bag was a freebie when my high school basketball team played in the NYSPHSAA championships in my senior year. That was twenty years ago this week-- I'm pretty sure that bag is older than some of the students who play with us at lunchtime.
I should note that I was a deep bench player…
drorzel | March 18, 2009Over at the New York Times' Freakonomics blog, Justin Wolfers gets into the March Madness spirit by reporting on a study of basketball games that yields the counter-intuitive result that being slightly behind at halftime makes a team more likely to win. It comes complete with a spiffy graph:
Explained by Wolfers thusly:
The first dot (on the bottom left) shows that among those teams behind by 10 points at halftime, only 11.8 percent won; the next dot shows that those behind by 9 points won 13.9 percent, and so on. The line of best fit (the solid line) shows that raising your halftime lead by…
drorzel | March 16, 2009The NCAA men's basketball tournament bracket was announced yesterday, which has kicked off the usual round of people "predicting" the outcomes based on totally silly criteria like the Academic Progress Rate of the schools in question.
This is, of course, completely frivolous. What you really need is solid, relevant information. Like predictions based on the ranking of physics graduate programs:
(Click for a slightly larger image.)
The algorithm used to fill this in was simple:
The school with the higher-ranked physics program wins
Schools with no physics program ranking lose to schools…
drorzel | March 15, 2009I've lost a lot of sleep this weekend staying up late to watch Syracuse games, so I'm only getting to some of the Friday articles in my RSS feeds now. I don't want to let this utterly worthless column by William Rhoden of the New York Times pass without comment though. It's ostensibly about the Syracuse-UConn six-overtime epic on Thursday night, but the actual description of the game is limited to two paragraphs at the very beginning that could've been written after twenty minutes of watching SportsCenter Friday morning.
The vast majority of the article-- seventeen of the twenty paragraphs--…
drorzel | March 15, 2009I haven't written much about basketball this year, for the simple reason that I haven't watched much basketball this year-- between SteelyKid, the book, and my day job, I just haven't had time. This weekend, though, I watched a whole bunch of hoops, mostly involving my two teams, Syracuse and Maryland. Yesterday was a bad day, as both lost, but they each had a good run leading up to that.
Various and sundry comments in no particular order:
-- One thing I have not missed in my non-hoops-watching winter has been the "announcing" team of Mike Patrick and Dick Vitale. I swear, these two reach a…
drorzel | March 13, 2009My plans to write long and smart blog posts today was thoroughly derailed last night by a combination of a slightly sick SteelyKid (she's had a runny nose for a while because of teething, but it seems to have slid into a bit of a sinus infection) and an incredible basketball game. Syracuse and UConn played an extra thirty minutes, with Syracuse finally winning in the sixth overtime. The game started at 9:30 pm, and ended at 1:30 am, and in the final OT, both teams were playing walk-ons who were seeing the court for only about the tenth time this season.
This was a good old-fashioned Big East…
drorzel | March 11, 2009One of my coaches, back in the day, always used to say that basketball was a game of quickness. Usually when he had just stolen the ball from somebody thirty years younger than him.
It's true, quickness is a big asset in basketball. But it's also a game of timing-- knowing when to shoot, when to pass, when to cut to the basket, and when to step into the passing lane and steal the ball to secure Cleveland State's first NCAA bid since 1986.
And, if you're talking pick-up basketball, there's also the important question of when to show up at the gym.
Arrival time is a major issue in places where…
drorzel | March 7, 2009It's March now, which means that we're at the absolute peak of the college basketball season. Small conferences have already started their tournaments, playing for the one shot those teams have of getting into the NCAA's. Big conference tournaments start next week, with the Big Dance the week after.
So, of course, ESPN and all its variants are devoting all of their energy to... speculating about Terrell Owens and Alex Rodriguez. Because, apparently, those two have signed-in-blood contracts with Satan ensuring that not one week passes without one or the other being the lead story on…
drorzel | February 21, 2009Maryland 88, North Carolina 85 (WARNING: Auto-playing video):
Greivis Vasquez did something no Maryland player had done since 1987, and the Terrapins pulled off an upset that was almost as remarkable.
Vasquez had a career-high 35 points and 11 rebounds and 10 assists -- Maryland's first triple-double in 22 years -- and the Terrapins rallied from a 16-point deficit to shock No. 3 North Carolina 88-85 in overtime Saturday, ending the Tar Heels' 10-game winning streak.
It wasn't on up here, so I don't have anything else to say.
drorzel | February 6, 2009Tennessee women's basketball coach Pat Summitt got her 1000th win last night, a record that will probably stand for a good long while. Nobody else in college basketball really has much of a shot-- the record for men's basketball coaches is Bob Knight at 902, and the most wins by an active coach is Mike Krzyzewski of Duke, somewhere short of 800.
I'm not a big follower of women's college basketball-- it doesn't really have the competitive balance of the men's game, and I'm not a huge fan of watching 30-point blowouts-- but what little I do know suggests that Summitt is a class act. I haven't…