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saint john's, Vermont

Prunelight in Vermont

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

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

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

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

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.