Oh, c’mon, how could I pass that up?<\/p>\n
So, if you didn’t know, no sooner did I say nice things about Team USA<\/a> than they turned around and reverted to NBA ball, playing a couple of closer-than-expected games, and getting bounced in the semifinals<\/a> of the World Basketball Championships by basketball powerhouse Greece. I blame Mike Krzyzewski.<\/p>\n I’d discuss the game in detail, but, well, it was on at three in the morning US time, so I haven’t seen more than the highlights on ESPN. Apparently, the Greeks got very hot in the middle part of the game, shredding the US defense with a series of pick-and-roll plays, and shooting something like 75% from the floor. They shot 63% on the game, which is pretty damn impressive. The US, for their part, appears to have relied on shooting lots of jump shots, which didn’t work terribly well. They also shot under 60% from the free-throw line, which is death in a close game.<\/p>\n This will lead to lots of finger-pointing from sports talking heads, which is sort of stupid because nobody really cared about this tournament before the loss. If it wasn’t more important than pre-season football when they were winning, it’s not a national crisis when they lose.<\/p>\n I do want to make one comment, though: a bunch of people have said things like “These guys are NBA stars, and they can’t figure out how to defend the pick-and-roll?” as if there’s no surer indication of complete idiocy. I have four words for those people: John Stockon, Karl Malone. Those two guys had a fifty-year career in the NBA<\/strong> doing nothing but running the pick and roll. And they were perennial all-stars as a result.<\/p>\n Done well, the pick and roll is extremely difficult to defend. Greece apparently did it very well in the wee hours of Friday morning, so congratulations to them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Oh, c’mon, how could I pass that up? So, if you didn’t know, no sooner did I say nice things about Team USA than they turned around and reverted to NBA ball, playing a couple of closer-than-expected games, and getting bounced in the semifinals of the World Basketball Championships by basketball powerhouse Greece. I blame… Continue reading Greece Is the Word<\/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],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-561","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-basketball","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/561","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=561"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/561\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}