{"id":5452,"date":"2011-03-12T09:06:06","date_gmt":"2011-03-12T09:06:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2011\/03\/12\/championship-basketball-though\/"},"modified":"2011-03-12T09:06:06","modified_gmt":"2011-03-12T09:06:06","slug":"championship-basketball-though","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2011\/03\/12\/championship-basketball-though\/","title":{"rendered":"Championship Basketball Thoughts"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I stayed up way too late last night, watching televised basketball and reading Steven Erikson (about which more later). It wasn&#8217;t a good night for my teams, with both Syracuse and Maryland losing, but this is the most hoops I&#8217;ve watched all season, and I have a few miscellaneous comments:<\/p>\n<p>&#8212; How about that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2011\/03\/12\/sports\/ncaabasketball\/12uconn.html?_r=1&#038;partner=rss&#038;emc=rss\">Big<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2011\/03\/12\/sports\/ncaabasketball\/12irish.html?partner=rss&#038;emc=rss\">East<\/a>? Two hard-fought games in the semifinals, both going to overtime, with a spectacular individual performance by Kemba Walker. Sadly, both Syracuse and Notre Dame lost in large part due to grievous lapses in judgement, with players who ought to know better rushing three-pointers when they didn&#8217;t need to. Also, this continues my teams&#8217; perfect record of losing when Kate puts SteelyKid to bed so I can watch the end of a game live.<\/p>\n<p>&#8212; Also, how good is the Big East, if UConn is the nine seed?<\/p>\n<p>&#8212; Maryland hung with Duke well into the second half, so I don&#8217;t really agree with &#8220;rout&#8221; in the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/aponline\/2011\/03\/11\/sports\/ncaabasketball\/AP-BKC-T25-ACC-Maryland-Duke.html?partner=rss&#038;emc=rss\">headlines<\/a>, regardless of the final margin. &#8220;Rout&#8221; to me connotes a start-to-finish drubbing of an opponent, a game where the guys all the way at the end of the bench get on the court, not blowing open a close game in the last quarter.<\/p>\n<p>Regardless, Maryland lost, as they should&#8217;ve, because they really weren&#8217;t very good this year. I didn&#8217;t see much of them at all, but from what I can tell, they didn&#8217;t have anybody on the team who could reliably hit a jump shot, though they had a number of guys willing to <em>take<\/em> jump shots, which undercut the best inside play they&#8217;ve had since the championship team in 2002. I hope Jordan Williams sticks around, and they find some better guards.<\/p>\n<p>&#8212; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/aponline\/2011\/03\/11\/sports\/ncaabasketball\/AP-BKC-T25-MWC-New-Mexico-BYU.html?partner=rss&#038;emc=rss\">JIMMER!!!<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&#8212; I&#8217;m not sure, because I didn&#8217;t see any &#8220;highlights,&#8221; but I suspect the only way to make the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/aponline\/2011\/03\/11\/sports\/ncaabasketball\/AP-BKC-T25-B10-Penn-St-Wisconsin.html?partner=rss&#038;emc=rss\">Penn State-Wisconsin<\/a> game less appealing would&#8217;ve been to use actual peach baskets, so somebody had to climb a ladder to fish the ball out one those rare occasions when somebody scored.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s about all I&#8217;ve got. Feel free to chime in with other higlights\/ lowlights\/ observations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I stayed up way too late last night, watching televised basketball and reading Steven Erikson (about which more later). It wasn&#8217;t a good night for my teams, with both Syracuse and Maryland losing, but this is the most hoops I&#8217;ve watched all season, and I have a few miscellaneous comments: &#8212; How about that Big&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2011\/03\/12\/championship-basketball-though\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Championship Basketball Thoughts<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-basketball","category-sports","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5452","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5452"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5452\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}