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| Haven’t we been saying this about NCAA officiating for years? |
DUKE sucks, and other news. To the bullet points:
• Never invite Duke to the party. Duke drinks all your beer, they hit on your girlfriend, and then they spill the Doritos all over the floor. They are a walking buzzkill. Duke ruins everything.
Seriously, is there a bigger downer in sports than Duke winning an NCAA basketball title? They won their 5th such title last night, a 68:63 victory over a Wisconsin team who blew a 9-pt. second half lead and proved, once again, that it’s hard to shoot, pass, or even dribble when you’ve got your hands around your own throat. Part of why Duke is so disliked is that their many triumphs at the game always seem to come at the expense of a team that’s potentially far more transcendent and a story line that’s far more compelling. The 1991 Blue Devils beat a previously undefeated UNLV team that was arguably the best single team in NCAA history that didn’t win the championship. The 1992 Dukies beat the Fab Five. In 2010, Duke beat Butler, who carried with them the hopes of mid-major schools and everyone who likes to root for the underdog. This year, Kentucky’s quest for 40-0 – and Wisconsin’s exacting revenge on the Wildcats for a 1-pt. loss in the Final Four a year ago – provided a far more compelling, engaging sort of storyline. But instead, we get Duke winning it all. Again. Bleah. A Duke championship is kind of like eating those grey leftovers in the fridge which don’t taste very good – completely unsatisfying.
I probably have less contempt for Duke than many college basketball zealots (most notably the guys over at Slate, who couldn’t help writing story after story after story this spring about how much they loathe the Dukies), and I still have a fair amount of it. If for some reason, I was mysteriously named Head Basketball Coach tomorrow at East Central Enormous State University, not having a clue what to do in that position, and I had the choice to contact one active coach and say, “hey, what the hell should I do?” Mike Krzyzewski would be that guy – in part because I think he would be the one most likely to respond and most likely to be honest and encouraging about it. His track record at both the college and international level speaks for itself. And in amid the absurd arms race that is college sports in America, Duke is still playing in an 9,000-seat overgrown gym of a facility where everyone’s nuts. That right there should make them more likable than they are, as they’ve chosen retro charm and hardboiled home court advantage over some colossal on-campus colosseum.
If it weren’t for the fact that they’re so damn smug, they’d almost be worth liking.
“Thank you very much, for reminding me of the reason why I left Duke … Never being considered a part of your posh group of yuppies really hurts me to the heart.” – Elton Brand
Jalen Rose, in a documentary for ESPN about the Fab Five, put it even less glowingly, in describing his feelings at the time he was playing for Michigan:
“For me, Duke was a person. I hated Duke and I hated everything Duke stood for. Schools like Duke don't recruit players like me. I felt like they only recruited black players that were Uncle Toms.”
Now, Rose later clarified that he was referring to his mentality at the time that he was at Michigan, and that he no longer believed that to be true, but his sentiment – that Duke is a bastion of spoiled rich kids who always seem to get their way – is one which is commonplace among those who follow college basketball.
And with that claim comes one that Duke always seems to get the breaks, particularly from the officials. For years, Duke has made far more free throws than their opponents have even attempted over the course of seasons. Now, that’s the sort of stat that can be coached to achieve, of course, through solid defending and taking the ball aggressively to the basket, but given that referees can so heavily influence basketball through the calling of fouls and awarding of free throws, this area is rife for conspiracy theorists. The 2001 Duke championship was particularly dubious on the officiating front. The Maryland fans were so angry after their Final Four loss to Duke that year that they made a point of showing up for the Duke-Arizona final and actively booing Duke throughout the game (which is something of a breach of etiquette at the Final Four, a grand spectacle where the 60,000 fans in the domes are generally disengaged from the game happening 1,000,000 miles away from them). Sure enough, a few crucial decisions went against Arizona in crucial times during the course of that final.
Just as a few crucial decisions went against Wisconsin last night, most notably the image I posted above from about the 1:30 mark of the second half with Duke up by five, where a ball deflected off a Duke player and went out of bounds, the zeebs awarded the ball to Duke, looked on the replay, and still awarded it to Duke, who promptly went down and nailed a trey and put the game out of reach. It was a terrible call, plain and simple. The officials blew that one at a critical juncture of the game. Deliberate? Doubtful. Incompetent? Most certainly. But that’s the sort of thing that always seems to go the Blue Devils way. If it happens often enough, it stops feeling like a coincidence.
• Having said all of that, let’s be honest about this: Wisconsin blew it. Wisconsin didn’t make shots down the stretch, and, far worse, they didn’t run their offense. Whereas Kentucky were cynical in their exploitation of the nature of the modern college game, Wisconsin were the most successful purveyors of it, doing so with a cerebral approach that had the versatile players and the shooters to back it up. Wisconsin played at the slowest pace of any major team in the country this season (as measured by offensive possessions per game), but also had one of the most efficient offenses. And being patient and methodical on offense was also a great way to play defense – the actual Wisconsin defense was meh, and turned out to be meh down the stretch against Duke, but it’s harder for the other team to score when they don’t have the ball that often.
Wisconsin’s defense wasn’t very good at all towards the end of the game. Duke made some shots, but the shots shouldn’t have been there to make. The Badgers, meanwhile, looked incoherent at the offensive end. They seemed to forget how to play down the stretch, forgetting what got them to the championship game in the first place, and once behind, they really had no idea how to play catch up in a hurry, wasting time and achieving little while doing so.
And speaking of playing in a hurry, I do think that Wisconsin generally needed to play faster earlier in the game. Duke was playing a junky, gimmick defense in the first half – a modified matchup zone with one guy guarding no one in the paint, and the other four players switching on every pass and giving the appearance of playing man – which the Badgers couldn’t seem to figure out. Trying to run a set for :35 against a defense you can’t unlock is just an exercise in futility.
This is where I think Bo Ryan got outcoached: your strategy has to be determined by what you’re seeing unfold on the floor. Not letting that Duke defense get settled in, and also getting the ball to Kaminski around the free throw line and running the offense from there, would’ve been far more productive that taking the bait and having guards constantly driving to the hoop and getting their shots constantly swatted by the Duke floater. Being outcoached by Coach K is no shame, of course. Coach K has 1000 wins for a reason. But it was ultimately really annoying to watch this game and see the Badgers let a very winnable game slip through their fingers.
Or off Duke’s fingers, as the case may be. I did think that the officials were terrible in this game, and particularly brutal down the stretch, when a whole lot of marginal whistles blew which went the way of Duke. But I also think Wisconsin needed to score more points, had plenty of chances to do so and misfired.
• The needless, pointless renovation by the Chicago Cubs of Wrigley Field seems to have taken a turn for the disgusting, as there were only two functioning restrooms for all of 35,000 fans in attendance for the Cubs opening day game with the St. Louis Cardinals. Faced with the prospect of waiting for 30 minutes to use the shitcan, Cubs fans got, well, creative:
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| No, that isn’t beer in those cups |
Any justification that the Cubs can put forth about why they are going about annihilating one of the unique sports facilities on earth is completely, utterly lame. The Cubs are one of the most valuable franchises in all of sports – Forbes recently pegged them as the 5th-most valuable franchise in baseball, worth $1,800,000,000 – so any argument about the need to increase revenue falls pretty flat. Sure, the facility was not up to the standards of other ballparks when it comes to amenities for players, and the ownership can argue that it hinders their ability to attract top talent, but the reality is that the Cubs haven’t lost because of Wrigley. They’ve lost because they are the Cubs, the most incompetent and lazy franchise in American sports, the club whose entire bogus narrative is predicated on being lovable losers and who’ve fed off, and profited from, that mystique for years. And saying that all of these renovations will ‘improve the fan experience’ is rubbish, as well – the fans seemed to like venerable old Wrigley Field exactly the way that it was.
This all comes down to greed, pure and simple. It’s a case of giving people what they don’t want at a price you think they should pay. Whatever the Cubs think they’re accomplishing through this renovation, ingratiating themselves to the fan base doesn’t seem to be all that important.
• Meanwhile, in Miami, the Marlins reminded all of us, on baseball’s opening day, that their use of the justification of “improving the fan experience” in their billion-dollar gouging of Dade County for a new ballpark was a crock of shit on. There’s a lot of rain in South Florida, see, and it keeps fans away, which is why they needed a retractable roof … which they left open, during a thunderstorm. Yes, there was a rain delay in a ballpark with a roof. The Marlins are apparently as incompetent as they are disingenuous.
• With their 2:1 OT victory over the L.A. Kings on Monday night, the Vancouver Canucks got a little breathing room in their quest to make the playoffs, opening up a 4-pt. lead over the Kings in the standings. It was a must-win for the Canucks – and the fact that it was a must-win at all speaks to just how stupid the NHL is.
If you were to look at the NHL from a straight won-loss record, the Canucks (46-34) are 2½ games ahead of the Calgary Flames (43-36) and 6½ games ahead of the L.A. Kings (39-40). Why are we even talking about the Kings at this point? They should be out of it, right? Yet in the standings, the Canucks are 4 pts. ahead of both Calgary and the Kings (97-93).
This is because the worst thing that the Canucks do as a team is not lose games in overtime. They’ve only picked up 5 of the infamous “loser points” all season, tied for the lowest in the league. The Kings, meanwhile, are the masters of losing in OT, having done it 15 times this year. So even though they are a sub.-500 team, they’ve got 10 extra points on Vancouver in the standings and, before the Canucks won on Monday, were threatening to knock a team that has 7 more wins than they out of the playoffs. As it is, they may knock out the Flames, who’ve only picked up 7 loser points all year. And as Nate Silver pointed out recently, it wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened with the Kings.
This is completely asinine. The Kings have been doing half-assed, laze about routine for years now, doing just enough to get into the playoffs. That they’ve won two Stanley Cups doing so only further trivializes the regular season. But the league trivializes the regular season all unto itself by settling games with a trick show shootout and awarding loser points. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that there are 3 available points in an OT game, but only 2 in a game that is decided in regulation, so if the score is tied late in the 3rd period, it behooves you to be conservative and play for the OT – which is basically happening now, as the 3rd period of deadlocked NHL games has all the excitement of a slow dance. Players will fully admit that they’re playing for OT – and why wouldn’t they do that? It’s the right course of action, since an OT game is worth more for everyone involved.
The Lose has said before that you should bring back the tie to the NHL, believing that there is nothing wrong with it. I’m not sure why it is the league thinks it’s so important that every game has to have a winner when the sport is necessarily low-scoring and, thus, deadlocks are inevitable. I think using the shootout to decide is garbage and I don’t believe the NHL’s contention that fans actually like it. It’s a gimmick and it cheapens the game. While I don’t necessarily agree with the assessment of 538 in that article linked above – that you should just play until there is a winner – it would be better than this nonsense the NHL currently has. The fact that teams are ultimately being overly rewarded for what amounts to playing not to lose a lot of the time, for losing some games but not others, or for winning what amounts to a glorified lottery, and that this is costing teams playoff spots, should call into question everything about the way that league conducts business. The game is already in something of a dead ball … er, dead puck era, anyway, one which owes in part to a lack of imagination and creativity both on the ice and behind the bench. You can’t legislate imagination into the game, but you can certainly stop actively discouraging it.
• Tanking in hip in the NHL these days. It’s the new teal. It’s been hip in the NBA for years, and Gary Bettman has finally brought one of the NBA’s most obnoxious tendencies over to the NHL after all this time. There are two elite prospects available in the draft this year, and several teams – the Buffalo Sabres and Arizona Coyotes – have gone into full on 76ers mode this season, trying to be as horrible as possible so as to try to strike it rich in the NHL draft lottery. (A third team, the Edmonton Oilers, are almost as bad as those other two while actually not trying to tank, which is saying something. The Oil are just flat out terrible.) The fans in Buffalo have gotten into the spirit of the affair, actually cheering against its own team as the Sabres went about winning a game against Arizona a couple of weeks ago. The whole situation is embarrassing, and I’ve read a whole bunch of stories in the press coming up with suggestions of how to change the lottery system to prevent this from happening.
And I have a simple solution to that, which is the same for the NBA. Get rid of the lottery entirely.
The problem with tankers in the NBA and the NHL is not the 1-2 teams which are awful and will clamor to get the first pick. It’s all of the other not very good teams which will sort of informally tank along the way. The NBA lottery proved yet again last year, when Cleveland had less than a 2% chance of landing the top pick but did so regardless, that you’re better off, as a not very good franchise, hoping to strike it rich than you are trying to compete for a low playoff spot. (This doesn’t hold quite so true in the NHL, where #8 seeds have won the Stanley Cup before, and where the low-scoring games make upsets possible.) The low percentage play is better than the no percentage play. Again, it’s a cynical application of mathematics. In both the NHL and the NBA, there are far too many teams that just give up along the way. That goes against the spirit of the game. Too many teams have benefitted from this sort of cynical thinking to discourage others from following suit. The only way to put and end to it is eliminate the lottery once and for all.
• Have I mentioned that myself and The Official Wife of IN PLAY LOSE are going here in a matter of days?
IN PLAY LOSE FTW!
