I wasn’t going to write anything about St John’s glorious 82-63 victory over the Columbia Lions Wednesday night at Carnesecca Arena. Because despite the fact that we’re only five games into the season I already need a mental health day. But I’d gone to the trouble of writing the notes section yesterday and thereafter spent several hours looking for just the right Showgirls jpeg to display above and I’d hate to waste all that hard work so here we are. So yea, SJ beat Columbia to the great surprise of no one because Columbia stinks. No doubt some fans are this morning congratulating the team for valiantly bouncing back from their disappointing loss to UVM (infra) but those fans are dunces, because Columbia stinks, despite the presence of Mike Smith, the best player on the floor, who was a few bounces away from a triple double.
As you can see it wasn’t much of a game: St John’s was up by 20 at the half and didn’t look back although it’s vaguely worth noting that much like UVM Columbia outscored St John’s in the second half, which I’m led to believe is a direct result of half time strategizing … A few boring obvious points:
- St John’s failed to break the magical 70 percent free throw for the fourth straight time and is now at 67 percent for the year
• Speaking of free throws Columbia shot three to SJ’s 19, the last two coming with three minutes left in the game. Roberts, Earlington, Williams and Dunn committed zero defensive fouls in a combined 79 minutes.
• 13 assists SJU had on 31 made baskets, this despite Coach Third Choice complaining during an in the huddle time out that his team was passing the ball around aimlessly and waiting until the last second before hoisting up a lousy shot
• Attendance was 3400 plus, which means in total they’re down about 6000 seats compared to last year. Which no doubt some of that has to do with them raising ticket prices and some of that has to do with the moribund schedule combined with the Wednesday evening starts but if it continues it’s going to be worri$ome.
• Shout out to Jim Spanarkle who opined after a St John’s steal that led to a dunk that “that’s a great example of why you don’t want to turn it over,” which I’d much rather he pointed out an example of why you would want to turn it over.
PLAYERS: The other Champagnie brother (14 points, 7 rebounds) continues to impress, although I’m not sure that his leading the team in shots (14) is a winning formula moving forward … It’s too soon to tell whether Rasheed Dunn is a volume scorer or just rusty but his numbers this year (albeit a small sample size) are uncannily like his numbers at St Francis: .34/.25/.81 versus .39/.28/.77. On the bright side he doesn’t seem disinterested defensively. Unlike several of his teammates … Heron (15 points) rebounded nice from his two disappointing NCAA tournament performances against universities Vermont and New Hampshire … Eight and eight from Marcellus Earlington, until recently deemed by the intelligentsia as not a D 1 player … Roberts with 11 rebounds … LJ Figueroa (nine points three rebounds) looked completely disinterested in the game of basketball in 20 minutes … the inferior competition evidently reanimated David Cadaver (9 points, five rebounds) much to the delight of the Red and White Club (because racism jokes never get old) … Sears, Williams and Rutherford had nine points and six rebounds between them. One the one hand they don’t really matter. On the other Williams look lost, which he didn’t look last year … Walk-ons J Cole and T O’Connell (I CBA to look up their Christian names) were rewarded with a combined two minutes for their hard work in practice. I’d predict the over under on how long it’ll be before CTC’s seeming penchant for leaving his starters in during garbage time results in a season ending injury for one of them but that might be a jinx
NOTES: Filed under ball-washing: Various astute St John’s fans spent Tuesday night providing live updates of the Vermont Virginia game, presumably on the theory that if Vermont could hang with Virgia and Saint John’s could hang with Vermont then St John’s can hang with Virginia. This of course is nonsense and those people are dolts. What happened at SJ over the weekend was that top 25 Vermont had an early season game against #7 Virginia circled on its calendar but before that they had to play a meaningless out of conference road game against cupcake St John’s, a perennial national laughingstock picked to finish last in its conference. Predictably Vermont put in a classic trap game performance, played down to its opponent, did just enough to not lose and went on to do pretty well in the game it was looking forward to when it was looking past SJ. Only the most delusional fans would think that a game between two tournament teams is a barometer of what the upcoming season portends for SJU, which at this point at least it seems that going .500 would be the ceiling … Much like me a mere five games in, Fox Sports seems to have run out of ideas. They last night at halftime re-ran a hackneyed who’s-on-St John’s-Mount Rushmore bit they did only two games ago. (In between they did the Big East Mount Rushmore, so it’s not like they’re completely boring hacks.) Anyway the SJU answer is Buck Freeman, Joe Lapchick, Lou and Chris Mullin. The Big East Mt Rushmore is a bit more challenging. Do you pick players who contributed for a maximum of four years or coaches who were there forever? Obviously the latter and the answer is (leaving out Dave Gavitt): Jim Calhoun, Jim Boehiem, John Thompson and Norm Roberts. A player Rushmore would be Patrick, Mullin, Pearl and someone else. I’m tempted to go with Walter Berry, but that would make me a bit of a homer, so maybe Richard Hamilton instead … Columbia university – an actual Ivy League school, not a public Ivy or an ACC Ivy but an actual Ivy – is one of the oldest schools in the US blah blah blah, it’s too boring to go into and their mascot is the Lion, which is interesting only the extent that that they’re the third Lion is a row St John’s has played. What isn’t boring is a list of famous Columbia graduates, which is so long and prodigious that I almost feel guilty about appending it here, but it’s a long season and I’m already sick of this. So. Columbia grads include athletes Chet Forte, who at 5’8″ beat out Wilt Chamberlain for college basketball player of the year in 1957 – Forte averaged 28 and 4 while Wilt averaged 29 and 18, so you can see why they gave it to the white guy; first round draft pick Jim McMillian; Jack Molinas, a college basketball fixer (he was responsible for future Hall of Famers Connie Hawkins and Roger Brown being banned from the NBA) who was murdered by the mob in Vegas; baseball HOFer’s Lou Gehrig, Sandy Koufax and Eddie Collins, the latter of whom instituted the Red Sox policy of not signing black players – Pumpsie Green, the first one, died just this past July; NFL HOFer Sid Luckman; and former Detroit Lion great John Witkowski, who completed 13 passes in an illustrious four year career. Politicians include four US presidents (Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and Barack Obama); founding father Alexander Hamilton; and former Czech president Václav Havel. Musicians Béla Bartók, both Rogers and Hammerstein and Art Garfunkle, which makes this is the only sentence you will ever read that contains both “Bela Bartok” and “Art Garfunkle.” Writers Jerzy Kosinski, EL Doctorow, Alan Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Joseph Heller, Langston Hughes, JD Salinger, Herman Wouk and Hunter Thompson; with a special shout out to the biologist Hans Zinsser, whose Rats Lice and History is the funniest book ever written about typhus and John Kennedy Toole, who wrote the great American novel before killing himself; Hollywood types William Goldman (Butch Cassidy), Herman Mankiewicz (coauthor of Citizen Caine), director Sidney Lumet (Dog Day Afternoon, Network), Jimmy Cagney, David O Selznick (Gone With the Wind), Pat Boone, Brians Dennehy and de Palma, Katie Holmes, Al Lewis, and Anthony “Psycho” Perkins. And variously the unctuous David Stern; the lovely Bella Abzug; the patriot Roy Cohn; the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg; noted chubster Meghan McCain; and fictional characters Meadow Soprano, Peter Parker and Jessie Spano.