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red storm, redmen dot com

It Ain’t Easy Being Green

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I watched yesterday for the first time in a long time nearly a whole St. John’s game, which, predictably, St. John’s lost. (I say predictably because they stink.) In the old days I’d have probably been disappointed in the result and to alleviate my funk written a bit of a gambol about the free throw discrepancy and then spent an enjoyable 20 minutes looking for just the right bit of cheesecake with which to festoon it. These days though I actively root for St. John’s to lose and so was delighted, both in the outcome and also in the fan base’s reaction to it, because the tears of St. John’s fans are to me Veuve Clicquot.

I don’t have much to say about the game itself: Anderson is a lackadaisical recruiter with a one trick pony fugazi system designed to not bring out the best in his better players and St. John’s will flirt with mediocrity until he’s ridden out of town on a rail. As such, the details of it don’t matter much at all, except to the purists among you. And anyway I’m only writing this to get the the important stuff at the end. Feel free to skip ahead. But first a couple of observations.

* Does Coach Third Choice ever take the blame for anything? When he’s wins it’s a credit to his system and when he loses it’s always someone else’s fault. Yesterday someone else was once again the referees: “The thing I was really disappointed in was the free-throw discrepancy, that was awful … They made 26 out of 30 free throws, we made eight out of 17. That’s a big difference in the game.” Because that’s how classy individuals like Iron Mike respond to adversity: they point the finger at someone else. Perhaps he thinks that an undisciplined team that presses full court on one end and chucks up random threes (4-22 yesterday) on the other is going to shoot a lot of FT’s? Where’s this guy think he is, dook?

* Some fans are asking what happened to Stef Smith, who many had penciled in as a third team all BE player. What happened to Smith is that after averaging 13 points a game over his career at mighty Vermont he decided to test his mettle against stronger competition in the Big East and his mettle was found wanting. Expecting Smith to average 15 ppg in the BE is like expecting a guy who hits .280 in double A ball to hit .310 in the majors. What happened to him is: he’s not that good. Unfortunately for SJU fans not that good is good enough if you have Coach Home Run’s faith in his genious system. Which let’s face it has only worked a handful of times since the Reagan administration and when it worked for Nolan Richardson his 40 minutes of hell featured Scotty Thurmond and Corliss Williamson, whereas Anderson’s version features Montez Mathis and O’Mar Stanley. 

* Finally, congratulations to Ed Cooley’s diseased head on his 300th victory. Congratulations are also in order because Cooley’s no longer the most hideous coach in the Big East, that honor having devolved to Tony Stubblefield. Jesus I saw that guy for the first time the other day, he’s a fucking gargoyle.

And now the important bit.

There was a thread this week over at Redman dot com – home of the worst most ignorant basketball fans on the internet – asking about the continuing viability of another Saint John’s fan site, this one called Johnny Jungle. (Which yes, Johnny Jungle is a completely stupid name). The thread devolved as threads at RDC often do into shout-outs of increasingly desperate and obscure references. Like if there’s a thread at RDC called “SJU Top 5 Bigs” the list will start out reasonably enough with Zendon Hamilton and Bill Wennington, and then someone will say hey you left off LeRoy Ellis or George Johnson or Mel Davis or whoever, fair enough, but by the third page some dummy will drag poor Rudy Wright or Ed Searcy into it and another dope’ll chime in with don’t forget Paul Berwanger until finally some drooling geriatric mentions a random golem like Archie Oldham and the whole thread collapses under the weight of its own absurdity.

So it was with “Johnny Jungle.” After the introductory whatever-happened-to-JJ talk, the conversation turned quickly to me (a sporadic JJ poster), I being a legend still spoken of reverently at RDC despite the fact that I stopped posting there when Lavin was coach. One poster said gee I miss fun and a conga line of others chimed in

his posts were hysterical.

I miss Fun the most

One of a kind and hysterical … I wish he’d come back.

He’s still twisted and witty.

Which this last one I don’t know how I feel about the word “witty,” it’s kind of ghey. Oscar Wilde was twisted and witty. I’m fucking hilarious.

So anyway the JJ thread devolved into whatever happened to this or that guy of ever increasing tangent until someone called Monty (not his real name) said hey does anyone remember a person screen-named CRGreen. Now, CRGreen was a UCLA alumni who migrated to the #SJUBB boards in the early teens after Lavin got hired: he was a deluxe fanboi. I didn’t put much credence in CRGreen’s opinion and we clashed often – despite all available evidence he maintained that Steve Lavin was a competent basketball coach, of which opinion I was forced to repeatedly disabuse him – but the thing about CRGreen was that he was a walking CBB encyclopedia. He knew knew more about CBB than me, and I know more about CBB than any 10 of you combined. But this guy, he knew everything.

In 2013 it came to light that CRGreen was facing various health challenges: esophageal cancer — which is essentially a death sentence — and because he was a fat bastard tipping the scales at near 400 pounds, heart failure and diabetes. (Note to any fatsos reading: put the donuts down, you’re killing yourself.) Eventually CRGreen passed and was mourned.

https://web.archive.org/web/20130831034752/http://www.bruinzone.com/b12/messages/96749.shtml

And like Marlowe he’s been dead lo these many seven years.

All of which to get here:

In the JJ thread, what this Monty guy (again, not his real name) said was:

I did think that [CRGreen] was a plant by Lavin or a family member. The timing of his illness and alleged demise was awfully coincidental. If I remember correctly, it was right around the time that Lavin was, ah, terminated, that CR Green announced that he departure was imminent. Now, I do not mean to make light of the situation … [if he] was in fact terminally ill and about to meet his demise, but the whole story just smelled fishy to me.

Yes, we wouldn’t want to make light of someone choking on their own putrescent flesh while dying a slow agonizing death from throat cancer, we here at RDC are far to classy for that. It’s just that like Lazareth, CRGreen’s corpse stinketh of fish (John 11:39). (Ed. note: if someone from RDC uses the word “classy” in your presence check to make sure you still have your wallet. And both your kidneys.)

Leave aside the to-the-best-of-my-recollection factual inaccuracies and consider the tacit premise: Steve Lavin, a recent cancer survivor suffering from an acute case of narcissistic personality disorder, in the midst of being exposed as a coaching fraud whilst simultaneously being cuckolded by his famous actress wife because his once proud Irish penis refuses to stand at attention and perform its husbandly duty, that guy’s sending spies to an obscure corner of the internet to refute the opinions of 30 or so active RDC posters, most of whom can’t read and those that can can’t figure out the forum’s quote function and all of them basketball ignoramuses nearly to a man. That seems an unlikely course of events to me. A more likely scenario is that Steve Lavin’s never heard of you and if he had wouldn’t piss on you if you were burning even if he still had control of his bladder, which seems dodgy.

And for those reasons I correct the record.

The Roanoke Times (Virginia)

December 1, 2013 Sunday

Metro Edition

Craig Green, of Blacksburg, died on August 26, 2013, from medical complications following a long period of illness and declining health. He was 59 years old. In his last years he put up a hard battle against three serious diseases: esophageal cancer, heart failure, and diabetes.

Craig was born in Glendale, Calif., and grew up in nearby West Covina, where he graduated from Edgewood High School. He studied at Mount San Antonio College in Walnut, Calif. His life’s work was in the field of computer technology. His early career in the 1970s began as an employee of Wang Laboratories followed by employment as a computer specialist in the banking industry. He formed his own computer consulting company in the early 1980s. In 1993 he founded the company VCS Computers which he moved from Indiana to Blacksburg, Va, in 1995. He was President of VCS Computers from its inception to the time of his death. VCS built, sold, maintained and serviced computers for the local community and members of many incoming classes of Virginia Tech students. He was an ardent follower of his beloved UCLA Basketball Bruins and became an enthusiastic fan of Virginia Tech sports after his move to Blacksburg. He loved to sing and had a lifelong passion for playing the guitar. Craig was a fine and decent human being who enjoyed the loyalty and admiration of his friends. He is much missed.

He is survived by his mother, Nellie Thurman of West Covina, Calif.; his brother, Glenn (wife Karen); and step-nieces and nephews.

Requiescat in pace CRGreen and condolences to his mother Nellie. It’s always sad when a parent outlives their child. Unless Lavin planted the obituary as part of a diabolical plan to outwit Monty obviously, in which case fuck her.

Coach Third Choice, red storm

True Recruiting Lies

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Evidently Saint John’s will this weekend be hosting a JUCO called Isaih Moore, and no that’s not a typo, that’s how he spells his name. And even more evidently I’ve never heard of him before three minutes ago because who cares about recruiting. But it seems that Isaih is a 6’10” 180 pound 2-star recruit who in limited minutes last year at College of Charleston shot 40 percent from the floor, 60 percent from the free throw line and averaged nearly a third of a rebound a game. As such he sounds exactly like the sort of recruit Coach Iron Mike Anderson and his cadre of tireless assistants are going to be able to coach up to challenge Jay Wright for dominance in the BE and I hope he commits this weekend and maybe after that has a bag of White Castle or something because he seems a tad skinny. Tarik Owens weighed 205 for goodness sake and he got thrown around like a rag doll.

The reason for my post though isn’t to bury Isaih or even praise him. It’s to note that when Isaih was at C of C he last November lit up a team called PC for 13 points and 5 rebounds in 19 minutes and I was like whoa, he lit up PC as in Providence College like that, the PC coached by Ed Cooley’s diseased head, that PC?  Well no. It turns out that the PC he lit up is a place called Presbyterian College in Columbia South Carolina, a first year division one program, and this PC’s nickname is the BLUE HOSE and their college slogan is BE A BLUE HOSE and their alumni weekend slogan is COME HOME BLUE HOSE which weekend they advertise this way on their official college website:

 

Having considered these hose carefully I think I’d marry the one on the left because she looks like she can cook, kill the two hose in the middle because they have terrifying smiles and bang the one on the right because she looks enough like Jamie Lee Curtis so that if I squinted I could pretend I was railing Laurie Strode, especially if I was wearing a hockey mask.

providence, saint john's

Rhode Apples

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GAME: If you’d asked me yesterday whether I’d be writing about St John’s 61-57 loss to Ed Cooley’s diseased head on Saturday afternoon I’d have responded with a responding No. Or more accurately “helsch noosch,” as I had about 17 martinis in me by then. This morning though I find myself with some thoughts rattling around the brain pan and I know from experience that they’ll continue rattling around in there until I excise them. First is the obvious: without their best player and with a walk on playing significant minutes St John’s put a pretty good scare in a senior laden projected 11 seed on their home floor on Senior Day. Not quite a moral victory but pretty remarkable nonetheless. And in fact had Marvin Clark exerted one or two more nanojoules on a three that he front rimmed with St John’s down 50-47 with two minutes left the outcome might have been different, because Providence looked to be looking to give the game away. Whether they were playing down to their competition or St John’s was playing up to theirs or whether St John’s record isn’t what their record says they are depends I guess on your your perspective. Mine is that they’re better than their record says they are: that absent some player defections (Lovett and Wilson) and some inexplicable awful early season performances (a 20-point home loss to Providence; a 20-point home loss to DePaul) and a bounce here or there (the double OT loss to Georgetown) they’d be firmly on the tournament bubble. Which is pretty remarkable considering the circumstances. That’s not to minimize the disaster that this season has turned out to be and especially the losing streak, but to put it in perspective. Barring a miracle in the BE tournament losing three out of their last four makes them I think a long shot for an NIT bid but on the bright side I think they’ve assured themselves a pretty good seed in the CBI, if there is a CBI any more. Because even if they beat Georgetown Wednesday night – not out of the realm of possibility if Ponds plays, but as bad as Georgetown is they’re a bad match-up, that 12 hour turn around is a lot to overcome. If not, wait till next year bums.

PLAYERS: Justin Simon had 13 points, nine assists and six rebounds but that was overshadowed by his ten turnovers. I realize he’s a natural three playing point guard but that doesn’t excuse the cavalcade of boneheaded passes he threw and it’s not like its the first time: he’s good for three or four a game. For the record the record this year for turnovers a game belongs to Trae Young, the projected number one pick in the NBA draft. Which puts Simon in some pretty good company. … Clark had 14 points and six rebounds before fouling out for the ninth time this year. That might be a record too but I can’t be arsed to look it up … Oft maligned Bashir Ahmed had his usual game: 12 points, seven rebounds and three steals; I predict that next year some of you will think at some point, wow I wish Bashir Ahmed had had another year of eligibility …. Tariq Owens had 12 points, all of them in the first half … Amar Alibegiwitz – the gem of Steve Lavin’s 2104 recruiting class, a class which comprised Amar and Keith Thomas, whose forged transcript was passed to a Lavin assistant in a darkened parking lot by a since convicted felon – finally fulfilled the promise he showed when I pronounced him as potentially the best white player at St Johns since Phil Missere: he played yeoman’s defense and didn’t embarrass himself too badly on offense. I take back every bad thing I ever said about him except a couple of the really egregious ones. In all seriousness, one of the things I don’t understand about how Mullin has gone about things this year is his not being able to steal a few minutes here and there with Amar and Yawke. Yes, they stink. But as a teacher you’re supposed to find ways to get the best out of even your worst students. Here I think Mullin failed miserably …. Speaking of Yawke he did not play, coach’s decision. Ostensibly he had some sort of gastrointestinal issue, but he sat on the bench the whole game and unless his diaper was full and he changed it at half time he didn’t look to be in great distress …. Brian Trimble played two minutes, got yanked for missing a defensive assignment and was never heard from again. Scuttlebutt has it that in a fit of pique he refused to go back in the game thereafter; to quote Bartleby  the Scrivener, “I would prefer not to,” he said. Which if that’s the case, kid’s today. Imagine being a chubby three star recruit who’s privileged to be sitting ten feet away from two of the greatest basketball players who ever lived who are mentoring you in your chosen profession and you defy their authority because you’re butthurt. The mind boggles. When Chris Obekpa refused Steve Lavin’s invitation to enter an NIT game in 2014, that I could understand: Obekpa was a grinning sociopath and Lavin a buffoon worthy of no one’s respect. Trimble on the other hand seems like a good kid who was this year given an opportunity beyond his current abilities and Chris Mullin is Chris Mullin. My immediate reaction was: if what allegedly happened happened, don’t let the door hit you, because you abandoned your team mates and defied the coach’s authority, which if this was war time he’d have been shot for it. This isn’t war time though, it’s university and in light of day shooting him seems a bit drastic, as does revoking his scholarship. What doesn’t seem drastic is having his fat ass run up and down the bleachers until he pukes … Someone called Justin Cole performed admirably in his stead.

NOTES: I watched the game with good old missus fun, who had a couple of comments worth noting. First she asked why, if Ed Cooley goes to the trouble of having his shirts custom made he doesn’t go to the trouble of doing something about the back of his head. He could shave it she said, or get a piece or use some of that spray-on hair. To that I had no answer, except that perhaps he doesn’t care what people think of him when he’s leaving, only when he’s arriving. She also requested that I fast forward through the half time show, because “life’s too short to listen to Steve Lavin.” And having evidently caught up on her reading she asked whether I was really going to retire after this season and looked vaguely disappointed when I said that that was my current mindset. I’d like to think that she enjoys reading my ramblings but in truth I think she looks forward to my retiring to the library for a couple of hours three times a week, because believe it or not I can sometimes be a bit of a long day. There was a time when she’d have looked forward to our spending more quality time together. Alas, it seems those days are gone.

A couple of weeks ago in the midst of St John’s losing streak Post beat writer Zach Braziller – and this is not to take a gratuitous shot at Braziller, but to piggy back on something I wrote last time about the shortcomings of real time expression of half formed thoughts  – tweeted that there were myriad issues plaguing the program, including “coaching.” As bored as I am by the anti-Mullin contingent in various SJU fan forums at least they’re consistent: they slam Mullin whether he beats Dook or loses to DePaul. This though I thought cheap and opportunistic, because ZB wasn’t criticizing Mullin’s coaching when the team was 10-2. When I pressed ZB, asking him what exactly were Mullin’s shortcomings he back peddled, claiming that I’d taken what he said out of context. Which I hadn’t but whatever. Yesterday Brazziller tweeted that “With a minute left, St. John’s trailed by 5 and opted not to foul. These are the kind of late-game decision that we’ve seen all year and are perplexing.” Now, is that really perplexing? You’re down two possessions with 60 seconds left. If you foul and they make their free throws you’re down three possessions with 60 seconds left. How does that improve your prospects for winning? To me if you’re down five with 60 seconds left – and remember that SJU came back from down five just this week with 15 seconds left – you play aggressive defense and hope for a steal or a stop: it’s not like Dean Smith’s out there running the four corners, there’s a shot clock. I’m not saying that’s the only strategy there is, but it’s hardly perplexing. What was perplexing to me was not taking a shot down the court down four with four seconds left. Probably Providence wouldn’t have offered any resistance, but maybe, just maybe Providence has a player as dumb as the many players St John’s has who’ve fouled the three point shooter in the waning seconds of a basketball game and maybe they get lucky. Because – and you might want to write this down – you’ll never get anywhere in life underestimating the stupidity of the other guy. Personally I think the criticism of Mullin’s coaching over blown: it’s not the coaching people don’t like, it’s the system. The same fans who’ve been lamenting for years the walk it up the floor offense St John’s has played since times antediluvian are now when confronted with an NBA style of play pining for Carmine Calzonetti running Lou’s half court offense. Well, I’m not. I mean sure Mullin’s no Mike Schrewshrenski or Doug McDermott’s father, but there’s not a lot of geniuses in the coaching ranks. What I see when I see Mullin on the sidelines is an engaged coach doing the best he can under the circumstances – some of which are his fault, sure. But what I’m most struck by is that he looks like he’s having a good time, despite the results. He looks happy. I think he looks happy because he loves St John’s basketball and his happiness makes me happy, because so do I.

providence, saint john's

Out of the Friar

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At first I wasn’t going to write about St John’s 94-72 loss to Ed Cooley’s diseased head on Thursday night at Carnesecca Arena. Not out of fatigue or disgust but more or less indifference: St John’s threw in a clunker of a second half – the worst half they’ve played this year and perhaps the only really bad one – and there’s not a lot of joy to be found in rehashing it. The loss dropped St John’s to 10-3 for the season and into a tie for second place in the Big East, one game behind #1 Villanova and #6 Xavier.

But what I was struck by and what I’m going to write about briefly – so if you’re looking for a normal recap look elsewhere – is the reaction to the loss and specifically the reaction of a certain type of fan: the type who reacts to every data point on the continuum as if it’s epiphanic, as opposed to mundane. And (royal) you know exactly what I’m talking about.

These are the fans who see only three kinds of games: must wins, cupcakes and guaranteed losses. These are the fans who were just 24 hours ago checking plane schedules to Nashville – Lunardi currently has St John’s playing there in March as an 11 seed – and using all the tricks they’ve learned coaching 3rd grade girl’s CYO basketball to devise a diabolical scheme to nullify the height advantage the Seminoles (that’s a racists name right there btw) should 7’4″ freshman Christ Koumadje come back from his foot injury. These same fans who this morning, after watching a bad half of basketball – and it was a bad half, no doubt: poor defense, poor shooting, poor decision making – are describing the game as a disaster (at first I thought a nail bomb had eviscerated the dance team at half time, whew) and humiliating and an embarrassment (they will no doubt this morning have mothballed their St John’s gear lest someone see them wearing it on the subway and be forced to cast themselves onto the third rail in shame)  and dashing off emails to university president doctor Conrado Gempesaw beseeching him to reach out to recently dismissed Louisville coach Rick Pitino to gauge his interest in returning to his hometown to save the day, their sources having assured them that Pitino would be interested and it can’t hurt that Mrs. Pitino still has family on Long Island, where she was born and raised, having never cared for the backwaters of Kentucky.

My own hope, such as it is, is that this game serves as a reminder to a young team that has been beating worse teams based purely on a differential in talent that when two teams of equal talent meet the one that works harder wins.

Anyway I’ve been trying to think up the perfect word to describe the behavior of this sort of fan. Mercurial comes pretty close but it doesn’t convey the right sense of emotional instability; infantile implies temporal immaturity, whereas most of these fans are grown men with jobs and homes and wives and children and grandchildren. The word I keep coming back to is faggotry hysteric: they are like middle aged Victorian women repairing to the fainting couch with smelling salts and complaining of undefined female troubles – something to with their uteruses probably, let’s face it nobody really understand what goes on down there – the only known cure for which is clitoral stimulation and a long lie down on the divan.

Now I know that most of you think I’m pretty smug and arrogant – and I am, and those are two of my more endearing qualities – but I’m also full of a degree of crippling self loathing and doubt that would leave most of you unable to get out of bed in the morning. I am at this point so cynical that I don’t even trust my own skepticism anymore and most of the time I don’t know what the hell I’m doing or why. And so it occurred to me, naturally, that maybe it’s me. Maybe I don’t understand what being a sport fan is supposed to be. I certainly don’t follow any sport besides college basketball. I can’t remember for example the last time I sat through an entire baseball game or watched an NBA game; I watch the Lions play on Thanksgiving unless Babes in Toyland is on and then I only flip over during commercials. But that’s really it. I’m not saying that’s good or bad or better or worse, I’m just saying I have other hobbies. Which is what these things are, hobbies. And so I thought sports – like other hobbies – was supposed to be enjoyable and entertaining, a distraction from the fact that we’ll all soon enough be dead in the cold cold ground, forgotten by our friends and families in boneyards overgrown with weeds and our remains being rendered to soil by worms and weevils.

Understand, I don’t think my hobbies are good and yours are bad: I have this moronic blog; I play in a wildly unsuccessful band that sells records almost exclusively to angst ridden pock marked teens in the former East Germany; I bet my hard earned money on dumb four legged animals ridden around in circles by South American midgets; I write long absurdist letters to local government functionaries, insulting them personally and ridiculing their job performance; and I drink, I drink a lot. These things are, all of them, quite stupid. (Note, the, commas.) But the difference between me and a certain type of sports fan seems to be that I enjoy my hobbies. Whereas you (royal) seem to be happy only when you’re miserable. You imagine the worst so that when the worst occurs – and it always does in college basketball, only one team finishes the season with a winning streak that matters – you’re prepared for it. And I think that’s sad.

For your sake I’m looking forward to the day when this program is not so hapless that you are condemned to forever look for a black lining in every silver cloud. A day where disaster doesn’t loom around every corner, where the sky isn’t continually falling on the ship which isn’t forever sinking. Not because I begrudge you your hobbies or the way you go about them or your opinions or your thoughts, but because what it will say about the state of the program, which, unfortunately, I love. (Because it’s all about me.) Nova fans, Creighton fans, Xavier fans, and dare I say dewk fans, Kansas fans, Kentucky fans, they don’t see every unremarkable event as the equivalent of the Titanic careening into a looming volcanic iceberg infected with the bubonic plague. They see blips on the horizon: every once in a while a fluffy cloud briefly obscures an otherwise beautiful sunrise. That is what I wish for you this holiday season: that if you can’t always enjoy the result you can at least learn to love the process.

Feliz Navidad.

===

Dear Ms. M________

On Monday December 26 I came to the E___ G________ town offices to pay my property taxes. Normally I wouldn’t venture near your offices but I was hoping to take advantage of the tax write-off before the new IRS code goes into effect on January 1. When I arrived a patron was already at the window and so I maintained a respectful distance – lest I invade that taxpayer’s privacy – busying myself reading the very interesting notices on the bulletin board facing your office. Only when he left and my turn came did I approach the counter. While I was there a second patron entered. Being it turned out known to you this patron was immediately directed to the counter, where he and you and your staff engaged in a loud, boisterous and excruciatingly boring conversation about who knew whom and whose sister went to school with whose uncle and whose nephews knew whose daughters and where everyone’s respective family vacationed in Florida. This was none of it of the slightest interest to me, the person in the midst of writing the town a check for nearly $ 5000. It occurred to me to ask how large a check I would have to write to get someone’s undivided attention for the five minutes I was going to be there, but I didn’t: that would have been rude.

But that’s not why I’m writing. I’m writing because while I was at the counter my check book out was out and my tax bill was on display, meaning that should he have had a mind to your loud mouthed buddy could have been privy to inter alia my name, my checking account information, my phone number, my address, the assessed value of my home, my tax account number and my tax liability – which amount he commented on, when you mentioned the specific amount I owed aloud, this was when you refused to accept a check for .21 cents more than my tax bill, which amount I had rounded up, and made me write another one, because accepting the first one would have entailed you making a change to your tax ledger, which change you would have found an inconvenience, earning as you do only $125,000 a year, and being subjected to such rigorous tasks as filing and alphabetizing – all of which information I suspect your office has a duty to keep confidential. Which duty you in my opinion breached.

If this is your standard operating procedure – entailing as it does the willy-nilly display of taxpayer information to the public – it might be something you want to reconsider. The public library more carefully safeguards the titles of the books I check out than seemingly does your office the details of my personal financial affairs. And I pay the library in dimes.

Your pal

S____

saint john's, St. Joe's

Something About Mary

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GAME: St John’s ended its preseason schedule Wednesday afternoon with a 77-73 over the trademark rival St. Joseph’s Hawks at Mohegan Sun Resort and Casino. It was an ugly game of the sort in which St John’s seems to thrive, one wherein their peculiar composition – they are oddly sized and freakishly athletic – can overwhelm less talented opponents. It’s somewhat ironic that at least part of Mullin’s system – Mullin being perhaps the most elegant player ever to grace a St John’s uniform – is designed to create chaos, although to paraphrase José Saramago perhaps this chaos is order I haven’t yet deciphered. In any event this was another game they could have lost and that last year they would have lost and the heartening thing about it is that they won not because of their basketball prowess but because of their mindset. At the risk of using a hack phrase that I’d condemn if used by someone else, they refused to lose …

Usually when I look at the box score after the game – some people believe that there’s nothing to be learned from box scores and statistics, that their eyewitness observations trump facts and numbers: those people are idiots – it reinforces my impressions of what I’ve just seen. Yesterday though was an anomaly. I thought for example that St Joe’s had shot the ball pretty well and especially from three: they did not. Both teams shot around 40 percent from the floor and 30 percent from three (St Joe’s at 27 percent was actually slightly worse than St John’s at 31). Neither did I notice the free throw disparity. I actually thought St John’s was getting hosed by an awful crew of officials – and the refs were awful, even the usually obsequious Tim Welsh noticed: he said “the officials have been a little sleepy,” compared the officiating to last weekend’s Steeler-Pat game and noted that “the refs were “getting worse as the game progresses” – whereas St John’s shot 28 free throws to St Joe’s 10, a disparity which like last game’s would have annoyed me were St John’s on the other end of it, although like last game you can’t expect to take a bunch of free throws if your offense consists of chucking up off balance threes. I thought that St Joe’s moved the ball well and that St John’s didn’t particularly, but St John’s had more assists that St Joe’s, who only had 13 on 29 made baskets. Despite giving up 73 points – they’ve only allowed 70 points four times this season – I thought the defense was again pretty good; the numbers at least bare that out, St Joe’s having turned the ball over 20 times … The win puts St John’s at 10-2 with only one OOC game remaining – a likely loss to the hated dewk blue devils. Only a delusional fan would be displeased: two losses to teams with two losses between them – one of those in the top five and the other receiving votes in the coaches poll – and most of those on neutral courts. It could be much worse and has been and will be once again and in the meanwhile I’m happy to enjoy it while it lasts. Ten and two, 15th in the country in RPI, 24th in strength of schedule, 30th in points allowed per game is pretty good, and despite things not being perfect – and they’re not, any idiot can see that, which is what makes the constant drumbeat of doom pounded by alleged fans so tiresome, comprising as it does the tedious restatement of obvious facts without a scintilla of wit or insight – I’m happy. Because you can’t lose the national championship in December. You have to wait for March for that. So I’m biding my disappointment lest it spurt out prematurely: being older now it takes me a while to be disappointed a second time.

PLAYERS: Ponds had another off night: 28 points, seven rebounds, four assists and two steals … I predicted last time that Tariq Owens (seven points, seven rebounds, five blocks) would triple double sooner or later. Justin Simon nearly beat him to it: 11 points, 11 rebounds, 9 assists … Ahmed had 16 points including a couple three diabolical moves to the basket and five rebounds … Clark was once again in foul trouble: eight points and three rebounds … Yawke (4 points) had some nice aggressive moves around the basket but zero rebounds (out of 84 possible) in 20 minutes seems technically impossible. It’s almost like he’s trying to not rebound because if he stood on the court with his hands in the air randomness suggests one would land there as a matter of course … Trimble was four of seven from three in his first two games and 4 of 24 (16 percent) since, including one of five last night. The good news is that he can’t be that bad, I shoot better than that … Alibeowitz DNP … Personally I’m loving this short rotation, it requires much less typing

NOTES: St Joseph’s University in Philadelphia is named for Joseph, the putative father of the baby Jesus, and allegedly a descendant of David and Solomon. If catholic lore is to be believed – and of course it is – Joseph was 90 when he married Mary, his second wife, who later conceived, his age perhaps explaining why Mary remained a virgin throughout the ordeal

I’m the queerest young fellow that ever you heard.
My mother’s a Jew,
my father’s a bird.
If ever you think I amn’t divine
you’ll have to drink water that I’ve turned from wine

Despite behavior that would have disqualified him from serving as senator from the great state of Alabama, Pope Pius IX declared Joseph patron of the universal church, in which position he still serves … St Joe’s and John’s share some obvious parallels: they’re both Catholic institutions, albeit the Joes are Jesuits – the superior form – and the John’s Vincentian; they share an identical acronym, which the Joes usurped based upon their slightly preeminent founding; both were formerly basketball powers; and even their mascots are the same: both are birds, although the Johns are for some reason named after a weather pattern … St Joseph’s alumni include former NJ governor William T. Cahill; hall of famer Jack Ramsey, who coached inter alia Wilt Chamberlain, Chet Walker, Billy Cunnigham, Hal Greer, Bob McAdoo, the terrifying Maurice Lucas, Bill Walton, Clyde Drexler, Ernie DiGregorio, and Reggie Miller; coach Paul Westhead; 2004 Naismith College Player of the Year Jameer Nelson; sportscaster Jack Whitiker; fun fave Joe Queenan; and Vince Papale, inspiration for Disney movie Invincible … I received a bit of push back after my last recap, a correspondent complaining about a joke I’d made. What could it have been I thought? The tasteless reference to the alleged rape of poor Rose McGowan? The tasteless Parkinson’s joke? The joke at the expense of ugly old Ruth Gordon? The one about Jim Valvano having cancer? Ed Cooley’s diseased head? A Scotsman being disemboweled? The various racial epitaphs? No. Evidently that poster is fine with racism, misogyny and mindless mean spiritedness. What set off this reader was my alleged comparison of “a color commentator’s performance to the murder of her mother by her father … waaaay beyond the pale. Completely tasteless and unnecessary.” Well. In the first place, this guy must be new, because being offensive is my stock in trade. In the second, only a very uncareful writer (or reader) would think that that was the comparison I made: I compared the color commentator’s performance to the murderer’s performance, both of which were shoddy: not even I could have gotten that dope acquitted. The last time I got this sort of push back is when disgusted with Steve Lavin’s constant references to his dead father I wrote a bit of a monkeyshine about digging up Cap, reanimating his corpse and murdering him, which led to a secret vote to have me banned from a website on which that particular drollery had not even been posted.

In fairness to myself I made the same joke about my own parents and in fairness to my family my sister laughed, she also having the sense of humor my correspondent lacks … Finally a happy birthday to Frank Zappa, born this day in 1940. He died lo these many years ago in 1993, which is why he is not celebrating his 77th birthday today, by which death contemporary music is much impoverished.

Iona, saint john's

Gael Force

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St John’s defeated Iona 69-59 Saturday afternoon at Madison Square Garden in a moribund renewal of what for some reason is still called the Holiday Festival. Brian Custer referred to the two schools as rivals, an odd choice of word considering that they haven’t played since 1995, the last game being one of the losses that precipitated Brian Mahoney being run out of town on a rail. And it’s not only the temporal dislocation that belies that characterization; these teams are not rivals because the disparity in talent between the Big East and the MAAC is just so vast, even between the bottom of the Big East and the top of the MAAC. I mean sure, every once in a while a MAAC team is going to jump up and beat somebody and maybe every once in a while there’s going to be MAAC team that has a surprising year, but that’s the exception. I live upstate in close proximity to Siena College, one of the better MAAC programs; they’re ubiquitous in the local news and the games are televised and even I go to one every once in a while. And the thing is, when two MAAC teams play there’s a parity in their awfulness that disguises how bad the basketball really is. It’s only when you see them play an actual D1 school that the shoddiness of their effort becomes apparent. And that might be especially true this year: MAAC teams are a combined 44-67; only one team, the mighty Rider Broncs, has a winning record. Which means bottom line that even though the game was tied at halftime the outcome was never really in doubt. Play the game 100 times and St John’s wins 99, because Iona is awful.

 

As the picture shows, St John’s won and pretty easily and this despite the fact that they played down to their opposition. Neither team shot the ball well (34 vs 37 percent); St John’s missed all 12 of its threes (you’d think that was impossible) but Iona, incredibly, ended up being worse: they made only 10 of 32, which accounted for more than half their points. That’s about how many threes dook takes a game and Dook has a system designed for that and the players to execute it. I haven’t seen much of Iona but they seem to have neither. The good news for St John’s is that once again won the game on the defensive end: they held another opponent under 61 points (that’s eight of ten for those of you scoring at home), forced 16 turnovers (although forced might be generous, at least a couple were Iona gifts) and blocked 10 shots. If St John’s was on the short end of a similar free throw disparity (they took 27 to Iona’s ten) I might have whined about it, but considering where and how Iona shot the ball it’s not worth mentioning, and especially since Iona shot only 50 percent from the free throw line … St John’s sits at 9-2, their two losses coming to ASU and MU, who’ve lost two games between them. With an RPI of 20 it’s conceivable that they receive some votes in the AP poll this week, which would be a remarkable thing, considering where they started a couple of short years ago. I don’t think they’re a top 25 team by any stretch, but they might be in the top 50 and some idiots have been voting for Georgetown so anything’s possible. I’d credit the staff but having been assured that Mullin and Mitch Richmond don’t know too much about basketball it must just be luck. It’s a shame Mike Rice or some similar basketball Tesla isn’t on the bench to help them out, this sleeping giant of a program might go places.

PLAYERS: Everyone’s favorite whipping boy Bashir Ahmed doubled doubled and had zero turnovers, leading one fan board genius to lament that he “shudders every time Ahmed touches the ball.” I suggest that poster get himself checked for Parkinson’s, because Ahmed played pretty well, especially at the beginning of the game, before Mullin sat him for a long stretch in the first half for some reason: I think it might have been so that Justin Simon could pick up a three fouls. In one remarkable sequence Ahmed had five straight offensive rebounds – albeit they were all of his own misses – and has 30 rebounds over his past three games. I know fans like to bitch about his turnovers and general blockheadedness but what I worry about is his FT shooting, which I guarantee will come back to bite St John’s in the ass at some point this year. You can’t play his game and shoot 50 percent from the line, but he does. You’d think a player who’s as interested as he is in scoring would want to pick up the free ones … Owens had 12 points, six blocks, and six rebounds and made six of six free throws. Sooner or later he’s going to triple double. Hopefully sooner … Justin Simon had 15 points, seven rebounds and four steals before fouling out. He was for some reason trending on twitter (usually when I see someone trending on Twitter I assume they’re dead or that they’ve raped Rose McGowan), this despite the enormous fucking the Steelers got from the referees in the late NFL. Simon was trending above even Tom Brady in the rankings. I’m not a Steeler fan by any stretch – I don’t follow professional football, I’m a Detroit Lions fan – but come on, that was a ridiculous call … Ponds had 16 points, five rebounds, and four steals. He did however miss a bunch more threes: he’s shooting 20 percent for the year – that’s Phil Greene territory – and is 5 of his last 29. On the bright side imagine what sort of numbers he’s going to put up when he stops playing with his head up his ass … Clark a quiet 12 and five, Yakwe played only 15 minutes, Trimble once again serviceable in ML’s absence and Alibegowitz remains a bad Steve Lavin joke

NOTES: Speaking of Brian Mahoney and rivalries it occurred to me the other day what a deleterious effect another Bronx school – Manhattan College – has had on St John’s basketball: Mahoney coached there and later Fran Fraschilla and Barry Rohrssen. You’d be hard to name someone not named Harrington who’s done more damage to the program than those three guys … I’m often amazed when I sit down to write these things where the day takes me. In my notes I have scrawled something about colormoron Sarah Kustok: she said 45 seconds into the game that something was happening  “so far,” which is like saying during the opening credits that you really enjoyed the movie. So I looked up this Sarah person and it turns out her father murdered her mother a couple of years ago. Evidently he shot his sleeping wife in the head with the gun he bought her as an anniversary present (better I suppose that a vacuum cleaner) and then claimed she committed suicide. Much like his daughter does with game commentary however he botched the job – he waited several hours to call the police during which time he cleaned the scene and fired the remaining bullets into the chiffarobe  – he said he didn’t trust himself not to join his wife, not being able to live without her, but obviously as a way to explain the powder residue on his hands – and so now sits in the penitentiary … For a prestigious roman catholic university founded in 1940 by the Congregation of Christian Brothers, Iona College (acceptance rate: 87 percent) has a pretty shitty on-line presence. Their wikipedia page is a scant 18 inches long, a full half of that taken up by descriptions of their various residence halls: they must have some nice bathrooms. That might have something to do with the paucity of achievement by Iona alums, the most notable of whom are hall of fame basketball player Richie Guerin; the actor Bud Cort, famous for rogering Ruth Gordon in “Harold and Maude”

(Gordon wasn’t much to look at when she was younger: along with her husband Garson Kanin she was half of one of the more hideous couples in Hollywood history

I can’t imagine banging the desiccated version); American Pie composer Don McLean, who on and off attended nearly every university on the east coast of the US, including night school at Iona; and John Gilchrist, AKA Mikey in the get Mikey to eat it he’ll eat anything commercials for Life cereal that were ubiquitous when fun was watching cartoons on Saturday morning. I mean off the top of my head I can name three men named Gail, all of whom are more well known than those Gaels: Gail Goodrich, Gale Sayers, and Gayle Gordon, all three of whom, oddly, (note the proper use of the comma) spell their names differently. The Gaels basketball wiki is no better: it fails to mention Jim “Big C” Valvano, who coached there for five years in the 70s before fleeing to North Carolina State, or Jeff Ruland, who attended Iona under Valvano and later coached there after a 13-year NBA career. (Other coaches include habitual drunkard Tim Welsh, rat faced Seton Hall coach Kevin Willard, and Pat Kennedy, the one who wasn’t married to Peter Lawford.) Iona’s current coach is Tim Cluess, one of four Cluess brothers to have played basketball at St John’s under Lou Carnesecca. After a remarkable career as a LI high school coach Cluess moved on to the college ranks, where he’s amassed a 265-105 record, including 11 straight years of more than 20 wins. Why he’s still at Iona is anyone’s guess, considering that any number arguably less successful MAAC coaches – Paul Hewitt, Louis Orr, Fran McCaffery, Steve Lappas, Fran Fraschilla, Bobby Gonzalez, Kennedy, Welsh, Willard, Kevin Bannon, and Ed Cooley’s diseased head – have moved on to greater D1 things. Cluess’s name comes up whenever there’s an opening at SJU, and frankly we could do worse and have … Iona’s sports team are called the Gails Gaels, Gael being a reference to fierce medieval blue faced Scottish warriors of the sort portrayed by Mel Gibson in Braveheart, which in this case have morphed into belligerent Hibernians spoiling for a drunken St Patrick’s Day fight.

The great Gaels of Ireland
the men that God made mad
all their wars are merry
all their songs are sad

which is almost a Dennis Leary song but not quite (it’s GK Chesterton), if for no other reason that it’s not stolen from Bill Hicks. In these politically correct times it’s a perverse sort of white privilege that allows for pejorative references to primitive Caucasian savages – Fighting Irish, Gaels, Vikings, Hilltoppers, Cornhuskers – to pass unremarked upon, whereas references to primitive non white savages requires cultural flagellation and government intrusion. I suppose they’ll come a day when all men are judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin, when put upon micks and sheep shaggers and frogs and wogs and lint heads are accorded the same respect as are Warriors, Braves, Indians, and Blackhawks. Until then remember: white lives matter.

 

saint john's, villanova

The End

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RECAP: I did something today that I rarely do: stayed sober. Just kidding, I’m faced. I didn’t watch St John’s lose to Villanova by a million or whatever it ended up being in the second round of the BET at MSG Thursday afternoon all the way through to the bitter end. In fact, I didn’t watch all the way through the first half. Because I saw what was coming and just wasn’t in the mood. I have it DVR’ed and maybe I’ll get to it some lazy afternoon but given the choice between watching that and watching the Georgetown game again, I’m watching the Georgetown game again. Because that was fun. Not having watched it I can’t really comment but let me ask my readers one question: is it really possible that Villanova committed seven fucking fouls the entire game? That they played an entire half without committing a single foul, without a single stray hand grazing a shooter’s or a body meeting a body coming through the rye? Because that’s loaves and fishes territory right there; that’s the baby Jesus casting demons into swine. I realize that Jay Wright is a classy fashion icon who runs his championship basketball program the right way and without a whisper of scandal and everybody loves him – I don’t love him, I think he’s a fucking cunt – but has He really transmogrified into a living god right before our eyes like fucking Caligula? Seven personal fouls? Dick Vitale would call more fouls than that if he refereed a dook game and he only has one eye and besides which he’d be hard pressed to blow the whistle, what with Shrewshrensky’s cock and balls buried in his throat. I watched 15 minutes this afternoon and saw Bashir Ahmed get fouled seven times on one drive to the basket. Seven fouls in the entire game? Give me a fucking break … And fuck Georgetown too while we’re at it, but at least Wednesday night we finally got the satisfaction of seeing Chris Mullin bounce a John Thompson team out of a tournament, even if it was 30 years too late and in a play in game in the BET and the wrong John Thompson was coaching. There’s your silver lining right there: St John’s won its first BET game since 2011, when they beat Rutgers in a game they should have lost, in a game that was so poorly officiated that Jim Burr and that stupid drunk Tim Higgins – the two worst referees in the history of college basketball – whose routine incompetence was the stuff of legend – were suspended for being complete and utter shitbrains without the vaguest understanding of the rules of basketball. So there’s that: we’re off the BET schneid. Onward and upward … I know what you’re thinking, you’re thinking fun, what’s with all the angst, you’re usually so even tempered and fair minded, the season didn’t end as well as it might have but things could have been much worse, so why do you seem so angry. And the answer is I don’t know. Frankly I’m ecstatic that I don’t have to write any more of these stupid things, because I’m sick of it; and the end of the basketball season means that spring is in the air, which might not mean a lot to you pussies who live on Long Island but for manly men like me who live upstate and chop their own wood that’s a big fucking deal; and now that this stupid basketball season is over not only am I one season closer to the sweet relief that death will bring but I’m one year closer to St John’s possibly not sucking as much as they’ve sucked my entire adult life. So I don’t know. As the kid’s say, it is what it is.

 
PLAYERS: Seeing that this is the last recap of the year – and perhaps forever – rather than rehashing the box score I thought I’d hand out some season grades. These are on a true curve: someone gets an A and someone gets and F and most of them cluster around the mean.

Ponds A / Lovett A minus: really a toss up as to whether Ponds or Lovett gets the full A because there’s no significant difference between them statistically. The tipping point for me is Ponds’ age, because he’s a true freshman. And what a freshmen: as good as any I have ever seen at St John’s and that includes the current head coach, who might not have been quite as Mullinesque as he was had he had to play with these stiffs as opposed to David Russell, Billy Goodwin and Kevin Williams. But I wouldn’t argue with anyone who flipped them. They already comprise one of the more memorable back courts in Saint John’s history – joining Utley and Williams; Moses and Mullin; Harvey and Porter; Barkley and Bootsy; Hardy and Kennedy – and have a chance over the next year or two to be one of the more memorable back courts in college basketball. Because they can both handle and they can both shoot and they both have wonderful court instincts. If I were a praying man and thought that the baby Jesus cared about sports I’d pray for their health and well being. Rumors circulating on St John’s fan boards – where rumors circulate with more regularity and velocity than around the knitting circle at Del Boca Vista – have Lovett leaving after this year to play somewhere for money. That wouldn’t be the best thing that ever happened to the program but it’s not an insurmountable setback. And Lovett doesn’t look like someone who’s going to take a step forward, at least on the offensive end, where he’s pretty much fully formed, so to that extent he has no reason to return.

A lot of people have questioned the pair’s effort and especially their defensive effort or more precisely their lack thereof. One fan board genius went so far for example as to complain that despite his having led the Big East in steals – as a freshmen – Ponds was not as good a defender as Gary Payton. Note to that genius: almost no one was as good a defender as Gary Payton, who was perhaps the greatest two way guard in the history of organized basketball. Among the players who were not as good as former NBA defensive player of the year Gary Payton was a freshmen at the University of Oregon who coincidentally was also called Gary Payton. Ponds isn’t even as good a defender as Gene Lawrence, much less Shariff Fordham, who was about as lock down a defender as I can remember.

The fact is that few freshmen are good defenders, because those freshmen who receive high Division One scholarships are so far advanced beyond their high school counterparts that they don’t have to be be good or even adequate defenders to be successful; and even when they play against players who are as advanced as they are in all star games and the like noone cares if they play defense or not. The biggest thing that freshmen players have to learn is that they need to bring it every night – on both sides of the ball. That’s why continuity of personnel and a balanced roster are so important: because upperclassmen who presumably have already learned that lesson can reinforce that message by word and deed. That’s not to excuse their lapses – I have been recently accused of being a Mullin sycophant, although not by someone who knows what the word sycophant means – which are often and obvious. Rather it’s to offer an explanation as to why what you see happening on the court is happening. There’s an old saw of which musicians are fond: How do you get to Carnegie Hall? You practice, because musical greatness is 99 percent perspiration and one percent inspiration. Personally I don’t think that’s true, I think it’s about eighty twenty, but the point holds. The entire foundation of pedagogy is that students learn and improve through repetitive exposure to accumulated wisdom. Yes there are prodigies – like for example Mozart or Chris Mullin – who are launched from the womb with gifts from their creator, but the majority of the population that achieves excellence achieves it through hard work and experience. Beyond all the difficulties that leaving the nest includes, college freshmen have not had the opportunity for exposure to accumulated wisdom. We none of us had that opportunity when we were freshmen lo those many years ago. Which is why patience is in order, because if there was video of you doing homework in your dorm freshmen year, it wouldn’t be flattering.

Ahmed – B minus: certainly Ahmed has some shortcomings in his game but 13 and 6 is pretty solid production from a first year player or for that matter anyone. Assuming a normal progression if next year he has a couple more makes versus a couple fewer misses and has a few more assists and a few fewer turnovers, he’s a second or third team all BE player. There’s certainly precedent for second year improvement among JUCOs – James Scott, Dwight Hardy, and Justin Brownlee off the top of my head – although that’s not a guarantee of success. But the one thing you cannot fault BA for – and you can fault him for a bunch of things – is his effort: he often is the only player on the court who looks like it bothers him that his team is getting its brain kicked in when his team is getting its brain kicked in. And let me tell you one more thing that gnaws at me: the niggling [sic] suspicion that if he was a white kid from Palermo the Red and White crowd would already have started a Kickstarter campaign to build him a staute in front of Carnesecca Arena.

Owens – C plus: If he had even a little bit of an offensive game he’d be a solid B, but he doesn’t: his jump shot is haphazard, his handle is suspect and those other things he throws at the basket are risible. (My suggestion? Sky hook baby!) And considering that he doesn’t his other production (5 rebounds, 2 blocks) is underwhelming. He does bring it every night though, at least until he fouls out, which he does on the reg. And let us be frank: he needs food. Make this guy a sandwich. Give him a milk shake. If you see him on campus give him some of your french fries. If Olive Oyl was this skinny even Bluto wouldn’t want to fuck her and he spent his entire life on a ship surrounded by beguiling cabin boys.

Williams – C plus: If he were being graded versus expectations he’d have gotten an A plus, because no one expected anything from him and he played some big minutes to the extent that there are big minutes on a 13 win team. Good rebounder, solid defender, and a deft touch around the basket – he and Owens were the only players with shooting percentages > 50 percent. I don’t know anything about his eligibility but if he has any then I’d welcome him back despite the fact that he’s seemingly made of tissue paper.

Mussini – C: Probably deserved a C plus but I reduced his grade because I’m racists aginst Italians. In his last half dozen games or so he seem to have found his niche a bit – emphasis on a bit – as an offensive spark off the bench. No one will ever confuse him for Vinnie Barbarino Johnson but he is what he is. Still can’t guard anyone and is limited by his stature and his lack of athleticism but at least looks like he’s trying. Speaking of upperclassmen he will next year be a junior and to the extent that he has absorbed the atmosphere and the culture for that reason alone I hope he returns.

Yakwe – C: This might be generous considering how he played at the begnning of the year when he looked like a wasted scholarship but he seems to have recently turned a bit of a corner, even if its not evident in the box score. By which I mean that he has for the past month or so has been catching the ball and sometimes finishing, which is a welcome change from the beginning of the season when he spent most of his time fumbling the ball out of bounds. Not a bad defender, especially considering that he’s playing the five with a three’s body, but he needs to learn to rebound. One of the Jucos I didn’t mention earlier was Walter Berry; when you watch Walter Berry rebound in traffic you could superimpose a bubble over his head saying “This is mine.” I don’t mean to compare Yakwe to Berry – because that would be as stupid as comparing Shamorie Ponds to Gary Payton – but if with his athleticism Yakwe had Berry’s greed he’d be immeasurably better off. Yakwe is kind of behind the eight ball having not played basketball until relatively recently, but it’s hard to question those who question the effort of someone who can touch the basket with his nose who has won three jump balls in two years: either he doesn’t undertand the importanmce of jump balls or he doesn’t care about the outcome of the jump. Neither conclusion is flattering. Still, if he were a stock I’d be buying: he can only get better.

Ellison – C minus:  Malik Ellison is one of the dumbest players I’ve ever seen who’s had the privilege of donning a St John’s uniform and I’m old enough to have suffered through Kyle Cuffe and Donald Emmanuel. That’s the bad news. The good news is that I was thinking the other day about other dumb St John’s players (no I don’t think I’m wasting my life thanks for asking) and one of them sort of reminded me of Ellison: he was athletic and had good size and looked like he should have been better than he was and was clueless for three years: Dom Pointer. Yes, Pointer was more gifted physically than Ellison and was more highly regarded coming out of high school but the point is that they were both dumb as rocks and sometimes the light just goes on, no matter how dim the bulb. Like Missini he’s an upperclassmen and if my theory about upperclassmen holds his scholarship is better spent on him than on some dopey freshmen who’ll need two years to learn the lessons Ellison might have learned in three. The bottom line is that no one coming into this program is going to be better than Ellison is having been in it for two years, because this is not Kentucky and the worst thing that can happen is that we’ll have to sufffer through another couple of years of him stinking off the bench. Because the two transfers have to be better than him and if they aren’t St John’s is screwed anyway. As an aside one thing I notice is that Pervis is never in attendance, so to the extent that this is the son of a former number one wasted draft pick it’s not doing anyone any favors.

Alibegovic – D:  If I were grading his last two games he’d get a C minus but it’s a long semester and attendance counts. For those of you scoring at home, Chris Jones who might have had his minutes otherwise averaged 10 and seven at UNLV. That would probably not have made any difference in any of the games recently but there were a couple of preseason games where an inside presence might have mattered and instead of an inside presence we had Alibeogwitz. All of which being said he better come back next year because otherwise we’ll have wasted three years on this moron and all we’d have gotten from Lavin’s recruiting trips to the Riviera is an extra Lavin chin.

Freudenberg – F: Probably an incomplete would be fairer but if I were fairer you couldn’t be reading this. Also, if not his grandfather some other of his progenitors were probably Nazis and the Nazis were even worse than Donald Trump.

Mullin- C plus: no less an authoirty than Ed Cooley’s diseased head said that Mullin should be the BE coach of the year. I think that’s a bit of a stretch – Doug McDermott’s father should always be the BE coach of the year, because he’s the best coach in the league – but there’s no denying the strides St John’s has made in two years. Mullin has collected the most talented roster since Norm Roberts juniors – Kennedy, Horne, Burrell, Hardy, Brownlee, plus NCAA scoring leader Quincy Roberts and former #1 NYC player Malik Boothe – and has a couple of highly regarded transfers in the wings; he won eight games in one of the better basketball conferences in college basketball – which the haters might poo poo, but the haters were in December wondering whether St John’s was going to win three more games all year; he has transformed himself from a seemingly disinterested observer sitting on the scorer’s table to an active and engaged head coach firmly in control of his team and his program and who seems willing to kick John Thompson three’s ass if it come to it; and his in game decisions while not always what they might have been were for the most part understandable. Certainly there are things on the negative side: the final record is not what anyone might have wished due mainly to some early season disasters; there were times when the team came out flat or didn’t show up at all; and the defense is a real problem. But on the whole, in what is essentially year one of a five year rebuild – because only the delusional think last year counts – with a team comprising six first year players, things might have been much much worse.

But there is no question that next year is the big year. Last year was a step forward: St John’s rid itself of that fraud Steve Lavin, hired the greatest player in its history as head coach and brought in a stellar recruiting class. This year was a step forward: the team nearly doubled its win in total and outperformed expectations in conference. But next year is where the rubber meets the road: barring some catastrophic personnel defections St John’s is poised to improve on its record and to do so they must demonstrate that their coach is imparting to them wisdom in a way that they are able to absorb. Essentially they must be at a minimum a bubble team: they have to win 18 games plus or minus and they have to be midpack in the BE at around 10 wins plus or minus and they must be an NCAA caliber team, even if they end up in the NIT. The last several coaches have faltered at this point in their tenures: Norm failed to take the next step in his year four, as did Lavin; Jarhead’s wheels came off after Fran’s recruits graduated and if not for the fact that Marcus Hatten was a supernatural being he would have been exposed much earlier than he was. They won’t fire Mullin next year if he shits the bed – and I am such a fan that I wouldn’t be surprised that if he shits the bed he does so elegantly and that his ordure smells delightful – but next year is the year he has to show results. Because the honeymoon is over. There’s blood on the sheets: now is the time for my bride to make me a sandwich. And it better be fucking delicious.

NOTES: So that’s that. All in all it wasn’t a bad year but it wasn’t a good one either. To the extent that I didn’t think it would be, I’m vindicated. To the extent that I hoped it might be, I’m disappointed. To the extent that I expect to live until next fall, I’m hopeful. (I told my dentist at my last bi-annual cleaning that according to actuarial tables every time we meet I’m two percent closer to the grave than I was the last time we did. If he had not laughed I would have found a new dentist.) Anyway, basketball’s over, the Derby trail looms and after that the great sports desert, because fuck baseball. Perhaps we’ll see each other next year. Perhaps we won’t. Que sera sera.

providence, saint john's

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St John’s lost to Ed Cooley’s diseased head Saturday afternoon 86-75 and thus endeth the St John’s regular season. In toto it was about what I expected – and unless you’re irrational it should be about what you expected as well, from a team nine months removed from an abysmal eight-win season and comprising nine underclassmen and five first year players and a coaching staff still searching for its sea legs. If you expected more than that then you’re more optimistic than am I, but then most people are more optimistic than I am: as an infant I distinctly remember thinking that my mother’s breasts were half empty. Just kidding, she didn’t breast feed me, that bitch. Oh dear, this turned ugly quickly. Probably I should start again but I’m not going to and fuck her anyway. So yes, the season: 13 wins is a bit fewer than I thought – I figured 15 or so – but as I noted two weeks ago if you flipped a couple of the atrocious losses – Delaware and Penn State primarily – this would be about a .500 team and a low NIT seed;  if you flipped five or so games that the November team lost that the February team might not this would be a bubble team. Consider: if you look back at the OOC conference schedule three of the losses look none too bad in retrospect:

Road loss to 23-7 Minnesota, a projected 6 seed
Road loss to 19-11 Michigan State, a projected 8 seed
Road loss to 23-7 VCU , a projected 9 seed

And two of the losses are understandable, if you eschew the ‘we should beat them because we are St John’s’ mentality

Road loss to 19-10 ODU
Road loss to 21-12 LIU

That’s five not too bad losses. In addition to those, seven losses were to ranked BE ranked teams: Villanova, Xavier and Creighton twice, and Butler once. Which makes carry the one 12 understandable losses of 18. Of the remainder of the league games today’s home loss to Providence – a bubble team on a winning streak – was arguably the worst. And on the other side of the coin are some good wins: at Syracuse, a projected 10 seed; home versus #13 Butler; at Providence; home versus Marquette, a projected 11 seed; and home versus Seton Hall, a projected 10 seed.

I’m no pollyanna but to me this represents real progress and especially considering the starting point. Next year of course is where the rubber meets the road: assuming no defections St John’s will have one of the top back courts in the country, finally some upperclassmen (even if they’re not very good), some well needed reinforcements in the form of Clark and Simon and hopefully a big body grad transfer and a staff that has had enough time to figure out the competition and the process. I am a Chris Mullin fan but absent extraordinary circumstances if they win 13 game next year I’ll be leading the chorus calling for his head: because St John’s has taken two steps forward. If they take a step back they might as well dismantle the basketball program and I’ll start a blog about curling, eh? But I don’t think they will. I think next year they take another step forward because as I’ve maintained all along, Chris Mullin has never failed at basketball before and he didn’t come to St John’s to start failing now …  To the extent that today’s game deserves discussion – and it doesn’t – St John’s shot 37 percent from the floor and 17 percent from three and were minus 11 rebounding and turned the ball over 14 times. I suspect that they know that today’s game didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things or at least that’s what I told myself. The defense was appalling – I keep refreshing ESPN’s page so I could post a capture of the shot chart because Providence’s offense comprised an unending line of uncontested lay ups, but because ESPN sucks balls you’ll have to take my word for it: Providence’s offense comprised an unending line of uncontested lay ups. Usually I don’t have a lot of patience for fans who think that the outcome of the game would have been different had St John’s only employed the triangle and two or the box and one or the pentagram and none but today I don’t see where any harm might have come from switching to a zone to have seen whether it might thwarted the conga line of lay-ups that the man to man rewarded PU with but whatever. The only thing St John’s didn’t suck at was free throw shooting and the officials were so appalling that even that is tainted by association: both teams were in the bonus halfway into the first half; John Gaffney and company called 52 fouls in 40 minutes that resulted in 67 free throws. Note to stupid John Gaffney: if I wanted to spend my afternoon listening to people blow things I’d hang around in the Port Authority bus terminal men’s room. Fuck you and your fucking whistle.

PLAYERS: Left to my own devices I’d have given the game ball to Bashir Ahmed: he had 17 points and seven rebounds and three blocks and for most of the game looked like the only player on the court who gave a fuck about what was happening. But Shamorie Ponds scored 29 points and passed the great tattooed negro D’Angelo Harrison to become the top freshman scorer in St John’s history so I gave it to him instead. We are you and I fortunate that Ponds is not two inches taller and 20 pounds heavier because if he was he’d be a lottery pick … Lovett had 12 points but most of them were when the game was over . Did not start the second half for some reason and did not look happy about it to the extent that I’m expert at facial expressions and body language. Embarrassed a PU player by bouncing the ball off his ass on an inbounds play for a basket … Ellison scored no points in 23 minutes which seems impossible unless you are familiar with his body of work. Those of you who had the under relative to his throwing yet another stupid lazy pass that was intercepted leading to a lay in for the bad guys, pay the man on the way out … Federico “Crunch time” Missini hit a three in the second half to cut PU’s lead to 17 or something but was otherwise oh fer the game … Yakwe once again was less horrible than he has been most of the rest of the year … Alibagofsandwiches played minutes that were not as offensive than his usual minutes, which makes three games a row … Darien Williams fouled out in nine minutes, barely defeating Tariq Owens, who fouled out in ten.

NOTES: Besides being the worst point guard in recent St John’s history, Tarik Turner talks too much. Please to be shutting the fuck up Tarik. But to Tarik’s credit he was no where near as appalling as booth mate Alex Faust, whose self written biography describes himself as “the voice of Northeastern University men’s basketball,” which is not what I want written on my tombstone, which is going to read ARE WE THERE YET in all caps. Because you’re all well educated you’ll know that the original Faust sold his soul to the devil in exchange for worldly riches, which I assume Alex Faust might have because he’s on TVG despite being dumb as a fucking rock.

creighton, saint john's

Lent Me Your Ears

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RECAP: I’ve been sitting here staring at a blank page for a bit now thinking about whether I have anything to say about St John’s 82-68 loss to the Creighton Blue Jays on the last Tuesday in February and the answer is no, because the game was from beginning to end lackluster: neither team played particularly well but neither was so atrocious as to be noteworthy; none of the performances were particularly compelling – some guy on Creighton nearly triple doubled and it was barely noticeable; and except for a brief appearance by Wally Szcerbiak’s terrifying eyebrows at halftime the broadcast was to charitable mundane. But one thing I’ve learned over the years about staring at the blank page is that it’s a waste of time: you don’t get paid until you’ve finished typing and you can’t finish typing until you start, this paragraph being an object lesson: it’s not very good but it’s good enough and now there’s only 1200 words to go

St John’s was down 11-0 five minutes in and it looked like it was going to be a very long night but they regrouped after a Mullin time out and got to within two points about five minutes later. Unfortunately the half lasted another eight minutes during which time Creighton outscored St John’s by 11, which was about all she wrote. St John’s got within five midway through the second half behind eight straight points from Malik Ellison but a rapid regression to bad shots, dumb turnovers and atrocious free throw shooting ended any hopes of an upset … St John’s shot 40 percent from the floor, 25 percent from three and were 8-17 from the free throw line – where meanwhile Creighton was 18-22, which if you add their 18 makes to St John’s nine misses that’s a lot to overcome for as team that’s having a hard time finding the basket; add to that that St John’s was minus 11 on the boards and turned the ball over 15 times and that they only lost by 14 seems almost like something of a victory. It’s not a victory obviously, moral or otherwise, but no one in their right mind would have expected St John’s to win in Omaha on Senior Night and had they lost by 30 and given up a hundred no one would have been surprised and at this point in the season and the process you have to take your silver lining where you find it … One game left versus Providence at the Garden and if all goes well the regular season will end with another bad loss for the Friars that send them and Ed Cooley’s diseased head to the NIT. As things stand now and I don’t think it can change St John’s gets Georgetown in the first round of the BET and then if they manage to not bollix that gift up Villanova, but silver lining again it’s better to lose to the number three team in the country in the feature game on national television than it is to Xavier or whoever in front of 17 people Friday afternoon.

PLAYERS: Malik Ellison had a career minute and a half midway through the second half: he scored eight straight points during a brief flurry where St John’s cut the lead to five. Unfortunately in the other 24 minutes he played Malik scored one point and committed four fouls and three turnovers … Ponds had 16 points and six steals and if he’s not the BE rookie of the year then something’s very very wrong because he’s as polished as any St John’s freshmen I can recall and that includes the current head coach … A dull effort from Lovett: eight points, four rebounds, three assists and oh fer from three … Mussini had nine points and five rebounds in 24 minutes but missed a three after Ellison’s flurry that put the kibosh on St John’s chances. Yes, that was a gratuitous shot, I do it on purpose … Don’t look now but Amar Alibagwitz put together his second strong effort in a row: he made a three, euro-stepped to the basket without travelling and threw a nifty back door pass that resulted in a layup by Heydrich Freudenburch – the German’s 11th basket of the year – a series of events so incongruous as to comprise evidence for intelligent design. Plus he had six rebounds. Plus he’s from Italy! Be still my heart … On the other side of the coin is Bashir Ahmed, who had his second poor effort in a row: three for 11 from the floor and four turnovers, although to his credit seven rebounds and a couple of blocks … Yakwe (seven points, two rebounds) once again caught the ball and finished with authority. Considering how bad he looked early in the season – and there were a couple of times where I thought to give up on him – he seems to have found himself. It’s not showing up in the box score but if he were a stock I’d be buying … Williams had six points and five rebounds in 16 minutes. I don’t know if anyone other than me noticed – certainly the otherwise omniscient referees didn’t – but after a made Creighton basket he inbounded the ball without coming close to having either foot out of bounds. Not a big deal in the grand scheme of things but emblematic of the sort of boneheaded mistakes I would be happy to see not repeated next year, when things get real

 
NOTES: Good ole missus fun had the line of the night when she heard Pete Gillen’s mellifluous voice during the pregame: “He sounds like some moron from Queens” she said. I set her right of course, informing her that (a) he’s some moron from Brooklyn and (b) that he’s not a moron, he’s just the sort of X and O guru that Chris Mullin needs beside him on the bench to help him understand basketball. (Funny we don’t hear so much about the need for an X and O guru anymore.) Gillen’s booth mate was called Carter Blackburn, which sounds the name of the long lost father of Krystle Carrington’s evil twin’s secret love child on Dynasty but who is in fact a graduate of Syracuse University whose claim to fame is calling Little League games on ESPN … Predictably I got a couple of emails after Saturday’s post complaining that I was complaining about complaints and that therefore I was by my own reasoning a cunt. (They didn’t say cunt, I just said that because missus fun found my use of the word offensive so I had to say it again.) To those correspondents I say: if you needed a syllogism to prove that I’m a cunt you must be new here … There’s now just one game left in the season and as the end draws near I feel like a skinny Kenyan within sight of the finish line in the NY marathon. Assuming a normal distribution of wins and losses there’s just a couple of these things left for us to slog through – yes us, you and I, we’re in this together – and then blessedly the season will end, depending of course on what happens on the Ides, March 15th, which is the day the CBI bids come out. I’d say if I’m Mullin I accept that bid except that if I were Mullin he’d have drank himself out of the NBA in 1987 and today he’d be working at UPS with Lenny Cooke and due to the butterfly effect St John’s coach John Calipari would this year be seeking to defend his third straight national championship. Thanks AA. But yes, take the bid: the more they play together this year the better they’ll play together next year and anyway you can’t use lack of experience as an excuse for failure and then eschew opportunities for experience … So anyway, as usually happens this far into the season I’ve exhausted pretty much everything there is to say and have my head so far up my own ass that not having anything to write about becomes something to write about. For this recap I investigated a couple of things, all of which came to naught. Today for example would have been February 29th if it were a leap year, which might have been a topic, but it’s not a leap year and anyway the Wikipedia page about leap year is so dry that I mistook it for my first wife’s vagina. I mean look at this:

“The Republican calendar’s intercalary month was inserted on the first or second day after the Terminalia (a. d. VII Kal. Mar., February 23). The remaining days of Februarius were dropped. This intercalary month, named Intercalaris or Mercedonius, contained 27 days.”

Jesus shoot me. But all was not lost: that leap year was not happening meant that March came in like a lion one day sooner that it might have otherwise. The bad news is that the origin of the idiom March comes in like a lion and out like a lamb is as deadly dull as explications of leap year. To the extent that anyone knows it seems that the constellation Leo (the Lion) is descending the sky as the constellation Aries (the Ram) is ascending. Personally I thought it had to do with the weather, because the beginning of March is cold and the end less so. So there’s no there there. Today is also Mardi Gras (literally Fat Tuesday), the day before Ash Wednesday, which marks the period in the Christian calendar before Easter – the 40 days are meant to simulate the 40 days Jesus spent wandering the desert culminating in His temptation by Lucifer. Which might be something except I already did that, in 2015. (No, I don’t think I’m wasting my life, thanks for asking.) The only interesting thing I read today about Fat Tuesday is that it’s celebrated around the world by the eating of pancakes: evidently the tradition started because fasting necessitated that the Christian faithful use up their butter and other perishables before beginning their period of abstemiousness. This might have tied in nicely to the essay I wrote a couple of week’s ago about Canucklehead fascination with maple syrup and had the season been two or three weeks longer I might have had to produce 1000 words about that but it’s not, so I didn’t. Consider us lucky.

providence, saint john's

Friar Suck

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Saint John’s defeated Ed Cooley’s diseased head 91-86 in Providence Wednesday night. In the aftermath of which I am not making up any of the following: it was Saint John’s fourth conference win of the year, two of which were on the road; the win left Saint John’s in sole possession of sixth place in the best basketball conference in America; Saint John’s is in conference as many games behind #10 Creighton and #16 Xavier as they are ahead of Georgetown and Providence; and they have only three fewer conference losses than Villanova, the defending national champion and current #1 team in the country. With 10 games left in the season Saint John’s has two more wins than they had all of last year and had they won a couple of gimmes in November they’d be sitting at 13-9 – which is just where ratface Kevin Willard is, and he’s been at Seton Hall for seven years. Not bad for the least experienced team in the country coached by a guy who’s in desperate need of X and O help from washed up nobodies like Tom Pecora … Wednesday’s game really comprised three mini games: the first half, in which Saint John’s defeated Providence 46-37, courtesy of ten PU turnovers and half a dozen missed free throws; the first seven minutes or so of the second half, where Providence outscored Saint John’s 22-7 on their way to a six point lead, this courtesy of a vintage display of Saint John’s ineptitude; and then the final ten minutes or so – after Mullin used his third and final timeout to calm things down – which was easily the most exciting ten minutes of basketball Saint John’s fans have seen in quite a long time, up to and including scoring the last six point of the game. Yes, the defense was atrocious and yes there were some questionable shots and bonehead plays. So what. They went up and down the court and traded punches and it was fun to watch. It wasn’t Hoosiers and no doubt some of the he-doesn’t-play-basketball-the-white-right-way crowd might have gotten overexcited and soiled their nappies and had to have a lie down afterwards, but it was about the most enjoyable ten minutes I’ve spent since my honeymoon night. And like that night Missus Fun slept her way through most of it. Her loss …. Usually when I post this graphic it’s to show how bad things got. This one shows how close things were

 
As does the box score. Saint John’s shot 50 percent from the floor, PU 60 percent; Saint John’s shot 47 percent from three, PU 40 percent; rebounds were more or less even (SJU +3), as were turnovers (PU +2), as were assists (PU +5). Oddly for a game with such prodigious offensive output the game was won and lost at the free throw line, where Saint John’s was a stellar 17 of 19 and PU a putrid 18 of 27 – and Diallo and Holt were a perfect 10 of 10, meaning the rest of them were 8 of 17. Speaking of defense, over the past two games Saint John’s opponents are 32 of 52 from the free throw line … I talked a couple of recaps ago about how enjoyable it is to see Mullin engaged and energetic on the sidelines as he grows into his role as head coach. Last night was no exception. Despite some questionable personnel decisions – like having Alibagodonuts and Missini on the court at the same time and having Oppengruppenfuhrer Freudenburgh on the court at all – Mullin did a good job of keeping his players heads in the game and deserves special credit for calling his final timeout with about 15 minutes to go, when things were in danger of falling apart completely. It was a risky move and it took huge balls and it paid off. As he said in the post-game press conference, what’s the use of having a time out at the end of a game you lose by 20. Mullin incidentally is now 8-1 this year when leading at halftime, which need I say it: that’s all adjustments baby.

 
PLAYERS: Lovett led all scorers with 26 points and together with Ponds (22 points, four rebounds, three assists, three steals) accounted for half of Saint John’s points. Of course they also accounted for half of Saint John’s 17 turnovers but they won so who cares. Lovett made huge plays late in both halves: at the end of the first he nailed a 35 foot three and at the end of the second saved a ball going out of bounds by throwing it over his head and halfway down court where it was retrieved by Ponds. For his part Ponds made six free throws in six attempts in the last minute, accounting for SJU’s last six points. Onions …. Ellison had 15 points and 6 rebounds. Took the ball to the basket impressively several times – he’ll be even more impressive when he learns to finish and make more than half of his free throws. Threw one of his patented lazy half court passes in the first half, which led to a PU layup, after which he was immediately pulled …. Ahmed (15 points) fouled out when he committed a curious intentional foul in the back court with a minute and a half remaining and Saint John’s up one. My lip reading isn’t expert but in the aftermath he seemed to be saying that he heard Mullin yelling at him to foul and so he fouled. Which if that’s what happened that makes him a good soldier and Mullin a bad general. It seems more likely that Mullin was jawing at the officials about some foul that was called or not called – he pretty much is on them from the opening whistle – and some wires got crossed … Darien Williams didn’t do much in the box score but was involved in three plays late that pretty much sealed the deal: in the first he pulled Tariq Owens away from a PU player after a block under the basket and shh-ed him like a librarian, saving what might have escalated into a technical; in the second he clanked a jump hook so badly that it got stuck in between the rim and the backboard and Saint John’s retained possession on the arrow; and in the final seconds he inadvertently blocked the potential game winner on the baseline, with his elbow …. Owens didn’t do much but had a huge block at the rim with 45 seconds left. He was fortunate he didn’t get T’ed up for looming over the fallen PU player and jawing at him. Earlier he was called for goaltending when he stuck his hand up through the rim to block a shot. Before Wilt Chamberlain that play was legal; much like the NBA widening the free throw lane, making that play illegal was one of a number of rule changes made by basketball authorities to stop Wilt Chamberlain from being so good at basketball … Yawke was pulled about 30 seconds into the game for loafing after a loose ball. He barely returned and contributed little … For some reason Freduenbrh played 11 minutes. All I can figure is that Mullin can write that off on his taxes … I’m wont to say that Missini (three points) can’t guard a pillar or a stanchion or a lectern, which is true. This is as opposed to Alibeghwitch (0000100010) who is a less effective defender than a pillar or a stanchion or a lectern.

 
NOTES: This is the second game in a row where color man Tarik Turner was not aggressively stupid or annoying. Keep up the good work Tarik. I thought Ashton Kutchner Justin Kutcher screamed a bit too much and was a bit of a Providence homer – he’s from New England and went to Boston College, so maybe, although I only mention it so I could stick a Mila Kunis photo at the top of the page … Usually when Saint John’s plays Providence I can get a paragraph out of the back of Ed Cooley’s head, because what the fuck is that and why doesn’t he mitigate it with some Rogaine or a wig or some Chia hair, but even I can’t go to that well anymore. Fortunately he wore a white vest with a white shirt and matching yellow tie and pocket square so I can describe him as looking like a polar bear with hepatitis. Other than that I got nothing.