Kevin Garnett is being held out of action until the playoffs. The official story is that there is no point in playing him in two totally meaningless games, but I’m not buying it. Wouldn’t you want to have a chance to test your knee and your fitness before the games got intense? Wouldn’t you want to ease back into action gradually? I sense that there is more to this story than we are hearing, and that makes me a bit uneasy.
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Dear Stephen,
You don’t know me, and you really have no reason whatsoever to listen to me, but I’m going to offer you some advice anyway. I hope you will listen to it because you know I am right – stay in school! You have another year of eligibility, and I beg you, implore you, and several other synonyms, to use it. Don’t just do this for me, though. Do it for yourself. Here are eight good reasons:
It’s a shame that no one (full disclosure – myself included) cares about women’s basketball, because what UConn finished off last night was truly impressive. They thumped Louisville in the championship game to cut down the nets. More impressively, they weren’t beaten all year. I know that women’s basketball is more top heavy than men’s is, but it still seems incredible to me that a team can go all the way without faltering. Never mind that UConn is always about that good. This accomplishment is almost enough to make me want to start watching women’s basketball. Not quite, but almost.
I’ll write one more article about my tournament thoughts and reflections and so on in a day or two, but let me just sum up the final last night with three words – wow, oops, and yawn. Wow, as in wow North Carolina looked incredibly good. Oops as in, oops, I guess I was wrong when I repeatedly said that I thought North Carolina looked vulnerable coming into the tournament. Yawn as in that was a truly boring game to watch despite the Tar Heels’ laser precision. Ugly.
Here’s the way it looks as the ACC’s UNC Tar Heels take on the Big Ten’s Michigan State—the Spartans have to stop the Heels. Is that possible? UNC has been consistently the best team in the country. As the odds play out, the Tar Heels are favored by 7.5 points. The best money line you can get on UNC is -360. The best you can get on the Spartans is +310.
Yesterday’s Final Four games started out very interesting, and then ended with a dull thud. Here’s a collection of thoughts:
1. I know that Bill Self won coach of the year, and I can’t really begrudge that, but Tom Izzo is unquestionably the coach of the tournament. Twice in a row his team has had to play heavily favored Big East behemoths, and twice he has masterfully dissected them. In neither case was it just a question of coming out a head in a close one, either. The Spartans have dictated the style of play, effectively shut down the key players, and looked totally in command for the second half. Michigan State has the fewest potential pros of the Final Four teams, but Izzo has been more than able to overcome that. Incredibly impressive.
I assumed this was a lame April Fools’ Day joke when I first heard it, but it seems to actually be true – Tim Floyd is reportedly about to be named the coach at Arizona. This is truly bizarre on so many levels. First, it doesn’t make a lot of sense for Floyd. Arizona is a good program with a great tradition, but they are little more than a lateral move from USC. He can recruit well to Arizona, but he can recruit just as well to USC if he doesn’t his job well, and he’s better located for access to more recruits. It would make sense if Floyd had a tie to Arizona, but he really doesn’t – born in Mississippi, school at Louisiana Tech and so on. He’ll get a bit more cash in his new deal likely, but he could have got more from USC if he really wanted it, too. It just doesn’t make much sense for Floyd.
Jay Cutler is the biggest baby I have ever seen. The latest news on the Broncos’ QB front is that the team has given up and is going to trade their pivot before the draft. That news has apparently been confirmed by owner Pat Bowlen as well, so it is past the point of just being a rumor. The impetus for this latest move is that apparently neither Bowlen nor coach Josh McDaniels has apparently been able to get Cutler to return a phone call for the last 10 days. Seriously? Not returning phone calls is what you do when you are in grade school and you are having a fight with your friend. It’s not what you do when you are a highly paid and well respected professional who has yet to prove that they can actually do their job – lead the team to playoff success. I don’t think that there is a quarterback in the league that could justify this kind of immature, prima donna behaviour, but at the very least you should have to have a winning record before you do it. Teams will line up for Cutler, and he’s probably an upgrade for at least half the teams in the league, but this whole episode has convinced me that Cutler doesn’t have what it takes to go all the way. I mean, can you imagine Tom Brady not returning Robert Kraft’s calls? Or Peyton Manning screening out Tony Dungy? Ridiculous.
This has not been a good preseason for pitchers. Johan Santana is behind schedule, Justin Duchscherer is out for a month or more, and we’re hearing even more today. Cole Hamels’ elbow isn’t recovering as quickly as they hoped it would, and he officially isn’t in contention to be the opening day starter anymore. His fastball is still only in the 85-88 miles per hour range so he has some work to do, but that’s much better than what it was earlier in the spring. The Angels also got some bad news – John Lackey is out until late April or May. The good news, if there is some, is that the MRI showed that the damage wasn’t as bad as it could have been. The Angels have a lack of depth in their rotation at the best of times, so the sooner they can get their ace back the better.
With the exception of the Michigan State win over Kansas that was one incredibly boring night of basketball. Sadly, neither of the early games were even remotely interesting. I had high hopes for Syracuse, and I thought Arizona was feisty enough to at least make it interesting, but they both fired blanks. The biggest conclusion out of those games is that I feel very confident in my pick of Louisville to win it all. It’s not just that they can score like they can, or that they play such good defense, or that their style of play is so unconventional that it gives other teams major headaches. It’s that they are so freaking deep – they are better five deep on the bench than most teams are two deep. Very impressive.
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