Duke

I think this is some of the best basketball stuff I have seen all season:

http://sports.aol.com/fanhouse/2008/02/07/duke-brings-phoenix-suns-sans-shaq-baskeball-to-college-and-ma/#cont

What's more, I watched UNC-Duke and Duke torched them. What Duke did--and what that post points out--is spread the floor, use a lot of high picks, pass, hit open threes, and play good, if not, passive defense. They were also so good at doing that--with more or less 6-7 interchangeable pieces who hit threes--they reminded me more of the 07 Golden State Warriors?

I actually think that this Duke team is for real. I know it's early and the brackets make it hard to predict a Final Four, but I would pick these four:

1. Duke
2. Stanford
3. Indiana
4. Memphis

Super Bowl...

Screw Dan Shanoff, I did not think the Giants win was the hallmark upset of sports history.

I say this because it underlies a couple of developments:

1) as my buddy Jon pointed out the other day, DS' new gimmick on the sportingnews is frustrating...As someone who never read the sportingnews until DS went there, I now feel comfortable stating the main reason I never did--it stinks. Also I feel like DS' reaction was premature and for some reason, sums up the edge he has lost in the last few weeks. Maybe its the switch to sporting news, maybe it's a Christian Guzman impression?

2) Coming into this game, I didn't feel like the Pats were quite Goliath or even Achilles. As someone on Fanhouse wrote earlier tonight, they were MJ-Bulls material weeks 1-10 and then after that, more like a good team. The Ravens almost got 'em, the Eagles almost got 'em, and in Week 17, the Giants almost got 'em. There were shades of gray in their "greatness."

Even in the Jacksonville and San Diego games, the Pats didn't seem utterly daunting. Yea they were undefeated, but they didn't convince me they were the best team ever or even an automatic Superbowl champ.

3. I think the Giants were a very good team. On paper they pass my critical test: good qb (manning), featured receiver (burress), good defensive rushers (strahan), and a workhorse on the ground (jacobs). So it was no stretch of the imagination that they could peice together a win over a very good 18-0 team. After all, they played them twice.

Lakers

I am going to step out on a limb and say that the Lakers are now the best team in the West. With the addition of Pau Gasol today, they are over the hump.

They now have two players who demand a double team, a decent supporting cast (esp. in Luke Walton, Andrew Bynum, and the injured Trevor Ariza), and a good coach (although coaches are highly overrated). Ole.

With that said, this is how I rank the West heading into the All-Star break:

1 Lakers
2 Mavs
3 Hornets
4 Suns
5 Spurs
6 Jazz
7 Nuggets
8 Blazers

I guess it's clear they don't watch the games

When we first started talking about this blog, I felt strongly that it should not just be about Georgetown basketball, and I maintain that. That said, I couldn't let this one slide. And rather than take the homer "Go Hoyas" banner, I'm going the other way and trashing the national media for its bias in favor our storied program.

In short, I guess it's clear that the voters for neither the AP nor the coaches poll are watching the games. It's a joke that Georgetown actually moved up both rankings after the week that the Hoyas had, eeking out two wins against mediocre (at best) teams (including the questionable no-goaltending call to end the WVU game). If nothing else, you would have expected all the voters to have seen the Ewing highlight and realized how close we came to losing... again.

Georgetown seems to clearly be the best team in the Big East (one game lead on Notre Dame, who we destroyed in our only recent quality win), and maybe being the best team in the Big East means you automatically are one of the 6 or 7 best teams in the country, but as a fan of the Hoyas I'm starting to feel pretty nervous about AT Louisville and AT Syracuse in a one-week span (starting a week from Saturday -- both games on ESPN). I don't see anybody coming out of the Big East with fewer than 4 conference losses, so maybe it's better to dump those on the road than put up a bad show in the home finale against Louisville.

Front Line Collapse

With Ewing as a starter not really working, Georgetown now plays 3 guards, 1 swing man, and a center. Unlike last year, when they had one of the best front lines in all of college basketball (7-2, 6-9, 6-8), now they have a weak, undersized front court, especially by Big East standards. Summers now plays PF (6-8), Freeman plays SF, but is actually a guard and a soft non-rebounding 6-4. Georgetown essentially replaced Jeff Green with Austin Freeman, lost 5 inches, and now gets routinely decimated not only on the boards, which is atrocious, but also on some offensive possessions. Hibbert cannot dominate down low on his own, and one of the reasons defenses collapse on him so quickly is because there is not another player down there to take pressure. Georgetown is a soft, small, three point shooting team that goes on monster cold streaks. This is the type of team that just begs to lose in the round of the 32.

The answer, I think, is to start Hibbert, Macklin, Summer, Sapp and Wallace. 7-2, 7-0, 6-8. Get rebounds, let Hibbert get touches, and then bring Ewing, Freeman, Wright, and Rivers off the bench as necessary.

3-Pointers

Pretty good weekend in college and for the three-point shot.

The much-hyped PAC-10 match-up of #4 Washington State and #5 UCLA got some life at the end, when the Cougars made seven threes in the final 90 seconds to come up just short and lose 81-74. In a head-t0-head of potential PAC-10 POYs Kevin Love's win and 27-and-14 got the nod over Derrick Low's six threes and 24 points. But more than anything, Low and the Cougars came as close as anybody has come to Jason Williams' "Miracle Minute" at Maryland in '01.

In the Midwest, Bradley University broke a six-game losing streak on the shoulders of Jeremy Crouch, who scored 20 of Bradley's last 26 to inch by Northern Iowa. Crouch matched Low with six threes of his own en route to a season-high 28 and a nice W.

But nothing topped this line: "0:06, 72-69, Roy Hibbert made Three Point Jumper."

In a back-and-forth game against a very good UConn team, Big Roy sealed the deal with his second career three-pointer from the top of the key with time winding down. Coach John Thompson III said it was not a "fluke" and I bet the Sixers, Kings, Clippers, and Bucks hope he is right. Either way, this was a statement game for the iffy Hoyas because UConn is better than advertised and the Huskies played a superb game on the road.

After the Chargers' upset in Indy, I watched most of Indiana-Illinois on CBS. As an Illinois fan, this game was a big deal because the Illini stink and really needed a "turning point" game to salvage the season. If any game offered that opportunity, it was this: against Eric Gordon and the #10 Hoosiers.

Motivation for a W was huge given the Illini's struggles, Indiana's success, and Eric Gordon's much-documented recruiting flip-flop. Illinois jumped out tp a 13-4 lead after starting 6-for-6 from the field, and again led by as many as nine the second half, but still managed to lose by four.

If they can't win this one, they are in serious trouble. What's the motivation at Minnesota or Penn State in the dead of winter? 4-12 in the Big Ten?

I think both teams will come back to this game as a sign of their opposite trajectories: the Illini falling to 0-4 in the Conference and heading toward a post-season snub, and the Hoosiers seizing first place in the Big Ten and rolling towards a top-3 seed in the Tourney.

I actually think that Indiana makes the Final Four. They have a great core with DJ White, Gordon, Armon Basset, JaMarcus Ellis and Jordan Crawford. Kelvin Sampson is a good coach and puts them over the hump against similar teams.

Furthermore, this game served as a prime example of Illinois' slow plummet since 2005. Nobody wants to play for Bruce Webber--not Gordon and not even in-state talents like Jon Scheyer, Patrick Beverly, and Derrick Rose--and he has slowly grounded this once high-flying program that competed for titles in '01, '02, and '05.

Congratulations

Props to Dan Shanoff for getting his morning blog back into the mainstream with the Sporting News. He's awesome, and even though his sports analysis is usually too fast to be especially thoughtful, hes pretty even handed, smart, and really easy to read without getting mad. Also, he has probably the most interesting takes on sports media and blogging in general.

But ,even more importantly, its finally been put into words. http://www.sportspickle.com/features/volume7/2008-0109-duke.html