Category Archives: saint john’s

saint john's, Vermont

Prunelight in Vermont

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At least we got that out the way, and by that I mean St John’s first loss of the season, 70-68 Saturday evening to the Vermont Catamites Catamounts at Carnesecca Arena. I know that the faithful consider these sorts of games – and by these sorts I mean games against the sort of no name teams that Lou used to feast on in antediluvian preseasons – are considered games St John’s “should win,” but really only by the faithful who haven’t been paying attention the last 20 years. It’s akin to thinking that Spain should defeat Israel in a war because they once had a very nice armada. Which is to say that might have been true in the deep recesses of history but nowadays not so much. My opinion is that there no games that St John’s should win and very many they’re lucky to have. But then I’m something of a pessimist. And yet as pessimistic as I am – and my glass is half empty and the full half is bile – I’m hoping that some good comes of it. In the grand scheme of things this one loss is nothing. This is not a post season team so even beating a projected NCAA tournament team like Vermont wouldn’t have done anything for their resume, because they won’t need a resume, because no one will be offering them a job. (If my crystal ball is accurate and it usually is they’ll be a couple of games over .500 when the BE season starts on New Year’s Eve, which means that Coach Third Choice is on his way to the first losing season of his career.) And neither is the some good my usual unfettered joy at seeing the air go pffft out of other people’s balloons, although there’s some of that. What good might come of it is that the team wakes up to the idea that they’re not very good, because they’re not, and that for the season to not be a complete fucking disaster they’re going to have to try a wee bit harder than they’ve been trying, which is not very. Because so far they’ve been chucking up threes and taking crazy floaters in the lane and reaching for the ball as their man blows by them and putting about as much effort into denying the entry pass as the bouncer at a Bangkok brothel. Which might pass muster against Central Connecticut State but won’t when SJU runs into the juggernaut that is DePaul …

All of which said, the game was an entertaining affair of the sort that often happens when two talented mid majors stink up the joint: Vermont shot 40 percent from the floor, 25 percent from three, 66 percent from the FT line; not to be underdone SJ shot 35 percent from the floor, 25 from three, 65 percent from the FT line – their third game in a row under 70 percent for you Eddie Mushes scoring at home – had a mere six assists on 20 plus made baskets and turned the ball over 16 times, In fact if they hadn’t shot 22 more free throws than Vermont the game would have been over by the second TV time out in the second half, because whatever halftime adjustments CTC made failed miserably: SJ was up six at the break and down seven five minutes later … Speaking of awful basketball Pat Driscoll and company didn’t help matters by calling a foul a minute, including a half dozen arbitrary and capricious charges that might have been blocks and several suspicious goaltendings. On the bright side SJ once again mainly got the benefit of the whistle, which is I think CTC being rewarded for not chirping at the refs all game ala Mullin … Anyway, as one genyioius said “we only lost by two” and as another, “On to Columbia.”

PLAYERS: LJ Figueroa had a double double, including an inefficient 14 points (4-13 from the floor, 3-7 from three and 3-6 from the FT line, where he’s at 60 percent for the year) and 10 rebounds … Josh Roberts had 13 rebounds and eight blocks: kudos to Matt Abudamessiah for spotting his talent and to Chris Mullin for nurturing it … the other Champagnie brother had nine points and six rebounds and was the only player to not miss at least one free throw … Earlington had eight points, seven rebounds and three steals in 20 minutes. He’s more and more reminding me of a former jack of all trades basketball renaissance costco batman. He doesn’t defend like that guy but that guy didn’t defend like that guy when he was a first semester sophomore either … Mustapha Heron had another NCAA tournament performance: he was 3-11 from the floor with four turnovers …Nate Rutherford and Greg Williams both had identical lines: no points, one block and two turnovers in 13 minutes – perhaps they’re twins? – and Damien Spears and David Cadaver played nine minutes between them. That’s carry the one two points, five rebounds, five TOs and one assist in 35 minutes from what projects to be the seven to ten slots on a team that relies on a system that goes ten deep. This does not bode well … the big news this week of course was that Rasheed Dunn received an eligibility waiver from the NCAA. On the one hand, good for the kid, because fuck the NCAA. On the other hand was the reaction of the most delusional fan base in the world – I read yesterday comparisons between Dunn and Pearl Washington and between Marcellus Earlington and Charles Barkley and Draymond Green – which proclaimed Dunn the missing piece in SJ’s resurgence under coach iron mike CTC based on careful viewing of two-minute highlight videos they watched on their phones. The fact is that Dunn had a 1-1 A2T ratio and shot 38 percent from the floor and 25 percent from three on a NEC team that was in his two years there 17-45 and he hasn’t played organized basketball in a year and a half. Unless there’s some sort of Cedric Jackson reverse osmosis miracle on the horizon I wouldn’t get your hopes up. In limited minutes yesterday he seemed to pay attention on defense and doesn’t seem bashful on the offensive end – he took more shots than Heron in fewer minutes (including a game tying three with 19 seconds left, which was an awful shot until it went in) and made more too although the way Heron’s been playing that’s not saying much.

NOTES: Just as dook is one of the finest Ivy league schools in the ACC, UVM is one of the finest of the so-called public ivies, which include William & Mary, Miami University, UCLA, and interestingly University of North Carolina, which evidently is so advanced academically that the students don’t even need to attend classes. Despite being a team St John’s should beat Vermont has made the NCAA tournament seven times this century, which includes as a #13 seed an upset of Syracuse (which SU squad included Gerry McNamara and Hakim Warrick) in the first round in 2005; they lost in the next round to Michigan State, who went on the final four … Vermont’s coach John Becker was 6–44 at Gauudet in Division II before he got to Vermont, where he won 100 conference wins in the fourth-fewest total games in NCAA men’s basketball, tying Bill Self … Famous attendees include former Cleveland State coach Rollie Massimino; the philosopher John Dewey, whose theories of pedegogy [sic] are directly responsible for the sorry state of education in the United States; Mrs. Jerry Seinfeld and Mrs. Calvin Coolidge; Trey Anastasio, Jon Fishman and Mike Gordon, three fourths of the appalling jam band phish; and perhaps most notably the mass murderer H. H. Holmes, who’s credited with 200 kills, which if true is close to a land speed record: besides his sheer numbers Holmes is notable for having built a specially designed “murder castle” in close proximity to the 1893 World’s Fair, from whence he lured his victims, whose bones and body parts he sold on the black market – after he fucked their corpses and stripped them of their flesh it goes without saying – which ingenuity his wikipedia article ascribes demurely to his having “an entrepreneurial spirit.” Which, nice work if you can get it … Vermont the state is the country’s safest per capita and also the leading producer of maple syrup, which I’m not sure I see a correlation unless the syrup makes Vermonters too fat and lethargic to get off their couches. If so that would be in direct contrast to their energetic forebears, who were in the 1930’s leading practioners of eugenics, which led the state to declare illegal marriage and procreation by what they called the feebleminded, which to Vermonters then meant French Canadians – which is understandable – minorities and especially the native Abenaki – most of whom were disappeared into the state’s copious mental hospitals, never to be heard from again –  and the differently abled. It should come as no surprise then that Vermont is the whitest state in the union at 96 percent because what nonwhite in their right mind would want to live there, which if I understand the current zeitgeist correctly makes Bernie Sanders a racists, which should come as a surprise to absolutely no one, him being a democrat.

new hampshire, saint john's

Miss New Hampshire?

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Saint John’s came back from a 12-point deficit to sneak by one of the worst programs (Hi Fordham!) in the history of college basketball at Carnesecca Arena Tuesday night 74-61 and if that isn’t enough to set off some alarm bells then I don’t know what is. Because there are only a few explanations and none of them are pleasant. Either Coach Third Choice is having a hard time motivating his players, which seems unlikely as he’s already in six short months created an entirely new culture wherein his team will run walk on hot coals to run through a brick wall for him, so it can’t be that; or they’re looking past their opponents  – one wag suggested that UNH was “a classic trap game,” presumably before their important homecoming showdown against crosstown rival Vermont; or they’re playing down to the cupcakes. But Occam’s razor suggests that they stink and that’s where my money is. I mean, okay, stink may be a little harsh. Mercer stinks. Whereas SJU’d be a contender for the national championship if they played in Division II and a contender for the conference championship if they played in the MAAC. Unfortunately they play in the Big East, which this year has lost one game so far as a conference and where perennial laughingstock DePaul just kicked the bejesus out of Iowa on the road. Despite a steady stream of ‘this is going to be a dangerous team that surprises some people’ chatter from the homers I suspect  that ‘this is going to be on of those pesky teams that no one wants to play but nobody minds beating.’ Still, that’s down the road and for the time being they remain undefeated. At least until Saturday …

The box score reflects SJ’s ineptness: they shot 40 percent from the floor, for the second game in a row 60 percent from the free throw line – Wow! When was the last time that happened Eddie Mush! – and turned the ball over 15 times. The only thing that saved them was that UNH was worse: they shot 38 percent from the floor and 50 percent from the FT line and turned the ball over 15 times and not a lot of that had to do with SJ’s defense, except the free throw shooting obviously. If there was a bright spot – and there wasn’t – it’d be the 17 offensive rebounds, which is I think without looking more than they had all of last season … For all the talk of 40 minutes of hell and Anderson’s (I refuse to call him Iron Mike and so should you) diabolical use of his bench only seven players played double figures and five of them played ~ 30 minutes. Whether this was a strategic decision based on match-ups and personnel or CTC abandoning his vaunted system at the first sign of adversity is a question for wiser minds than my own.

PLAYERS: Absent LJ Figueroa – he had a career-high 25 points (including 5-9 from three), eight rebounds, five steals – CTC’s cadre of ball washers would this morning have some splainin’ to do … Champagnie had another near double double – 11 points and nine rebounds – and Josh Roberts had in 33 minutes (!) 12 points and seven rebounds along with four blocks, which puts him about second in the country total and tied for fourth percentage-wise. Regarding that Marquette’s Theo John is currently averaging eight blocks a game, which prediction: that number comes down … Unfortunately that’s the end of the good news. Mustapha Heron must have thought this was an NCAA tournament game: he scored five points on 2-12 from the floor … Nick Rutherford had six rebounds and five assists which is nice but is averaging close to three turnovers a game and shooting 20 percent from three for the year and 66 percent from the FT line, which if that continues, that’s going to be a problem … Earlington had eight points and four rebounds in 12 minutes and was involved in something of an ironic sequence where he was called for flopping at one end of the floor – which if flopping was a point of emphasis a couple of years ago several former dook players would have been hanged – and a charge on the very next possession … Great White Hope David Cadaver contributed little in nine minutes and Damien Sears less in fewer than that

NOTES: I sojourned in New Hampshire briefly in my youth, drawn by the lure of cheap booze from the government-run liquor stores and no state income tax and the delicious irony of living in a state where convicts make license plates that say “Live Free Or Die,” but didn’t last very long there despite those boons: the arts are nonexistent – the state’s greatest cultural achievement is a rock that looks allegedly like an old man –

the winter weather is atrocious, and the citizenry comprises the sort of rock-ribbed can’t get there from here republicans that make even rock-ribbed can’t get there from here republicans such as myself rethink their rock-ribbed can’t get there from here republicanism. Not to mention that it’s next to Massachusetts, the worst state in the union other than California, California being peopled in the main by mellow extroverted assholes in Bermuda shorts. I can’t place the year I was there exactly but it was long enough ago that I had a square job waiting tables at a downtown Concord restaurant run by the sort of Greeks who hate their customers only slightly less than they hate the staff. There was nothing much notable about it except that one day I waited on alleged comedian Pat Paulsen, late then of Rowan and Martin and the Smothers Brothers, who was running for president, which he did every four years. His wife had a vanilla milkshake while Pat took a shit; she was nice enough but he didn’t leave a tip, which isn’t surprising as he was running as a democrat … New Hamphire’s sports mascot is the wildcat, by which I assume they mean mountain lion, because it’d be weird if they named their team after Johnny Bench, Ernie Ladd or Andres Galarraga, big cats all. I never saw a lion while I was there but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any: I never saw a minority either and I assume there are some as the state’s population is allegedly one and a half percent black. Which perhaps explains the futility of UNH’s basketball program, which is described in its Wikipedia article as having “a long-standing reputation for futility … since 1903 no Wildcats team has made it to the NCAA or NIT tournaments and no Wildcat player has made it to the NBA.” Current Coach Bill Herrion  – who can perhaps be forgiven as he learned everything he knows about basketball studying at the feet of Mike Jarvae at George Washington – is 172-251 in 14 years at UNH and has had two winning season in that time and yet his job seems pretty secure; his predecessor Phil Rowe was 45-125 in six years; and those are two relative success stories compared to the conga line of incompetents that preceded them, a conga line so incompetent that they defy description, even for a writer of my prodigious talent and access to a thesaurus: Jeff Jackson was 21 and 61; Jim Boylan – who went on to coach the Lebron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers – was 15-69; and Gary Friel was 188-335 in his twenty year career. The last coach to have a measure of success was someone called Butch Cowell (119-54), who also coached football and baseball, except when the university was unable to field sports teams due to a little thing I like to call “World War One.” … The university’s notable alumni – and I hesitate to plow this ground as I notice that Norman Rose over at Rumble has cleverly come up with this idea all by himself – include major league baseball players Carlton Fisk and Del Bisonette – the first player to hit a bases loaded triple and home run in the same game and as a rookie only one of five players in MLB history to be walked with the bases loaded (the others include Barry Bonds and a presumably sober Josh Hamilton); the novelist John Irving, a first rate writer who’s scared to write a first rate novel; Michael Kelly, who edited the work of literary fraud Stephen Glass before going on to die needlessly in the first Gulf War, leaving behind a widow and orphan, because journalism; the saxophonist Jeff Coffin; and a  bunch of hockey players and Canadian football players, which who cares … Fox Sports 2 had four halftime analysts which I thought a bit of overkill for a Tuesday night preseason game until I learned that they were naming – wait for it – the Mount Rushmore of SJ’s basketball. That this turned out to be merely an opportunity for these dopes to shout out the names of random past players – Willie Glass! Bill Wennington! Sergio Luyk! – shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but it did. What didn’t come as a surprise was that histrionic personality disorder poster boy Steve Lavin opined that one of his players – D’Angelo Harrison – should be considered, as he might have been the school’s all-time leading scorer “if I hadn’t suspended him,” which statement allowed Lavin simultaneously to thrust himself into the center of the conversation while diminishing the accomplishments of one of the players directly responsible for his meager success. What a repulsive, repulsive person. No wonder Mary Ann cucked him.

Central Connecticut, saint john's

Devils May Care

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I was going to half ass my way through this essay the way I half assed my way through the last one but then ‘Wait a minute fun,’ he thought, referring to himself in the third person, ‘What if we,’ he thought, referring to himself as the royal we, ‘What if we were to sit down and see if we can’t pound out two thousand words, just like we did in the good old days when having written meant looking forward to getting paid — and to make it even more difficult we’ll do it sober, I mean relatively sober anyway, there were those mimosas this morning and the beers with lunch, but we haven’t started drinking martinis yet and it’s nearly 1 PM.’ So here we are.

So yes, St John’s defeated Central Connecticut State Saturday afternoon 87-57, about which there’s not much to say about it except that a mere two games into Coach Third Choice’s tenure at St John’s the team came out flat and stayed that way for about 20 minutes. In fact the only reason they weren’t behind at the half was because the threes they kept chucking up kept going in. Whereas the other guys not so much. Still, whatever halftime adjustments CTC made worked a treat and SJ put CCS away early in the second half and didn’t look back.

To put this in perspective though the last time St John’s played CCS the score was 80-55 and that was under the lazy and unmotivated Chris Mullin, who couldn’t coach his way out of a paper bag and spent most of his tenure at SJU drinking inappropriate amounts of water and tying his shoes. Remember too that even though CTC’s first class was pretty lackluster Mullins 4-star leftovers and his two-star bluebloods are outplaying only the no-star recruits they’ve had the good fortune to be facing. For which reason until conference play starts or they lose to Vermont I’ll be withholding judgment on just how bad this team is going to be … Not much of interest in the box score: all of SJ’s 11 three pointers came from Heron and LJF, while the rest of the team was a combined oh for eleven, which carry the one is not very good; nor is 15 turnovers against barely a Division I school very good; and neither is shooting 53 percent from the free throw line. One basketball guru noted on a fan board after the Mercer game that lost in the shuffle of that resounding victory was that SJ had shot 80 percent from the free throw line and when was the last time that had happened, which note to that dummy the last time that happened was two games ago in the Big East tournament and the next time it happens you might want to keep it to yourself because evidently you’re Eddie Mush.

PLAYERS: It’s almost like Mustafa Heron is trolling us now: after shooting 3-15 from three in his last six games last year — including an oh fer in the NCAA tournament — he’s this year shooting 76 percent. Prediction: he cools off … LJF had what for anyone else might be a career: 17 points, six rebounds, and six assists. For him he seemed a bit off … Champagne once again displayed some lively basketball instincts and was a couple of rebounds away from a double double, which is pretty good even considering the competition although prediction: he cools off and then later hits the freshman wall … Josh Roberts had his second seven rebound four block game, although it might be a little early to pencil that in for the rest of the year. He does have mad hops though yo … The rest of them came back to earth a bit. Nick Rutherford — who one geriatric wag compared to the late great Mel Utley and I’m not even making that up — had one assist and four fouls in 18 minutes … Much to the chagrin of the red and white crowd great white hope David Caraher was 2-7 from the field which means he’s shooting 35 percent from the floor and an appalling 14 percent from three. Prediction: He heats up, a little … Damien Sears had 11 rebounds in 14 minutes, which seems like it should be a misprint, Earlington was Earlington although less so and Greg Williams continues to look lost and out of place.

NOTES: I took a bunch of notes last night but they make little sense, which is odd because I wasn’t even that drunk yet. For example in the middle of the page it says “Frank Thomas, WAC!,” which WAC stands for ‘what a cunt’ and in light of day I can’t imagine why I’d want to call the Big Hurt a cunt … St John’s allegedly hosted last evening something called “Basketball Family Day” as a part of which 125 former athletes and team managers were honored at half time. I can’t barely find any mention of it on the internets but am led to wonder: who was number 126, aka the guy who failed to make the cut. My money’s on Paul Berwanger, but then it is always … The game was called by someone and Len Elmore, who told for the umpteenth time the story of how he was all set to come to St John’s and then Louie went to the Nets and Len hied off to Maryland where he went on to become an All American and a first round NBA draft pick. I suppose if you’ve never heard the story before it’s interesting but it’s also a bit rude. I mean imagine if some girl you never quite managed to bang every time you saw her she went out of her way to tell you about the guy she fucked instead. It’d get pretty tired pretty quickly … Speaking of tired Coach Third Choice might want to consider losing that soul patch, unless he’s going to start wearing zoot suits on the sidelines. And speaking of facial hair LJF might want to consider a trim as well, because he looks like the best supporting actor in a beheading video … Central Connecticut State is coached by Donyell Marshall, a former BE Player of the year and lottery pick who went on to a long and respectable NBA career. Unfortunately for CCS being a successful NBA player does not always translate into coaching success: DM is in three years at CCS 31–61 total, which includes 16–38 in conference. Still, you’d have to think that as a prodigal son returning to the site of his former glory for a program that’s made the NCAA tournament a mere three times this century he has some measure of job security … Along with 10-odd other universities CCS are called the Blue Devils, which got me to thinking: what the hell is a blue devil? I know what a red devil is (aka Beelzebub) and a Sun Devil (a whirlwind) and even a sea devil (aka the angler fish, also known as the monkfish,

which is sometimes called the poor man’s lobster, which btw is not a reason to put fucking mayonnaise on it and you know who you are), but the etymology of blue devil escaped me. Well. Evidently blue devils are apparitions supposedly seen by sufferers of delirium tremens, aka the DTs, which explains why I never heard of them, because the DTs are an affliction that affects those who lack the willpower to not give up drinking. It’s come to mean over the years more than that: its synonyms include “mulligrubs,” a word meaning stomach ache or colic and “collywobbles,” meaning depression and which apocryphally was shortened to refer to a type of music allegedly inspired by melancholia, aka the blues. This seems a bit fanciful to me, but I read it on the internets so it must be true. As a mascot for athletic teams the term seems to have arisen from the moniker of a brave group of World War I French paratroopers called “les Diables Bleus,” which seems apocryphal to me as well, I mean a brave Frenchman, pull the other one.

 

Mercer, saint john's

Bear Necessities

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Well I’m back to burst your collective bubbles. For how long who knows but for the time being: you’re welcome.

I couldn’t be arsed to take any notes during last night’s 109-79 drubbing of the hapless Bad News Mercer Bears, but I did have a few observations I thought to share:

*I’d say Mercer is awful but that’d be insulting to awful.

* Have to be impressed by the final score – St. John’s scored 100 points for the first time since they scored 100 points last year – but what impressed me was how classy it was of Coach Third Choice to leave his starters in to almost the end of the game so that Mercer didn’t  feel like they were being condescended to.

* For all the talk of defense amongst various basketball intelligentsia today I thought it pretty porous. Mercer got a ton of open looks from three and got the ball inside seemingly at will – although that might have been ploy by CTC because Mercer’s big men made the Frankenstein monster look like a ballerina. If Ömer Yurtseven gets the ball on the block like that I suspect there might be a different outcome. And neither was I terribly impressed with the press – it created turnovers but a lot of them were the result of boneheadedness of the sort that happen when your point guard careens wildly down court, leaps into the air and looks around for someone to pass to. And anyway I suspect that a good coach – Doug Mcdermott’s father for example – is going to run more than one inbound play all game, aka throw the inbound pass to the corner and hope for the best once the point guard gets trapped.

* Of the players not a lot was to be gleaned: Figueroa looks like a late first round draft pick; it’s a shame Heron can’t shoot threes against Arizona State as well as he can against the likes of Mercer and Sacred Heart – but for his spectacular choke last year SJU might have won one more NCAA game than Mercer has this century, which they have not, Mercer having beaten DoOk within recent memory and SJ having squeaked by Northern Arizona shortly after the Y2K bug ended life on the planet Earth as we know it; fun’s favorite player Marcellus Earlington showed why he’s fun’s favorite player; Roberts is very active – regarding the latter two it’s obvious that a year working with Mitch Richmond really paid off for them and kudos to Coach Chris Mullin for sacrificing some production last year to allow these two fine student athletes to adapt to college, because as the great Steve Lavin once said “Some things are more important than winning,” although in Lavin’s case what was more important than winning was a getting a table at Rao’s where he could stuff himself with carbohydrates, the fat slob; hopefully Williams has some sort of lingering injury because he looks like less than he looked like last year; if Rutherford is forced to play point for extended periods of time this year is going to be even longer than it’s already going to be; Champagnie seems to have some basketball instincts; Sears does not; and David Caraher looks like Tim Doyle lite, which is unfortunate because he can’t transfer to Northwestern.

* Hoping Jim Gaffney and company shake off their early season rust: they called only 49 fouls, which isn’t even two a minute. They did though accord SJU the home field advantage for a change, because SJU got away with a lot of things they might not get away with against Villanova, which need I remind you last year played an entire game without committing a foul. Off the top of my head, Heron’s forearm shiver to some guy on an inbound play; Figueroa pushing off on a step back three; and Earlington routinely hooking guys on his way to the basket.

*Announcers though were in midseason form. Sarah Kustok – who’s a pretty chipper person considering her father is in prison for murdering her mother (she testified on his behalf) – said eight minutes into the first game of the season that Marcellus Earlington was assuming a bigger role “thus far this season” than he had last season and then the rest of the time she and Brian Custer babbled about sneakers.

* Yes I know wags, hopefully I shake off the early season rust as well.

saint john's

No Irish Need Apply

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Opportunity: a favorable occasion for grasping a disappointment. — Ambrose Bierce

I’m usually not one to use words like embarrassing and disaster when it comes to sports, even St John’s basketball: the sinking of the Titanic was a disaster; getting a hard-on when the doctor checks your prostate is embarrassing. But what’s been going on at St John’s over the past ten days has been an embarrassment and a disaster and has turned the program into more of a national laughingstock than it’s been for the past 30 years. Consider:

First, St John’s pushed the best player in program history out the door after a 20-win season that culminated in an NCAA tournament bid. Probably this should not have been surprising, since every SJ coach since Brian Mahoney has been fired after making the tournament; only Norm outsmarted them: he never won anything. Next SJ made a generous offer to the university’s choice as Mullin’s successor, Danny Hurley’s brother.  Danny Hurley’s brother rejected their 15 million dollars with a jaunty “Forks Up!” Undaunted SJ then made an 18 million dollar offer to their second choice, a Midwestern mediocrity called Porter Moser, who similarly laughed at them. Let that sink in: a career .500 coach turned down nearly 20 million dollars to coach in Queens.  At this point in the search prospective candidates started preemptively turning down the job: Ryan Odom said flat out ‘please don’t offer me the job.’ Former St John’s player Tim Cluess said ‘If you’re thinking of offering me the job, don’t.’ Currently the only person who hasn’t said no thanks is Tom Pecora, who’s at this moment sitting by the phone, staring at it, willing it to ring.

That last bit was a bit of an exaggeration. In point of fact it seems that SJ is on the verge of offering Rick Pitino Billy Donovan Jim Calhoun Bobby Knight Frank Martin James Jones the gig. And not James Earl Jones – Dook, I am not your father – James not Earl Jones. Jones has a lot going for him: in the 20 years he’s been at Yale he’s won slightly more than a game for every game he’s lost, he’s had a losing record one third of the time, and he’s never recruited a scholarship athlete. And of course the elephant in the room (Patrice O’Neill RIP) he’s black, which will allow the university to put a nice spin on the hire: look at our commitment to diversity. It’s just a shame he’s not as butch as Jessie Smollett, think of all the boxes that would have checked off, a minority LBGTQWERTY who’s been lynched personally by Donald Trump.  Speaking of hard-ons.

Seriously, if they were going to hire a James Jones, I’d have preferred they hired this one.

If nothing else he’d have the good sense to put the program and those of us who are still drinking the Kool-Aid out of our collective miseries and failing that the program could move to Guyana the A-10 (I have another Peoples Temple joke but the punch line is too long. Ba dum. Thanks, I’ll be here all week, don’t forget to tip your waitress.)

Seriously, I’ve been a St John’s fan, more than 40 years now. And I’m beginning to suspect that the administration doesn’t know what it’s doing. The other explanation is worse: that the administration thinks you’re stupid and doesn’t give a shit about you, that you’re a rube who’ll continue to support the product no matter how awful it is. I guess we’ll see how dumb you are.

saint john's

If You Rebuild It, They Will Dumb

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You idiots have loaded up a hair-trigger double-barreled shit machine gun and the barrel’s pointed right at your own heads. – Jim Lahey

I’d say you can’t go home again but that’d be hacky. How hacky? So hacky that it was the theme of a column written by Mike Vaccaro, which note to Mike: as hard as you try to be a bad writer you will never be the worst writer at the NY Post while Steve Serby still has a functioning liver.

Not surprisingly – him being a dunce – Vaccaro misunderstands the meaning of Wolfe’s epigram. It doesn’t mean merely that you can’t return from whence you came. That would be stupid, because lots of people leave a place and return to it with no great loss or effect. What the saying means is that from whence you came becomes different because you left it and becomes differenter still when you return: you can’t go home again because when you leave home there is no home qua home left. And that is not the moral of the Mullin saga and even if it were that’d be the wrong moral anyway.

So yes anyway Chris Mullin has resigned as head coach of St John’s after four short years, after being given a vote of no confidence by AD Mike Cragg. The story is that Cragg refused to extend Mullin’s contract, making him essentially a lame duck and that Mullin refused to be a lame duck. So Mullin will take his four million dollars and go home, and good for him: the lawyer in me – and as I learned recently via 23 and me the Ashkenazi – says he earned every penny.

The news of Mullin’s departure led to great glee among the worst fan base in the world, or at least the vociferous part of which posts on line: at redmen dot com – a steaming fetid cesspool where a dozen bitter zealous imbeciles – like this moron, an Uber driver who lives in his mother’s basement, which would be cliché if not true

– repeat the same shopworn twaddle half a dozen times a day without a scintilla of wit or insight – and johnnie jungle – a sort of redmen dot com for the short bus riders – and on Twitter at #sjubb – which while also a fetid swamp of stupid at least displays a modicum of a sense of humor. The glee is not surprising: besides being the worst fan base in all of sports St John’s fans comprise in the main St John’s graduates, meaning that they were poorly educated and not too bright to begin with. Which in turn means that their take is apt to be wrong and spectacularly so. What was surprising to me was the animus displayed against arguably the greatest player in the program’s history who led St John’s to one of its few triumphs in the modern era. But as Hitler said to Stalin on the eve of Operation Barbarossa: what have you done for me lately.

At this point I’m so cynical that I no longer trust my own skepticism but frankly I was a bit taken aback. Not by the recent graduates certainly. Besides having no connection to Mullin the player millennials comprise the stupidest generation to walk the planet since cro-magnon struggled to two feet and have been since birth swaddled in confident estimation of their own self-regard. You’d think that they of all people would have awarded Mullin a participation trophy just for trying to coach. But no: their charity extending only to themselves they do not understand why they cannot win now; after all they deserve it. But I was surprised a bit by the reaction of the red and white club crew: all of them former division one athletes and CYO coaches and basketball savants and multi-millionaire donors with sources inside the program who pal around with NBA scouts and Big East VIPs whose shifting avatars and veiled allusions comprise vague hints about vague rumors, lest they burn their important sources; they are not at all twice divorced desperate for attention low self-esteem drama queens who own several cats: they are important people with important opinions deserving of respect. These people I thought might give the great Chris Mullin the benefit of the doubt. But no. They had their knives out too. Dull as their knives are.

So Chris Mullin is gone. Frankly that makes me sad; I had high hopes. That said he marks the fourth of the last five St John’s coaches to be fired after winning 20 game and making the NCAA tournament. Fran was fired after going 22-10; Jarvis was 21-13 the year before he was let go; stupid Steve Lavin was 21-12; and Mullin 21-13: the combined record of those four coaches is carry the one 85-48. The only coach not to be fired at St John’s since the last century was good old Norm Roberts, who had the good sense never to make the post season; no doubt the same fate would have awaited him had he. Even at UCLA do they wait until their coach doesn’t make the tournament to fire him but here at St John’s we act preemptively, because if the 30 years since Lou retired has taught us anything it’s that changing coaches every five years is a recipe for success. And so we face another another five years of torment by the basketball gods. Which maybe we probably deserve.

Not that Mullin was particularly a good coach. He wasn’t. I’m not talking about the optics that the morons talk about: where he sat and when he tied his shoes and how much water he drank when. Those things are McGuffins that mesmerize the rubes. I mean that his system was not designed to optimize the talents of his players, who weren’t good enough to play ball the way he thought it should be played. On the other hand the talent he brought in was about as impressive as any that had been brought in since hapless Brian Mahoney and but for a couple of key defections – Lovett last year and Owens this – and a couple of shit the bed performances by Heron and Clarke in this year’s tournament, things might have been different. But then if pigs had wings they’d be my uncle.

***

When Mike Cragg was introduced as St John’s new Athletic Director he talked a great deal about the importance of family, both his existing family and his new one. I thought – mistakenly it turns out – that he was talking about his new St John’s family, you know, the family that sprung from the loins of Buck Freeman and spawned Joe Lapchick who in turn begat Louie and Mully and Walter and Malik and so on. Turn outs – if the rumor is true that the mediocrity that is Bobby Hurley is going to be the next St John’s coach and if not him Chris Collins or the appalling John Scheyer – Cragg was talking about his dook family. Because evidently Cragg is trying to recreate dook in Jamaica. If I were a teen age girl I’d type here LOL and festoon it with emojis. I think what Cragg doesn’t understand  – which is understandable considering the cocoon he’s lived in for the last 30 years – is that dookies are not successful merely because they’re dukies. And in fact most dukies (other than Mike Brey) are spectacular failures: Shewrkinski’s coaching tree comprises mediocrities like Collins, Tommy Amaker, the disgraced Quin Snyder, floor slapping dope Steve Wojowitski

and  serial cheater Jeff Capel; and his players comprise a conga line of failures so spectacular that it defies description: Chris Duhon, Josh McRoberts, Chris Carrawell, various and sundry Plumlees, Jason “look out for that tree” Williams, Shane Battier’s furrowed head, Trajan Langdon, Jahlil Okafor, Austin Rivers, Cherokee Parks, Shav Randolph, Brian Zoubek; more dook graduates have had life threatening drunken driving accidents than have had successful NBA careers. The most successful duke player in modern NBA history was made of tissue paper and after him comes who? Probably this guy, former poet laureate James JJ Reddick.

who penned these immortal lines, once the subject of an unctuous ESPN special

No bandage can cover my scars
It’s hard living a life behind invisible bars
Searching for the face of God
I’m only inspired by the poems of Nas

Facing the forecast of fears
that none of my peers
have ever been faced with
I wanna reach the top floor
but I’m stuck in the basement
With not enough juice 
to burst through the chains
that have shackled my brain

 

As Oscar Wilde said of The Olde Curiosity Shop: “One must have a heart of stone to read of the death of little Nell without dissolving into tears of laughter.”

What Cragg doesn’t understand is that dook succeeds for one reason: that Mike Schrewshenki sold his soul to the devil is a diabolical genius who every year takes a group of slow unathletic pasty faced ballerinas and molds them to his indomitable will and who with the aid of a corrupt college basketball hierarchy peopled by repulsive sycophants and lickspittles like Dick Vitale and Jay Bilas – and the coven of dook alumni who comprise college basketball’s lead analysts: Quinn Snyder, Mike Gminksi, Bucky Waters, the drunkard Bob Wentzel, Jim Spanarkle, Alaa Abdulwhaterver – are presented as the paragon of white privilege virtue and sportsmanship. I suspect that Cragg is in for a rude awakening when he discovers what goes on outside the protective bubble wrap that ESPN affords his former employer. Because Bobby Hurley, well he doesn’t stink, but he’s nothing to write home about: he’s given credit for rehabilitating U Buffalo, but that distinction falls to Reggie Witherspoon, who inherited a five win team on NCAA probation, won 20 games four times in his ten year tenure after that and bequeathed Hurley a team laden with upperclassmen; and at ASU in four years after inheriting a respectable program from Herb Sendek has done nothing of distinction. Prediction: if he comes to Jamaica Hurley will fail in Jamaica, as every coach post Louie has failed in Jamaica, because Jamaica is where coaching careers come to die. And Cragg will follow him out, rodent tail between legs.

Finally a word about Rick Pitino, about whom the great unwashed have been tweeting and posting lo these last several days. Bring in Rick Pitino they say, returneth the prodigal son to returneth St John’s to its former glory, such as it was, what a story of redemption they say for a great Catholic institution. Frankly I don’t see it happening. If the stories are true St John’s wouldn’t let Mullin hire poor Mike Rice and all he did was assault some players and call them sissies. Whereas Pitino fornicated publicly and thereafter ran a brothel: that’s like seven mortal sins and various cardinal and for which he has not repented: he recently demanded as a prerequisite for gracing St John’s with His presence apologies from various government agencies who had dared challenge his ethics and morality; how dare they! Not even as corrupt an organization as the Catholic Church can put up with that sort of hypocrisy.  Obviously it will be a great disappointment to Rick Pitino should he not be offered the job, but on the bright side if Rick Pitino can get through 9/11 he can get through anything. I just don’t see it happening. But on the other hand, it’s the only positive outcome. Do you fire the great Chris Mullin to hire Kevin Tim Cluess? Steve Pikiell? Geno Ford? If that’s the case they should have given Steve Lavin a lifetime contract. And Steve Lavin is a horrible coach and even a worse person. If you don’t believe me ask Rysheed Jordan. Not right now, he’s presently being sodomized in the prison shower. But  later, through the glass.

redmen dot com, saint john's

Redmen dot dum

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In the wake of St John’s disappointing first round tournament loss I checked in at redman dot com this afternoon, home of the basketball intelligentsia. Suffice it to say that everything is rotten in the state of Jamaica. And the stench is not just from the bay. According to the various college basketball insiders there and former Division 1 athletes and current CYO coaches and self-important in the know drama queen avatar shifters the following changes are impending:

Mullin, who hates coaching, is leaving for the west coast to be closer to his family, just as he did last year

Matt A is leaving for Nebraska, just as he left last year for LSU.

Of the players, these nine guys are gone:

Ponds (turning pro)
Heron (turning pro)
Simon (grad transfer)

Trimble (he posted Oprah-esq pablum about every change being an opportunity, hence he’s leaving, just as he did when he posted a picture of an airplane on his Twitter feed earlier this year)

Keita, a low D1 player, is transferring

As are all the freshmen, because as one knowledgeable insider said, “I’d be shocked if any of our current freshmen spend their sophomore years at St. John’s,” because Williams is unhappy with his playing time, as is Roberts; and Earlington – whose father tweeted recently that he was the future of SJ basketball – is fleeing to Rutgers to play football.

More bad news. Of the incoming players Tabor is decommitting, Cam Mack is staying but he’s a head case and Wright, Caraher, Manuel and Steere are not D1 players, because someone watched a 30 second youtube video.

On the bright side lazy and shiftless Mitch Richmond is staying, along with boy wonder Greg St Jean and LJ Figueroa. No word about the walk-ons.

Also on the bright side our next coach is lined up: if Jared Grasso (11-42 lifetime as a head coach) is not available we’re going to break open the piggy bank for Rick Pitino.

Also also on the bright side new AD Mike Cragg is going to address the “composition of the current roster,” because that’s what big time AD’s do. They micromanage the basketball roster. And he has the experience to do so, because you know that at dook Cragg had long fruitful discussions with Mike Schrewshrenski about how and who he should recruit when.

I’ve made a lot of bad decisions in my life, mostly having to do with broads (too many fast ones), horses (too many slow ones) and drinking and drugs (not enough of either). One of the smarter things I’ve done though is delete my RDC account, because that place is a cesspool: a bunch of middle aged men who haven’t seen their dicks since the Clinton administration stalking teenage boys and slandering them on the basis of their interpretation of their Instagram emojis. And when they’re not doing that they’re talking about how classy they find themselves and how classless they find everyone else. The only interesting things I read were the various mentions of me and what I might be doing, because evidently I am legend and live in their heads.

Jesus fuck those cunts make me feel dirty. And I’m a piece of shit.

arizona state, saint john's

Post Mortem Depression

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So once again our long national nightmare has come to an end, and to no one’s surprise – except the maggots – St John’s lost in the first round of the NCAA tournament. To those among you who are too young to remember Lou Carnesecca – or Steve Lavin – this will have come as no surprise. To long time fans like me who are slowly sliding into the grave: been there done that.

Personally I very much enjoyed this season. A 12-0 start that would have been 15-0 had not St John’s been butt-fucked in Jersey by rat-faced Kevin Willard; various quad one wins against Villanova and Marquette; and an NCAA tournament bid: a season termed a disappointment by die-hard fans living in the 1980s, but for me at time thrilling and in the end good enough I guess. I think a part of my enjoyment comprised my resolve to no longer read the faggotry that passes for commentary on various SJU fan boards and especially my decision to no longer rehash every awful loss and pathetic win on this stupid blog: because fuck the pressure I put upon myself to render my drunken day before scribblings into vague thoughts the morning after; and also fuck you, my dear readers.

Rather than rehash what was a what-might-have-been season – and kudos to all those who spent hours and hours minutely examining the OOC schedule and NET scores and RPI and whatever, because you’re not at all maggots – I hereby render the final season grades, and as usual no disagreement will be tolerated. As usual, we grade on a curve, meaning there’s an A and almost an F, which in today’s everybody gets a trophy world is a C minus.

Shamorie Ponds: A: someone’s got to get one. He is no – as I’ve been maintaining since forever – Marcus Hatten, who led St John’s to the post season twice in two years. He is however one of the more supernaturally talented players to have visited St John’s in a while and I count myself fortunate to have seen him play. He does not seem to have it, whatever it means, let’s call it a killer instinct, but he has something, which is more than most St John’s players have had in a very long time. Good luck to him.

LJ Figeroa: B plus: second best player on the team and with crazy upside: size, motor, skills. Looking forward to his second year.

Mustapha Heron: B: despite his 1-12 implosion in the tournament had a nice year and hopefully he returns for another. It’d be an NCAA slap in the face for him to have received a waiver to move back to NY to care for his ailing mother and then a scant nine months later abscond to Turkey or Lithuania to play pro ball, because NBA bound he is not. On the other had, I’d love to see the NCAA – the worst most corrupt organization since Tammany Hall – slapped in the face, so there’s that.

Justin Simon: B: numbers were down a little but his numbers as a sophomore were Dom Pointer’s as a senior. And defensive player of the year is nothing to sneer at. Hopefully he returns as well.

Brian Trible: C: a poor man’s Truck Bryant, he’s seems to be coming along nicely. Hopefully he takes a 1000 threes a day and steps up next year.

Bench (Williams, Earlington, Roberts): C: personally I’m not a fan of freshman and evidently neither is Mullin. Still, they all showed flashes and I’m not willing to give up on any of them and no good can come from any of them leaving, because continuity.

I am Marvin Clark: C minus: unlike on the court, he’s hard to defend. Scored no points in his last two games; fouled out of more than half of his last 10 college games; and was 16-52 from three over the same period. Yes he was playing out of position and yes he’s overcome a lot in his life and yes good luck to him but bottom line I do not care if the door hits him on the way out. Because he folded on the big stage and was the weak link before that.

Sedee Keita: C minus: No telling how much the injury effected him. Lamont Hamilton II: big body, small hands. Hopefully he comes back and gets better.

And now the big one:

Chris Mullin: B minus: on the plus side he won 20 games, won a must win game in the BE tournament and made the NCAAs; he coached a first team all BE selection and the BE defensive player of the year. That’s something. On the minus he’s not much of in-game coach – which to me in game coaching is over rated: bring in superior players and they will beat inferior players all day long. But here’s the thing: Mullin is one of us: a NYer and a SJ lifer and a non-hysteric non mental patient. Imagine what Steve Lavin might have done had his brother been diagnosed with cancer during the season and shortly thereafter died: he’d have donned sack cloth and ashes and taken a bereavement leave and then afterwards mentioned how devastated he was by the loss in every half time interview he did for years afterwards; whereas Mullin never mentioned it once: all he did was visit his brother in the hospital day after day after day and then get up and go to work and then when he died went to the funeral and mourned in private and then went to work. He acted like a fucking man and I welcome him back next year and fuck all the maggots lining up his successors, because that is not happening and your disappointment makes me hard.

Consider:

Subtract the team Norm Roberts left Steve Lavin with and you get this, Lavin’s subsequent record

13-19
17-16
20-13
21-12 (NCAA)

and compare it to this, Mullin’s record

8-24
14-19
16-17
21-11 (NCAA)

and subtract Lovett’s defection, and you have the same coach, except Mullin’s not Lavin.

So there we have it. What’s to look forward to? The Kentucky Derby and the Triple Crown and Saratoga punctuated by sloppy drunken star gazing on warm summer nights and various self-important dopes on St John’s board with insider information and shifting avatars starting vague rumors about how Matt Abdelmassih is moving to Nebraska. Same as it ever was. It’s going to be a long off season, I suggest you all find a hobby. Mine’s masturbation, but as usual YMMV and more cowbell.

 

arizona state, saint john's

Hurley Girly Man

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Somewhat in my cups I wrote a bit of a monkeyshine selection Sunday evening, the gist of which was that there were very many St John’s who were less than pleased with a 20 win season that resulted in St. John’s fourth NCAA tournament appearance this century, because St John’s fans are the worst most disgraceful and stupidest fan base in the history of sports. (One chronic malcontent for example claimed that despite their name being called during the various Tournament Selection Shows as part of the field of 68 St John’s had not actually made the NCAA tournament because they were in the play in game. I had to listen several times because the fact that he had the repulsive Steve Lavin’s dick in his mouth all the while obscured his diction, but I made it out eventually.) During the course of that post I used an unfortunate euphemism to categorize St John’s fans – it rhythmed with maggots – for which I was chastised by one of my seven regular readers, which euphemism I later excised, not because I found it offensive, but because I’d rather have seven regular readers than six. That said, it was absolutely the right word. Because St John’s fans suck.

Which is the reason I resolved several months ago to stop reading the retarded (oops! another forbidden word) drivel written by the chowderheads who populate various St John’s fan boards – all of whom are self-proclaimed college basketball insiders and former coaches and D1 athletes and if not that savants – boards where I had been a regular and much beloved poster for over a decade. I did so because the only responses I could think to compose in reply to the incessant twaddle that passes for discourse in those forums involved liberal use of the word cunt, and for some reason the word cunt is against the rules. Whereas in my world it’s de rigeur. So I just stopped participating and I don’t even really miss it. Because St John’s fan boards comprise in the most part the same 17 morons repeating the same tired 11 talking points over and over and over again, without a scintilla of wit or intelligence or insight: which is not surprising, as these are in the main all St John’s graduates. But I thought this evening on the cusp of a St John’s impending and glorious victory over Arizona State (JINX!) to check and see what the intelligensia were thinking. Here follows a sample and I was not disappointed:

Here’s what they had to say about the best player to commit to St John’s since Marcus Hatten:

“I think [Ponds] checked out a while ago. I hate to say it, but it wouldn’t shock me at all if he stopped showing up to class right after our last game”

“[Ponds] has one last chance to play with some heart in the ncaa tourny. If not … I’ll say good f’ing bye. I’ll never ever respect anyone that plays with no heart.”

“Chris should have benched [Ponds] … and yeah I’m talking about about all damn season”

” his attitude this season damages his legacy”

Another die hard is “not holding my breath” [regarding a St John’s victory]

Another wishes for what might have been: “Imagine this team with [folding chair Frederico] Mussini”

Another says of an NCAA tournament bid that “Ponds, and co had a pretty disappointing season”

Fear not fans, because victory is around the corner, if only HOF’er Chris Mullin heeds this sage advice: “My … point of emphasis would simply be hitting open shots.”

Thanks genius. Maybe Coach St Jean will mention that during a time out.

But I really have a special shout out for one acute imbecile, this guy

a 30 year old Uber driver who lives in his mother’s basement and attends home games dressed up in Halloween constumes, who says of the prenaturally talented Shamorie Ponds that “he never really had it between the ears.”

You sir, are a real maggot.