Yi Jianlian: The saga continues

December 26th, 2007 | Posted by PostmanR

Again, I will not understate this: Yi Jianlian RAWKS HARDCORE. I have been rather dubious about his game thus far, because he seems too fragile, too thin to execute well in the NBA. But over the blogging break he put up a performance worthy of a considerable amount of praise. Some are even saying he might push Kevin Durant in the ROY race.

… it was that near-perfect performance that helped Yi pass Kevin Durant atop this week’s rankings.

Playing against a road-weary Bobcats team (it took them 11 hours to get from Charlotte to Milwaukee), Yi hit his first 12 shots and finished with a career-high 29 points in a 103-99 win on Saturday. Oh, and he pulled down 10 rebounds and had three steals on defense.

“He’s getting a feel of the game, getting more aggressive, dunking the basketball,” said teammate Michael Redd after the game. “He’s versatile. He’s like a fourth guard out there sometimes, the way he can shoot.”

So can Yi make up ground on Durant in the Rookie of the Year race? Maybe, maybe not.

Feb. 2 is the Yi vs. Yao rematch. This time it’s in Milwaukee. It appears Yi is thrusting the city of Milwaukee into the international spotlight. This man knows no bounds. Somewhere, Kevin Hunt is smiling.

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.

Case of the Mondays: Action, but at what expense?

March 19th, 2007 | Posted by PostmanE

Those of us clamoring for more upsets, more close games and more overall excitement in our NCAA Tournament were rewarded this weekend, finally, when everyone decided to go all crazy. My title-winner, OSU, nearly lost (I’m naming my first kid RonLewis), Purdue played Florida tightly, Wisconsin was upset and sent home, and Louisville and Texas A&M played a rousing game defined by ballsy guard play from Acie Law IV and Edgar Sosa.

All in all, a good weekend. Well … sort of.

There were at least two serious negatives here, too, and they were both brought on by LA’s two pristine academic institutions.

First, UCLA was complicit in a criminally disappointing end to our Hoosiers’ season, in which IU’s first half field goals (five) were outnumbered by their fouls (six). Terrible, terrible stuff, made all the worse by IU’s insistence on getting everyone’s hopes up and winning that thing down the stretch. Hard to swallow, to say the least. (And it kept me from another week-long vacation in California. Motherfucker.)

But the greatest loss was, by far, the USC-imposed tournament departure of Kevin Durant, who is likely to go pro now that his Longhorns failed to make it even to the Sweet 16 this year. That means no more of Durant’s sublime domination of the college game, no more Texas-Oklahoma State triple-overtime thrillers, no more 37/15 against the nation’s most athletic defense (Kansas). Instead, we have to watch Durant go through the altogether painful process of NBA draftdom. Instead of celebrating his mastery, we’ll be hearing for the next few months about the small flaws in the kid’s game, how he needs to put on weight, hold his follow through longer, and so on, why Chad Ford thinks he’s a mix of Player A and Player B with a mix of Player C thrown in, but with a higher ceiling.

It’s exciting, sure, but it’s also sort of sad. In that way, Kevin Durant, as we now know him, is gone for good.

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.