Greg Oden is going No. 1, yawn

June 28th, 2007 | Posted by PostmanR

According to the WWL, Portland will select Greg Oden with the first pick in tonight’s NBA draft. So now, we await what sort of suit Greg will be wearing and if the NBA is going to be able to construct a hat large enough to fit on his dome.

Acie Law’s take on the Oden-Durant decision is pretty spot on.

“Without question, Kevin Durant’s the most talented player in this draft,” Texas A&M point guard Acie Law said. “But if I’m building a franchise, as most teams at the top of the draft are, you can’t pass up a guy you can just build your team around. Because there’s guys in the league that can score 20, 25 a game, like Kevin Durant can, but you’re not going to find a 7-foot manchild that can just patrol your line for 10, 12 years.”

A manchild, indeed.

We Recommend: L. Jon Wertheim’s Transition Game: How Hoosiers Went Hip-Hop

May 24th, 2007 | Posted by PostmanR

It’s been some time since we’ve done one of these. So here goes nothing...

We all know the sports landscape has changed. Baseball players are no longer rail thin and lithe. They are thick and strong — no matter what position they play. But perhaps more than any other sport, it’s basketball that’s veered away from its mean the most.

Gone are the short shorts. There’s a 3-point line. And, in a lot of circles, fundamentals and hard-nosed work is de-emphasized. There is more emphasis on pure 1-on-1 athleticism. Defense has taken a backseat to dunking. And this is where L. Jon Wertheim’s Transition Game: How Hoosiers Went Hip-Hop manifest itself.

It’s a quick, well-written read. The book bounces back and forth between Wertheim following his alma mater’s (Bloomington High School North) boy’s basketball squad during the 2003-2004 season and him taking us to other pockets of the state. He tells us where the history lies and how it’s been eroded by the new school. The spirit of the Milan squad, the team the movie “Hoosiers” bases itself upon, is still alive and well. The hero, Bobby Plump, still gets recognized and asked for autographs. But, there will never be another underdog, small-school-beats-big-school state champion. Class basketball no rules the day, a wholly unpopular decision in the state.

He pens about the proliferation of women’s basketball, where 20-30 years earlier it was nearly nonexistent in the public’s consciousness. We learn that one of the most successful sports agents, Eugene Parker, lives in tiny town in the northeast quadrant of the state. He tries going about things the right way. Instead of sending headhunters and shady individuals to AAU tournaments, he prefers to take a less aggressive route.

There’s even a scant description of a young Mike Conley Jr. and Greg Oden and their Lawrence North squad taking out Bloomington North in the state tournament’s equivalent of the Final Four. They were sophomores at the time. We also learn of the Duany family, who migrated to Bloomington from Sudan after experiencing hardships and political strife in their homeland. The parents sent all five –all five!– of their kids to college on a basketball scholarship. Wertheim takes us to all these places at a blistering rate, giving us just enough information to get a handle on the situation. Then, we are wisked away to somewhere else.

In Indiana, basketball is life. And life is basketball. Both have changed. But, the game we all know and love still seems to be plugging right along. It’s just different now, that’s all. And that, my friends, is all that really matters.

Greg Oden was not good enough to stop the Gators

April 3rd, 2007 | Posted by PostmanR

Dude sure tried though, huh?

He had some haters, (I’m looking at you Bill Simmons) but Greg Oden singlehandedly kept the Buckeyes in that game. Or rather, tried to keep them in that game. Without him, Florida wins this game by 20 or more. No doubt about that one.

How about in the first half when, double-teamed, Oden threw a dunk in Noah’s and Horford’s face. Unreal. He also had some tremendous blocks on the defensive end. But, that defense is what we’ve come to know him as. And, this was probably also his best game of the year, on the highest stage.

In the end, Florida was just too selfless, too complete and too well, too good for the Buckeyes. From Brewer to Green to Horford to Humphrey to Noah, they simply possessed too many weapons operating as one unit to lose this game.

You know what I’d really like to see though? This Ohio State team aged a year or two, taking on this Gator squad of ‘06-’07. That would be a showdown for the ages.

I can’t imagine if I was a student at Ohio State right now. Florida trumped us in two National Championship games this year?

Um, any room left in those anti-Noah Facebook groups?

Case of the Mondays: Grand opening, grand closing

April 2nd, 2007 | Posted by PostmanE

In terms of sports days, it doesn’t get much better than this, does it?

With apologies to the Cardinals and the Mets (actually, screw the Cardinals), today is the real Opening Day, the one day before the Cubs start losing and my early-to-mid summer depression really begins setting in. Minus Kerry Wood and Mark Prior, all is well in Cubdom, a content feeling that will surely pass as soon as the balls are dumped on the field today. Still, today is the day to enjoy, and from now until about June is the childhood of the baseball season. The potential is limitless.

And of course, tonight also marks the closing of college basketball season. After the disappointment of the Final Four - in which the Amazing Disappearing Jeff Green ruined my bracket chances - it seems a little presumptive to assume this National Championship game will be historic in any way. Still, there’s an historic ending by default with Florida here, and if Ohio State wins, Greg Oden and Mike Conley will get their well-deserved coronation. We’ll see if the Buckeyes can keep Oden out of foul trouble and causing problems for Florida’s interior … or if the Gators will shoot OSU off the floor, as they’ve done in nearly every other tourney game this year.

I’ll be back later to talk in more detail about the National Title game and whatever else tickles me, but I’ll also be over at my other home for most of the afternoon. Make sure to stop over, and a very Happy Greatest Sports Day Of The Year Besides The Super Bowl to you and yours.

OK, so some other stuff DID happen

January 22nd, 2007 | Posted by PostmanE

Most notably, a bunch of college basketball games were played. Here’s a sparse roundup of the action:

The Big Ten is three teams deep. We’ll get a better look at things Tuesday night when Indiana travels to Illinois (a game we’ll be attending, by the way), but for now, it looks like it’s Wisconsin and Ohio State at 1a and 1b, respectively, Indiana at 3, and Everyone Else in sharply cascading downward fashion. Even with their recent play, it would have been hard to put the Hoosiers in that top 3, but after their impressive, resilient win over UConn on Saturday, IU looks like the cream of that Big Ten crop. Relatively speaking, of course.

Give credit where it’s due. It’s easy to sleep on the Pac-10, what with their wacky Thursday-Sunday schedule and their late start times and such, but that conference is far and away the best in the country this year. Not only is its top team (UCLA) possibly the best in the country, but it goes about seven teams deep to the point that even Stanford will be able to make a pretty strong tourney case by the end of the year. Oh, and Aaron Brooks (no, not that Aaron Brooks), is tearing it up in Eugene for a pretty impressive Oregon team.

Sit down, Kansas. Every time Kansas makes it seem like they should crawl back into No. 1-seed contention, they go and do something like this. (In case it’s not abundantly clear, “this” is a 69-64 loss to Texas Tech in Lubbock Saturday.) That Kansas team is loaded with talent, but they seem unable to really string things together to get over that national hump. A 10-game win streak will put you in the discussion, sure, but you can’t go losing to TT after the fact. Ouch.

Have you heard about this Greg Oden guy? Apparently, he’s pretty good. Oden dropped a dominant, will-exerting 29 on Iowa Saturday, a career high he’ll probably eclipse at least once more before the season’s over.

Also, something about a guy named Durant…Kevin, maybe? All these future NBA Hall of Famers are hard to keep track of! What makes Durant different from Oden, at least today, is that his team lost a pretty boring game to Villanova this weekend while Oden’s rolled. We’ll see who has the last laugh, though, when Durant is making that NBA wing player endorsement money and Oden is toiling in obscurity in the low post. Punk.

Your quasi-analysis of Greg Oden

January 10th, 2007 | Posted by PostmanR

I know I’m dealing with a horribly small sample size here from the few games I’ve watched, but I’m going to go ahead and give this a go regardless. (I just used way too many permutations of the verb ‘go’ in that last chuck of the sentence.)

So here are some observations, in no particular order. (Or are they in an order meant to deliver you some sort of secret coded message about the imminent destruction of the universe?)

Oden is a sick defender. Insanely sick. He’s one of - if not the - best shot blocker in the nation and when he’s not blocking shots, he’s altering opposing players movements and shot selections under the basket. His foot skills could use some work and he is immobile at times, but he’s definitely a huge intimidation factor under the rim.

He shows no emotion. Well, barely any. I saw a little during the first half of OSU’s loss to Wisconsin last night. He’s calm and poised and doesn’t do any of the primal screaming after a dunk. He just goes about his business and gets it done - a la Tim Duncan.

His offensive skills leave a little to be desired. I know he’s been playing almost exclusively with his left hand due to his right wrist injury, so some slack should be cut. But the guy rarely calls for the ball in the post or actively pursues a shot in Ohio State’s offensive sets. He gets a lot of junk points of rebounds, inbounds plays and free throws. I’m sure in high school he was just clowning suckers in the post, but it’s different up there in the collegiate level.

He is 32-years-old. Isn’t he?

In which I question Sam Eifling’s logic

December 20th, 2006 | Posted by PostmanR

A somewhat flawed idea proposed over at Slate by Sam Eifling: stop following college basketball and get on the AAU train.

Seriously. That’s what he proposed in this column entitled “The Death of College Basketball.”

OK, let’s talk about this here and shamelessly rip FireJoeMorgan.

Here’s how far college basketball has fallen: Fans and pundits are going gaga over 7-foot super-prospect Greg Oden, a guy whose career at Ohio State will last less than a year. The NBA’s new age threshold means that high schoolers can’t jump straight to the pros. Still, for immortal players, college will be nothing more than a one-year way station on the path to a huge payday.

Well, isn’t it better for college hoops to get Oden for at least one year, then not to get him at all? I’d think so.

And how can you say college basketball has fallen because of people’s enthusiasm for Greg Oden? He’s one of the best players to come around in years, there’s going to be excitement for a player like that at any level. Yeah, Oden will probably only stick around for a year, but, if the rule hadn’t changed, he’d be banished to the Toronto Raptors right now. And we wouldn’t see him on national television once this year. Not once.

So by going to college, he’s doing far more service to a basketball fan then he would in the pro ranks. If you catch my drift.

But why should you care? For starters, check out a list of former AAU players who made it to the NBA: Amare Stoudamire, Allen Iverson, Shaquille O’Neal, Shawn Kemp. Every great player—even those who for the past decade have bypassed college—signs up. A hard-core AAU fan would have already seen Greg Oden for years, just as he would have been well-acquainted with the last such phenom. (LeBron James’ AAU team from the age of 10: the Shooting Stars.) The AAU circuit has also given us a tantalizing glimpse at the game’s famous flameouts. Don’t you wish you’d seen, say, poor Leon Smith as a 16-year-old, to know what all the hoopla was about? Or Kemp, back when he gave a crap about basketball?

Wow Sam. Amare Stoudamire, Allen Iverson, Shaquille O’Neal and Shawn Kemp all played AAU ball? Great. Two of them also played college ball as did oh, about 1,000,000 other NBA players. Which, I won’t chart here, because the list would go on for days.

And no, I really wouldn’t have liked to see Kemp when he ‘gave a crap about basketball.’ I don’t know if the man ever ‘gave a crap about basketball.’ Although, I’d like to think his years with the Sonics were rather productive.

And no way would I want to see Kemp as a young teen over Greg Oden playing this year in college basketball. No way. I can sit on my ass at home and watch Greg Oden’s magic. I would have had to drive myself all around Northern Inidana to catch up with Kemp when he supposedly gave a damn.

CONTINUE READING THIS POST –>

Case of the Mondays : PostmanR’s cornucopia of feelings

December 18th, 2006 | Posted by PostmanR

The National Football League :

Wrap your head around that Chicago Bear near meltdown. It’s hard to conceive. But hey, look at Mr. Grossman there. He’s all smiles. Career highs abound for him on the day. Defense and special teams let the Bucs get back in that one.

Jeff Garcia deserves some praise.

Collegiate Basketball :

Greg Oden is a freak. His wizardry around the hoop is simply stunning and once at full strength, it will simply be unfair. Like if Michael Jackson did a dance off against some dude with glowsticks. Simply unfair. (Did that make sense?)

Kentucky topples Louisville and I begin to wonder if the Cardinals are going to be a contender at all this year.

National Basketball Association:

George Karl should not have had Marcus Camby and Carmelo Anthony in the game so late. HOWEVA, that really is no excuse for this whole mess.

Observe.

Agent Zero dropped sixty on the Lakers in Los Angeles yesterday. Surely, to the pleasure of this Internet site.

Bulls continue to impress. Ben Wallace had 27 boards on Friday. Saturday, the overtime comeback win was stellar.

Um, so this was a pretty hodgepodge post. I spent hour upon hour re-working/designing the site into the wee hours of the night last night, so bear with me on the brevity. I’ll be back later with an informative post about the new design as well as some other treats. And we all love treats, no?

Greg Oden sure is tall

March 30th, 2006 | Posted by Matt

Last night, future Ohio State Buckeye Greg Oden competed in the McDonald’s All-American game. The 7-footer chipped in 10 points and a ridiculous amount of blocks and showed that he had something new to prove - that he’s tall. (He’s pretty much the size of three Thad Mattas.) Well, that might not be new, but Oden showed just how much of an advantage his physical attributes hold.

The guy looks like Ralph Sampson and plays like Hakeem Olajuwon - plus there’s no doubt he’ll “skyrocket” into the NBA.

With the exception of last night’s 112-84 loss to the West squad, absolutely everything has gone Greg Oden’s way lately. Mr. Oden enjoyed and took part in one of the best high school teams in Indiana’s history. His Lawrence North squad won the state title last Saturday - their third consecutive state championship. He was also just named the Naismith Prep Player of the Year.

Now, Greg Oden can just kick back (in his size 19 kicks), show his face at a few All-Star games, schmooze with celebrities and prepare to work really hard next year - at simply being tall, blocking shots and dunking the basketball.

West rallies, breaks McDonald’s losing streak