Well that was fun, and by that I mean the 79-56 beat down St John’s put on Nebraska at Alumni Hall Thursday night. It wasn’t so much the margin of victory – they beat CCSU by more on Monday – but the way they went about it: dunks and blocks and behind the back passes and a couple through the legs and even one off the backboard. It was so much fun that the game featured prominently on Sportscenter – just after James Harden’s 40 whatever point night and just before a video tribute the NL MVP Giancarlo Stanton – introduced by “if you like dunks you’re going to love this” and with an exit line warning viewers to “keep an eye on Chris Mullin’s crew.” The team’s play was I thought just the right level of arrogant: they got up big and kept their foot on the other guy’s throat and swaggered a bit but weren’t cocky about it and if anything the fact that they didn’t look like they were trying to humiliate anyone made the humiliation more humiliating. It was like one of those cartoon fights where one guy holds the other guy off with a hand in his face while the other guy futilely windmills his arms.
Which degree of confidence is not necessarily a bad thing, assuming they don’t forget they’ve won 25 games over the past couple of year.
For all the points they scored and the way they scored them they didn’t shoot particularly well – 40 percent from the field and 30 percent from three. What they did do well was rebound – they had 50 and were plus 11 – and pressure the ball in a way I don’t remember them doing in quite a while and when the pressure worked they got out and ran. Which is what I think the Mullin plan is supposed to be: defend, rebound and run the other guys out of the gym. The result last night was that Nebraska shot 28 percent from the field and turned the ball over 16 times. And that’s not to mention the ten shots St John’s blocked. That’s a lot of deficit to overcome and Nebraska is not the team to overcome it. Because they stink, which means there’s not a lot to take away here except to remember that this time last year St John’s was losing to Delaware State and everyone was soiling their nappies and calling for the formation of a new search committee … Mullin was once again animated and engaged and managed things well. He got T’ed up early in the second half for they said on the telly smashing a water bottle, but they didn’t show the smashing on Fox and I couldn’t tell what he was upset about anyway.
PLAYERS: Ponds had 22 points, 7 rebounds and five assists but was oh for five from three. Threw a nifty alley oop to Ahmed on a break and one off the backboard to Simon … Simon had his second double in a row, 13 points, 12 rebounds, plus four steals and three blocks. Which is Dom Pointer as a senior production … Ahmed had 15 points and 5 rebounds and really only took one bad shot …. When Tariq Owens entered the game the usually reliable Jim Spanarakle said that he’s a “senior” who can “play any position,” which no he’s not Jim, he’s not any of those things. Six points, six blocks, nine rebounds … Lovett finished with 14 in a team high 35 minutes … Clark had seven points and five rebounds, but fouled out in 25 minutes. Which makes nine fouls his last two games which does not bode well moving forward … Signs of life from Kassoum Yakwe, who had five rebounds in 15 minutes, after having just one the previous two games … Trimble didn’t play much and Alibegowitz not nearly at all. If that’t the rotation, that’s seven men, which is not ideal, but Villanova only goes eight deep and they’re pretty good
NOTES: I’ve written a a bunch about what a load of nothing Nebraska is relative to regular opponent Creighton so there’s no need to plow that dust bowl again. Nebraska the University though turns out to be not as much of an intellectual wasteland as you might think, boasting as alumni three Nobel laureates in science, Pulitzer Prize winner Willa Cather – who dressed like a man, referred to herself as Bill and lived for 39 years with a special friend called Edith – the great Johnny Carson – whose shit sanctimonious gasbags Jimmy Kimmel and Steven Colbert are not worthy to sniff; inventor of the all-you-can-eat breakfast Warren Buffett; and not surprisingly a bunch of football players, although not as many notables as you’d think, the most recognizable being Roger Craig and Irving Fryar. Nebraska’s sports teams are called the Cornhuskers, corn being the state’s bumper crop and husking its past time, but they didn’t settle on that until adopting and discarding the Hawkeyes (oddly Iowa, now the Haweyes used to be the Cornhuskers), the Antelopes, the Old Gold Knights (save the coupons), the Bugeaters, the Tree Planters and the Mankilling Mastodons, which I don’t know why you’d pick huskers over any of those last couple. At basketball they’ve never been any great shakes, having made the NCAA tournament only seven times since 1897, which makes St John’s look like UCLA in comparison … Speaking of UCLA it wouldn’t be a recap if I didn’t shit on halftime analyst the repulsive Steve Lavin. Over the summer I spent an afternoon editing Lavin’s wikipedia page, which before I got to it sounded like Lavin had written it himself: it was a smorgasbord of half truths, lies, and damned lies and reading it you’d think Lavin was an accomplished and respected basketball mind, as opposed to a histrionic cunt of a sociopath who in his short career destroyed not one but two storied basketball programs. I mean, the article mentions “cancer” seven time – which is about as many times as cancer is mentioned in the article about cancer – and gives Lavin’s win loss record minus games he missed “due to Father’s passing.” Which Olympic level faggotry I set about correcting. For example, the article noted that
to which I added
The article then ejaculated said that
Which I changed to
This
became this
and this
became this
and this
this
and this
this
All of which you have to admit was pretty fair, except maybe this, which even I’l admit was gratuitous
Those edits lasted nearly six months, until they were reverted this past week. Which is a victory for post modernism, because only in a world where there are no standards can Lavin be considered a good basketball coach or even a good human being. One small consolation thought is that they didn’t quite revert all of my edits. They missed this one.
Which must be true, it’s on the interweb … Speaking of California Charlie Manson is apparently at death’s door. No doubt the St John’s family’s thoughts and prayers go out to Charlie and his … Finally for poster Desco, who complains every time I don’t post titties, here’s Carol Wayne, who walked off into the ocean in Mexico in 1985 and was never heard of again.
