Category: basketball

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Two words: Play offs

It’s NBA Playoff time, dear readers! There’s no chance on earth that the early games will be as exciting as last year’s, but that’s no reason not to watch!

To help you along, I offer up the inaugural Official VM NBA Playoff Preview! With commentary and predictions from a truly bizarre array of people, journalists (Mitchell Prothero and Tom Spurgeon), a law professor and author (Thane Rosenbaum), and some average schmoes (me, my brother, and my buddy Craig), this preview is bound to entertain, please, and provide no useful information for gambling!

So check it out and leave us your own darn predictions in the comments! Happy hoops!

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The Imus thing

I can’t muster up much energy to write about Imus’ firing. I’m not a listener, so I can’t characterize his show and “what he meant” or offer any other context-creating remark. I feel bad that this whole event has helped Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson consolidate their roles as Kings of All Black People In America, since they’re a couple of charlatans.

I do marvel over the fact that, while he got fired for making a dumb comment about female athletes, his comment had nothing to do with the most prevalent stereotype about female athletes.

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College whoops

I’ve learned a ton from reading Charley Rosen’s basketball columns, particularly his single-game analyses. He’s got a mailbag up this week, and it includes a vituperative response to the “NCAA or NBA” question:

Although I do not always agree with your opinions, I respect them because you seem to know a lot about the actual substance of the game. I know a few people who say that the NBA is not good basketball, and that college ball is much better in regard to defense and team work. They believe that college basketball is played the right way as compared to the showmanship that’s the mainstay of the NBA game. It seems that the college game is more focused on teamwork, while the NBA highlights individual stars. Is the college game really better? — Luke Ford, Minerva, Ohio

No, no, a thousand times no!

The college game is sloppy and the “amateur” players are prone to making innumerable mistakes. Which is why 20-point leads often vanish in a few minutes.

The defense seems to be good in the collegiate ranks only because the overall offense is so poor. Which is why the likes of J.J. Reddick and Adam Morrison struggle so much to score when they come to the NBA. And why so many of the NCAA’s scoring-average leaders in recent years can’t even play in the NBA: Ruben Douglas, Jason Conley, Ronnie McCollum, Alvin Young, Charles Jones, Kevin Granger, Greg Guy, Brett Roberts, Kevin Bradshaw, and so on.

The preponderance of zone defenses in NCAA competition assures that too many players never really learn how to play straight-up defense. Inferior (to the NBA) ball-handling, passing, ball-catching skills, footwork and overall creativity are additional reasons for college defenses appearing to be better than they really are. Which is why the primary difficulty for virtually every NBA rookie is playing defense.

And don’t mistake passing per se for teamwork. The truth is that most college offenses are so poorly constructed (especially against zones) that multiple passes are necessary to find an open shot or to create space in which a designated scorer can operate. In fact, teamwork is much more critical, and much more subtle — the execution of plays, defensive rotations — in the NBA.

It’s economics that pressures the NBA to focus on individuals rather than on teams. Whereas the best college players remain “amateurs” for one or two seasons, NBA stars are around for a decade or more. Add in the fact that playoff teams in the NBA annually play three times as many games every season as do NCAA qualifiers, and pro hoopers’ recognizability is understandably greater. That translates into commercial opportunities, also millions of dollars in player-jerseys, autographed balls, bobbleheads and similar trinkets.

The NBA game has a huge advantage in player talent, offensive and defensive prowess, coaching, officiating and the overall quality of performance in every aspect but one. The only advantage the college game enjoys is the consistent enthusiasm of its players. And this is true only because some veteran NBA players on basement-dwelling teams will take an occasional game off late in the season.

The worst NBA team would trounce the NCAA champs by upwards of 30 points.

Considering I just watched UNC completely melt down and miss 20 of its final 22 shots in its loss to Georgetown, I’m inclined to give some credence to Rosen’s take on this. That said, I think players take a lot more than the “occasional game off late in the season.”

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Drugs’re bad, mmmkay?

Scot Pollard hasn’t had a distinguished career in the NBA. He has shown off some tremendously bad haircuts, which I give him credit for, because not a lot of white guys go with crazy styles in the league.

Although he had a bright yellow mohawk going earlier this season, he has a more conservative look now. He also made one of the funniest in-game comments, um, EVER:

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When bad metrics happen to bad GMs

Anyone who’s read our VM basketball previews in the last few years knows that the Timberwolves are in terrible shape, and it’s due to the incompetent dealings of its general manager, Kevin McHale, who can also be faulted for being part of the Joe Smith debacle that ruined Kevin Garnett’s career.

So that’s why it’s really funny that when Forbes.com came up with a system of metrics to evaluate general managers across the major sports, they ended up with Kevin McHale as #1.

Given the failure of that system, I’m going to have to take any of their other rankings with a grain of salt. I think this is an instance where the metrics sounded good, but when they were applied and led to this Bizarro world where McHale’s #1 and Billy Beane is #26, someone should have said, “Maybe we need to re-weight or add some other factors.”

And ranking Billy King of the Sixers at #3 was also pretty mind-boggling.