Basketball
drorzel | April 7, 2006Hypothesis: The outcome of any pick-up basketball game depends more strongly on the match-up between the two worst players on each team than the match-up between the two best players on each team.
Argument: If the talent differential between the worst players is sufficiently large, then on defense, the better of the two is essentially free to double-team the other team's best player on every single possession, while the reverse is not true. Thus, the team with the single worst player is effectively playing four-on-five against the team with the second-worst player, and it's rare for the best…
drorzel | April 1, 2006Because my bracket picks this year have been so uncannily accurate (tied for twelfth of 23 in the ScienceBlogs pool), I'm sure you're all dying to know what my predictions are for the Final Four games, if only so you can bet the opposite. The short version is: Florida over LSU in the title game. The reasoning behind this is below the fold.
First of all. let me say that I'm not picking this on the basis of personal preference. Actually, I've been waffling between supporting George Mason or LSU for the last week, on the grounds that they're the only teams that seem to be enjoying themselves (…
drorzel | March 26, 2006Just a quick note: When I talked earlier about the aesthetic superiority of college basketball, I wasn't thinking of last night's Memphis-UCLA game. Ye gods, what an ugly display. That set basketball back so far they should've replaced the rims with peach baskets at halftime.
I think Memphis coach/ huckster John Calipari said it best:
"We just couldn't make a basket," Memphis Coach John Calipari said. "Please make a basket. Make a free throw. Anything. Kick one in."
It was vaguely consistent with my view of the game, in that Memphis was playing like an NBA team (one or two passes, followed…
drorzel | March 23, 2006Matt Yglesias has a fairly silly article denouncing the NCAA as a "celebration of mediocrity." Jason Zengerle takes issue with this, and provides a nice explanation of why college basketball is superior to the NBA on emotional grounds (and let me just note how happy I am to see our leading political magazines writing about something interesting for a change...). I prefer to take a different approach: in my opinion, what they play in the NBA is a bastardized and degenerate form of basketball, while the college game is closer to the true form of the game. I'll expand on this below the fold.
The…
drorzel | March 23, 2006One of the nice things about the move to ScienceBlogs is that I gained access to a much better stats package than we had for Steelypips. In particular, I can now look at the keywords that bring people to my site (for steelypips, I could only get keywords for the domain as a whole, which meant that my blog traffic was swamped by Kate's NetHack site.
On ScienceBlogs, though, I can easily find the odd search queries that have brought people to the site. Which is both depressing (the #4 result is "pharyngula," which really puts things in perspective...), and sort of interesting ("deep attachment…
drorzel | March 21, 2006So, how's my winning NCAA strategy going, you ask? Shut up, I reply.
Well, OK. I'm currently in a four-way tie for tenth place in the ScienceBlogs pool (of 23) on Yahoo. Of course, unlike some gloating people, all four of my Final Four picks are still alive... I still don't have much chance of catching the other people ahead of me.
So, for the record: Deliberate ignorance is a losing strategy. Hear that, Kansas and Ohio?
drorzel | March 17, 2006I passed on the first set of games in favor of playing some basketball with the usual lunchtime crowd, but made it home in time to see Bucknell finish up winning against Arkansas, and Northwestern State hit a wild three at the buzzer to beat Iowa. What state is that? That'd be Louisiana. Now you know, and knowing is half the battle.
Let's get back to it...
5:21: OK, one final note: The Burger King commerical with the giant chicken rodeo is the oddest thing I've seen in weeks. They're really cornered the market on hallucinatory spots about junk food, for whatever that's worth. I'm sure they're…
drorzel | March 17, 2006So, the big question in college basketball yesterday, "Can Syracuse sustain their Big East Tournament run through the NCAA's?" was answered with a resounding "No." They made a decent run at it, but Gerry McNamara didn't have any legs left, and went without a field goal for the first time in his career. Terrence Roberts played well, but he and Darryl "Flippers for Hands" Watkins were overmatched on the glass, and A&M pretty much controlled the game from start to finish.
I feel terrible for McNamara, as he really couldn't play, and is kind of down on himself:
"I feel great about it,"…
drorzel | March 16, 2006All right, we're back from our walk, and Emmy is very proud of the way she taunted the big scary German Shepherd up the road, so it's back to the games.
5:53 Marquette's three-point ace Steve Novak misses an open shot with eight seconds to play, and it's all over but the intentional fouling and free throws. The Big East is now 0-2. Montana's win over Nevada has also gone final. That's it for the afternoon games, and may be it for today's live-blogging (as Kate will probably want her computer back...)
5:51 Alabama is playing like they've never seen a full-court press, Marquette is playing like…
drorzel | March 16, 2006One of the few perks of working in academia is that I can take the occasional day off for no reason at all. I handed in my grades yesterday, and spring beak starts Monday, so I can feel free to take the afternoon off to sit on my ass and watch some basketball. And bring back First Round Live-Blogging. I'm sure this will drive all kinds of traffic...
3:17: BC wins the second overtime 14-2, and thus the game. The crowd started taunting them with the "over-rated" chant in the last few seconds, which has got to piss them off. Meanwhile, Tennessee has an early lead in the most anticipated 2-15…
drorzel | March 13, 2006So RPM thinks he's all clever, with the Double Entendre Fridays-- he's not the only one who can game search engine traffic...
If you're one of those philistines who doesn't like basketball go revel in nostalgia ("Cow... yup, yup yup.."), because we're all about the hoops this morning. It's that time of year again, when everybody rushes to fll out their brackets for the NCAA Tournament office pools, and we here at Chateau Steelypips are no exception:
Of course, the Subject: line aside, I never win these things, because I always pick the teams I root for to go far-- I figure, why put my…
drorzel | March 12, 2006I'd be required to turn in my fan card if I didn't at least mention Syracuse winning the Big East Championship in one of the more improbable runs I've ever seen (the AP story is tarted up with ESPN graphics here). They looked dead heading into the tournament-- having lost by 39 to lowly DePaul barely a week earlier-- but won four games in four days by a total of eight points to defend their conference championship from last year.
It's really hard to overstate how impressive Gerry McNamara's performance was in this tournament, though the sports media are going to do their damnedest to. I don't…
drorzel | February 12, 2006My Terrapins lost to the hated Dukies yesterday, 96-88. I'd be more down, but they actually played pretty well-- they just aren't that good a team this year, and Duke is better than they are. They gave a great effort, though, and might've had a chance if they'd had more than half of the right game plan.
On offense, they had exactly the right idea of how to attack Duke. Nik Caner-Medley came out and went right at JJ Redick, who isn't a great on-ball defender, and Maryland concentrated on scoring inside, which is Duke's weakness year in and year out (generic office pool tip: When you're filling…
drorzel | February 8, 2006I'm a bad basketball fan.
Duke played North Carolina last night, and I didn't watch. The Blue Devils are the #2 ranked team in the nation, the Tar Heels are the defending national champions, it was a back-and-forth game that went down to the wire, and I didn't watch any of it, other than a short stretch of the first half, to get the Maryland score from the crawl on the bottom of the screen.
There are lots of reasons I could give for this-- yesterday was a particularly difficult day at work, I'm still behind on grading from a couple of weeks ago when I was sick, I'm in the middle of a very…
drorzel | January 28, 2006Possibly the hardest thing to understand about the game of basketball is that it's really a very simple game. You pass the ball, you catch the ball, you shoot the ball, you rebound, you play defense. If you watch too much of the NBA, or sloppy college teams, or "Street Ball" on ESPN2 in the wee hours of the morning, you can get confused, and start to think it's a complicated game. It's not. You pass the ball, you catch the ball, you shoot the ball, you rebound, you play defense.
My best game is really as a post player, where I depend on other people to get me the ball, so I confront this a…