Creeping Death ...

It's been my general experience that teams that allow their opponents to go on 25 point runs over the span of 5 minutes in multiple games, nay, multiple times in multiple games, often are not a factor towards the end of March.

SRSLY? 80+ points to a Tech team that has roughly one and a half solid offensive players in Crittendon and Young. This was your plan?

Meanwhile that sound you hear is another Carolina free throw rattling off the rim. Getting to the line 40 times in a game really isn't much of an advantage if you're only going to bother hitting 60% of them.

And kudos to Roy for sitting Lawson for the first 8 minutes, for whatever reason. That was a real nice touch when he brought Quentin Thomas in to look lost on offense for 4 minutes while a 5 point lead turned into a 7 point deficit. That bastard should never be in a game that Carolina isn't leading by at least 10.

We're about one more meltdown from devolving straight into gross underperformance. I never thought I'd have to watch Carolina turn into my least favorite kind team, yet here they are, can win a blow out whenever they want but can't win a close game to save their lives. That should serve them real well in about 2 weeks.

We can only hope that we're headed for a replay of '99 when Harold Arcineaux and Weber State precipitated an incident in which I proved that it was in fact possible to break Tupper Ware against a dorm room wall.

In closing, Roy, WTF?

Well that was much tougher than it should have been ...

Hansbrough played somewhat akin to refried crap. I'm beginning to think that either last year was a huge anomaly for him or they've locked up the kid with the solid hands who got double digit rebounds a game last year and apparently don't want to let him back out. And Ellington looked like he'd never seen a basketball in his life. Thank god for Lawson and Wright though.


Anytime now son

I'll give Paulus a modicum of credit, he wasn't a complete walking turnover machine and he did hit some open shots in the first half. And you can pretty much make a hot sauce to the eye guarantee on McRobert's offensive disapearing act in a big game. Meanwhile, WTF is a Jon Scheyer?

Anyway, that's over with. I can only hope that Carolina continues their renewed commitment to actually playing a type of defense that they rediscovered in the 2nd half and combines that with an offense that doesn't involve Terry randomly plowing people over and Tyler fumbling every loose ball underneath.

D-bags Unlimited ..

So I've got a few more hours to prepare myself for the first UNC/Duke show down of the year. All in all I'm feeling pretty good about this, as I'm prepared to write off Saturday's NC State game as one of those freakish games where the team with the off beat offense suddenly shoots lights out for 40 minutes straight. And obviously, the chance to send Duke on their first 3 game losing streak within the same season since I'm not quite sure when is always an exciting prospect. About the only unappealing prospect for the evening is listening to a certain someone discuss Duke, Coach K, and especially Greg Paulus for 2 hours tonight.


Astonishing how those APG numbers drop without the leading scorer

I have no problem admitting that UNC, and specifically Hansbrough, gets a media provided tongue bathing during most of their games. Quite frankly, it turns me off a bit at times too. But I at least view it as somewhat justified. UNC is clearly one of the top 2 or 3 teams in the country this year. I don't think there's a more exciting team to watch when their offense is clicking. And Hansbrough, while probably primely positioned to be a very underwhelming NBA player, owing I suppose to the lack of demand for 6'9" white guys who are about half a beat to slow with the ball in their hands in the paint, is a very solid college basketball player. So while I do get tired of hearing it all at times because I feel like announcers are ruining my ability to enjoy my own team and forcing me to defend them to everyone else that's heard enough, I can at least construct a valid argument supporting the treatment they get.

But WTF with Duke?

I think this year, above all others in recent memory, has stretched our friend Dickie V's ability to find ridiculous things to say about Duke and his buddy Coach K to insane levels. This Duke team has pretty much been trash since the season tipped. Paulus and McRoberts, plz.

And let's step back here, take a little bit of a historical perspective on things. With the continual barrage of fawning shit we have to hear about Duke, you'd assume we're talking about the dominant team in the nation in the last 10 or 15 years, but is that really in any way true?

Conveniently enough, it's been about 15 years since the back to back titles in '91 and '92, so we'll use that as the jump off point. Since that time, they've won exactly one National Title, which I still refuse to recognize, mainly because there's no way a team that started Richard Jefferson, Jason Gardner, Loren Woods, and Agent 0 himself should have ever lost a game, and more specifically because if the refs had taken their heads out of their asses long enough to whistle Jason Williams for his 5th foul when he dry humped Gardner with 6 minutes left there's no way that Arizona doesn't run away and win that game by 10 themselves. But we'll lay aside the revisionist history and give Duke their one National Title.

But including that season, they've been to 4 Final Fours over that stretch, which would of course be 2 less than Carolina's 6, and equalled by Michigan State's and Kentucky's 4, so we're hardly talking about any sort of national hegemony over that stretch. Now, I will give them credit for holding sway over the ACC Tournament, and to a lesser degree over the ACC regular season title, over the last 7 or 8 years. But, in my opinion, they've always been greatly benefited by the Duke factor when they're playing in ACC country, as any other ACC basketball fan will quickly corroborate. It's a lot easier to win games when you're playing every game with a free throw and foul advantage facilitated by the Cloak of Invisible Charges that every Duke defender wears. Of course, once tournament time hits, that protection goes away and the results become more indicative.

So that's why I'm no great believer in the overblown Coach K lovefest. He's done no more in the last 15 years that a half dozen other coaches have also done, probably with less talent. In fact, you could argue that in some ways, he's underutilized the supposed wealth of talent that he gets and shows a marked lack of ability to adapt to overcome the same problems that plauge in every year, namely an inability to develop any quality depth, which always come back to haunt him in March.

And what of the current crop of players themselves? By which I mean, how can any self respecting analyst continue to back Greg Paulus as an effective basketball player?

I may have hated Battier and Boozer and Jason Williams and most especially Redick, but in one way or another I would not deny that they were probably all All-American quality college players. Now, Battier may have been the primary beneficiary of the Cloack of Invisible Charges, since at least half his reputation was built on his "defense." And Redick was a world class douche, who I always contended you could negate with an athletic defender, as LSU proved last year with Temple. Say what you will about the ACC, but I think the lack of commitment to defense was at least half to blame for Redick's career numbers. If you drop him in the SEC, his numbers are probably cut in half. But he wasn't, he was in the ACC, where he became very effective at working himself open and hitting shots, so there you go. Point being, I may have grown tired of having these guys shoved down my throat, but at least it made some sense.

But now it's like Duke has reached some nadir of talent, but rather than call it what it is, they're going to try to continually convince me that Greg Paulus is an effective point guard. Have you watched this kid? Can you think of another primary ball handler for a top 20 team that is often completely unable to bring the ball up and initiate an offense against someone playing active defense on him? He has become a bit more effective in the last 10 or 15 games with his shot, but honestly, whenever somebody pressures him, he becomes a 40 minute reminder of last year's NCAA when LSU would send in their white guard and the eyes of the street kids playing for Iona would light up like it was Christmas. Honestly, if making ill conceived passes and diving on the deck for loose balls that you created was a marketable skill he'd be in great shape, but otherwise, they need to start warming up the patented Wojo Asst. Coaching seat for him. In the end, I honestly think I'd feel better if Vitale would finally say, "You know, this kid actually sucks, but I'm just going to tell you that he doesn't because he tries hard. But basically, he's an overhyped Wojo that fooled us into believing that he could run point for a top 10 team."


Working white boys since '06

All of which goes to say, Paulus is a joke (as is McRoberts although I've left him alone for now), and I'm fully ready to kick the shit out of Duke tonight and put their season to bed.

30 Days (plus much much more) In The Hole ...

Well, given the name of this place and the events of the last two days, I'd be remiss as hell if I didn't lead off with this.


Did you hear what I said Denver? Or should I turn it up for you?

So I promised myself before school started that I'd step away from any posting here whatsoever, with the noble intention of concentrating on my first semester at law school, because knowing myself as I do, if I were presented with any sort of distraction at school or when I returned home in the evenings, my forays into captivating subjects such as the continuing viability of heightened pleading requirements measured against Rule 8(a) or the economic differences between joint liability and joint and several liability would be severely hampered.


Back to back at 2 and 3, everyday on TNT

Of course, that noble sentiment did nothing to stop me from using most of the spare time in the library to scour the internets and still read everyone else or spend 6 hours a night watching TV, or go to Atlanta to watch My Morning Jacket the night before I turned in my open memo. Of course, that was well worth it, that was a kickass show. But, except my the day of death when I had to listen to UGA lose to Kentucky on the radio in the solitary confines of my apartment, I did manage stop myself from doing any posting. And I suppose it worked well enough, one semester down and I haven't been asked to pack my things and leave, so good times all around I suppose.

Obviously any attempt to do anything in the way of catching up with the last 5 months in any sort of comprehensive way would be pretty useless, so we'll just highlight the main things I learned during this past football season.

1. Somehow coming to the realization during the middle of the 3rd quarter that you are going to lose to Vanderbilt, announcing to everyone around you, "F this, I'm not going to sit here and watch us lose to Vanderbilt," leaving the stadium and walking back downtown, and therein raining on everyone's parade during our "comeback" of sorts by correctly predicting that we would still give it away in the last 2 minutes made the whole day strangely more bearable.

2. Listening to your team lose to Kentucky on the radio might be the most debilitating feeling in the world.

3. Apparently I should have come on and made my apocalyptic post of death about a month earlier, since I can only assume it was the main catalyst in us finishing the season with an epic ass kicking of Auburn on the road, a level 1 kick in the nuts to Tech at home, and a truly stirring comeback win against VPI in the Peach Bowl (for that 10 minutes where nothing could go wrong, it was one of the top 3 or 4 stretches of time I've had at a game, only diminished by the fact that the only thing on the line was some sort of vindication of the fact that perhaps we were a decent team).

4. Although I do not have a rocket arm and the attention of several thousand comely co-eds on campus, Matt Stafford and I apparently do at least share a proclivity for eating MexiCali on Friday nights, which I suppose makes us basically brothers.

Beyond that, what else is there to say about the Atlanta sports teams?

The schadenfreude associated with Tech's season deserves several posts of its own. I suppose it could best be summarized by noting that I got to make good on my promise that I would laugh in the face of my Tech friends (and possibly set them on fire) when they ended the season with 3 straight losses and a worse record than UGA, a promise I made after the Vanderbilt game.

The Falcons had the exact season anyone from Atlanta would have projected, so surprises there. All hail the Bobby Petrino era, I guess.

The Braves have now traded their weak bullpen for 3 closers of varying reputation and have shipped off most of their infield in the process. Of course, I'm not saying that's necessarily a huge loss. At least I don't have to watch LaRoche threaten to fall asleep at 1st base anymore. On the other hand, I also don't get to see him grow a Fu Manchu during the year, so everything comes with a cost. Also, I'm pretty sure I heard Bam Bam Bigelow died, so I'm not sure how I feel about making copious Wickman/Bigelow comparisons during the upcoming season. In the end, upgrading the bullpen was obviously necessary since spending 3 months without a closer last year is pretty much 100% to blame for us missing the playoffs last year, and I've pretty much resigned myself to the fact that the organization isn't going to spend the money to have a guaranteed winner before the season starts anymore. So I guess my two hopes is that we miraculously grow an offense from somewhere or that Andruw hits a 2 run shot every game, the starter goes 6 innings and gives up 1 and then we use our 3 closers for an inning a piece. 2-1 Braves, everyone goes home happy.

College basketball deserves much more treatment, but I do feel compelled to go ahead and note that this Carolina team has become one of my favorite teams to watch, ever. My only real concern is that I'm pretty sure that Hansbrough has regressed from last year. He looks slower. He puts the ball on the floor everytime gets it underneath, entry pass, rebound, doesn't matter, and he seems too slow to get clear of anyone for a clean shot anymore. And, no that's drawing contact everywhere, he's not dumping in the trash baskets like he was last year when people were hanging on him. Of course, once I drop names like Wright, Ellington, Lawson, and Terry, the fact that Hansbrough is probably playing lower than he was last year quickly seems to become irrelevant.

Anyway, that's it for now, with any luck Aliens is on one of my Cinemax channels again, so probably time to go do that.

In the meantime I'll leave you with a little something that's always brought a smile to my face during any low times over the last couple months.

A Requiem for the 2006 season ...

DIAF. K Thx Bye.

I had decided to hiatus myself during the first semester of law school, but I thought today deserved a special note.

See you in January.

All My Base Are Belong To Them ...

I thought after a week, it was fair to finally recap the hurting that the Isle of Capri put on me in Biloxi. Why the Isle you ask? Hasn't your day at the Isle on past trips always been the stuff of nightmares? Well the answer is yes, but considering that they and the Imperial Palace are the only 2 casinos opened back up, coupled with the fact that they're handing out free nights and other inducements like candy, all added to fact that it's been over a year and a half since my last trip leads to the conclusion that sometimes you just have to tempt fate.

And man did fate kick me right in the ass. I'll spare you the hand by hand account at the blackjack tables, lest this flip into a Simmonsesque rambling where suddenly Bish and J-Bug and I are high-fiving over jokes at the blackjack table and drinking vaguely gay drinks while the Ukranian Jonathan Papelbon comes out of the bullpen to close out our hot streak.

The whole trip can really be summed up by two simple situations. A single session included these two statistical slaps to the face. I quadruple split aces against a 6 and managed to reap two pushes and two losses. I later triple split 9's against a 5, including a double on one when he threw a deuce on it and reaped 1 push and 2 losses, and obviously the double was one of the losses. That really cuts right to the heart of the matter. And of course there was the usual bitch slaps of doubling on 11 against a against 5 or 6 and getting dealt a 4, only to watch him flip a combination of a hole face and a 5 on the next card or a hole 5 and a face on the next card. And this happened multiple times, within the space of an hour or two. I also, as one has to do, watched myself sit on 15 against a 5 or 6 from 3rd base, only to watch him flip a face and deal himself a 5 roughly 5 times in one shoe.

In the end, the Rains of Justice were against me as the pockets were emptied, until Tom, the helpful dealer pointed out around 1 the a.m. that the ATM's were giving away money. I felt compelled to tell him that unless they were giving away free money, I probably wasn't going to partake, and that yes, I did get his joke. Much like I was the only one to get his joke wherein he felt compelled to say that, "He hadn't had a match since Superman died," in response to someone's request for a match. Of course, that lead to a strange discussion on the curse of actor's who had portrayed Superman. Weird night.

So some would say things were not meant to be last week. TJ was in fact correct in saying that they could keep busting me up all night. And it was probably time for that, it was the first time I ever left a gambling trip with less than I showed up with, and little surprise that it happened at the Isle, my own personal slaughterhouse.



Now as an aside here, I went back the other day and reread Simmons's earlier articles on Vegas trips that he had up on his page. I noticed something this time that had never really occured to me before. I have no idea what kind of check ESPN.com or Kimmel were cutting 2 or 3 years ago, and he wasn't yet a best selling author with a book (which he may or may not be now after his book, but whatever), but one would assume primary writers for late night TV shows and far reaching websites such as ESPN.com must make some decent coin. And in fact he goes to the trouble of pointing out had they had moved up in the world because they were getting rooms where they had their own beds instead of double bunking, man love style (nullus). So taking all that into account, the fact that he's treating a couple hundred up or down in a day as a big thing, and making a couple hundred in a long session as some serious play, and limiting himself to not even dropping a grand over 2 or 3 days just seems kind of odd to me. Neither myself or any of my friends are exactly made of money, but I've got plenty of them that'll put $500 into play in a day, make over a grand in a session, and drop a grand over a couple days if things aren't running hot. I don't know, just struck me like the big man really isn't putting an amount of money comensurate with his means into play. Or perhaps I'm just in the mood to poke fun today.

-In Braves news, as my last post intimated, we now have a closer in the mold of Bam Bam Bigelow, which is clearly a reason for much rejoicing on multiple levels. And he's been, to the extent we've gotten to use him, pretty much nails since he got here, at least compared to what we were dealing with. And I just wanted to use "nails" in that context. Then we made the move for Baez so that we actually have a setup man too. There's two problems with all this.

Problem the first, and this one is a little less timely now that the Mets sweep is starting to fade from memory. They're pretty useless when your starters are getting handed leads and still getting blitzkrieged out of the game by the 4th or 5th innings.

Problem the second. They can't help us recoup any of those 20 or so blown saves from the first half. Which, had these guys, or at least some semblance of a serviceable bullpen been in place the whole time, you can at least cut those blown saves in half, and suddenly you're leading the wild card by a couple games and still in striking distance of the Mets. But alas, in these days of fiscal restraint amongst Time Warner/Liberty Media/whoever might end up owning the Braves, we've found that even John Schuerholz can't play Angus McGyver to the bullpen indefinitely.

-In movie news, I think we all know that Snakes On A Plane is only two weeks away. How in the holy hell though is this only 3 weeks away and tonight was the first I'd heard of it? My guess would be because Broken Lizard took a hit after Club Dread didn't live up to the promise showed by Super Troopers. Still, I'll give them another chance. Super Troopers is still OMG LOLZ whenever I watch it, and Club Dread grew on me with multiple viewings.


You think Eddie Money has to put up with this shit?

-Lastly, the Sunday AJC had a great article about college coaching turnover. And unfortunately for all who have made it thus far, the Sunday paper has disappeared. So sadly I won't be able to mock proper quotes or use the exact numbers or poke fun at the author by name, but I'll summarize just for the hell of it. The accompanying graphic went something like this (numbers promised to be vaguely correct within 2 or so percent, but trends are upheld):

Year Coaching Turnover (%)
1997 20%
1998 9%
1999 15%
2000 10%
2001 21%
2002 11%
2003 14%
2004 8%
2005 20%
2006 9%

And the headline centered around the drop in coaching turnover between 1997 and 2006. Perhaps I'm wrong, but what I see there is a 4 year cycle, with a weaker two year cycle, where coaching turnover hits a max every 4 years, drops to it's lowest point in the 1st and 3rd years after the max, and has an intermediate high in the 2nd year after the max. So, the beauty of this data, for whoever wants to misuse it, is that they can claim whatever trend they want. This year, you can point to a drop in coaching turnover. On the other hand, you could have written it 365 days ago, started your table with 1998, and decried the huge increasee in coaching turnover. Or at least I think that's what anyone with a passing knowledge of data analysis would see is going on here. And those with the reckoning of numbers would probably write the article and point out the cyclical nature of things.

For the sake of full disclosure here, I will say that due to my busy Sunday, I didn't really get to read the whole thing, so there is a possibility that the author did choose to do this late in the article. But based on what I know about the AJC, I tend to guess that like most newspaper writers, they continue to mold numbers to mean whatever is convenient, as opposed to what they might actually be showing.

We Have A Closer?

Well the Braves and the Reds are doing their part to make trading for old, overweight closers the chic move this season. Sadly enough, as last night proved, the Braves aren't going to score 12 runs a game for the rest of the season, so any upgrade over Sosa at the closer position (i.e. myself or anyone with two functional arms and a penchant for not giving up massive homeruns), even if it is Bob Wickman, has to be taken as some sort of upgrade? (Question marks implies massive amounts of probably unfounded hope).

At the least his presence at the buffet line should bring a fresh new level of competition that might hopefully spill onto the field.



Hmmmmm?

Face It ...

I'm not going to lie. My Muse has crawled into a hole somewhere and died. I haven't been able to motivate myself to take enough of an opinion on anything lately to show up here and talk about it. My guess is that it's related to the late summer melancholia when you realize that Memorial Day felt like yesterday but in reality, the 4th of July was almost 2 weeks ago, and you're staring down the barrel of possibly heading back to school or not getting to watch the sun go down after 9 o'clock, which of course allows you to tee off for 18 holes at 4, or hell, whatever it is that makes you enjoy summer. Point is, it's slipping away and you don't know where it went. Of course, that also means that college football is back within spitting distance, so all is not lost.

I will say this though, TJ has gone and drawn attention to a fact that really needed serious hiding, that somehow, the Braves, owner of a 6-21 June are right around 6 games out of the Wild Card at the moment. Frankly, everyone needs to shut the hell up about this for another month at least. I could address a lot of things. I could draw attention to the fact that, based on his new found youth at the plate, one might assume that Chipper Jones has discovered a new Hooters near his place. I could point out that Renteria is waking up after a June where he probably hit around .200. I could point that even though Giles has now reached the point where he'll publicly proclaim his hatred for the leadoff spot, he is slowing crawling back towards respectability at the plate after someone finally reminded him that getting on base is in fact the ultimate goal of an at bat. And I could sing the praises of a proud young man named Chuck James, who actually brought the art of pitching back to the staff for a game or two. And after addressing all those issues, I could talk about the whole scale turn over from the opening day bullpen til today. I could throw out names of a half dozen identical slightly overweight sclubs like Yates or Paronto or Barry or Stockman, who have somehow moved the pen from roughly 25% effectiveness up to maybe 70 or 80% effective.

Of course, if I address all those things, we'll still come back around to the dearth or production in left field and at first base. And I'll be forced to realize that we're still trying to turn Jorge Sosa into a closer even though some of his key ratios might look something like 2BB/inning and 1HR/3 inning. I'm estimating, but hell, they feel worse than that. And then I'll be even more disappointed when I realize that he's probably our best option in spite of that. And then after all that, I'll look at June and say, if those happy assholes could have just played .500 ball for the month of June, we'd be winning the Wild Card right now and roughly 6 games back of a Mets team whose 2nd half pitching staff may well devolve into Glavine (who god knows is due to start to fall apart, you people in New York know it too), Trachsel, and um ..... yeah.

And the point of all this was? I'm not sure, I guess it was to highlight the fact here we are in striking distance of the playoffs, beginning to look better in most facets of the game, after the worst month of all time and the biggest bullpen implosion ever. And then to further point out that everyone needs to do me the favor of keeping any positive prospects under wraps for about another month.

The most important news I have though is that I've recently discovered the existence of a channel called the Sleuth channel which appears to be entirely devoted to showing the A-Team, Knight Rider, and the occasional Miami Vice. So yes, I picked an excellent month to take off between working and heading back to school.