Well I’m back to burst your collective bubbles. For how long who knows but for the time being: you’re welcome.
I couldn’t be arsed to take any notes during last night’s 109-79 drubbing of the hapless Bad News Mercer Bears, but I did have a few observations I thought to share:
*I’d say Mercer is awful but that’d be insulting to awful.
* Have to be impressed by the final score – St. John’s scored 100 points for the first time since they scored 100 points last year – but what impressed me was how classy it was of Coach Third Choice to leave his starters in to almost the end of the game so that Mercer didn’t feel like they were being condescended to.
* For all the talk of defense amongst various basketball intelligentsia today I thought it pretty porous. Mercer got a ton of open looks from three and got the ball inside seemingly at will – although that might have been ploy by CTC because Mercer’s big men made the Frankenstein monster look like a ballerina. If Ömer Yurtseven gets the ball on the block like that I suspect there might be a different outcome. And neither was I terribly impressed with the press – it created turnovers but a lot of them were the result of boneheadedness of the sort that happen when your point guard careens wildly down court, leaps into the air and looks around for someone to pass to. And anyway I suspect that a good coach – Doug Mcdermott’s father for example – is going to run more than one inbound play all game, aka throw the inbound pass to the corner and hope for the best once the point guard gets trapped.
* Of the players not a lot was to be gleaned: Figueroa looks like a late first round draft pick; it’s a shame Heron can’t shoot threes against Arizona State as well as he can against the likes of Mercer and Sacred Heart – but for his spectacular choke last year SJU might have won one more NCAA game than Mercer has this century, which they have not, Mercer having beaten DoOk within recent memory and SJ having squeaked by Northern Arizona shortly after the Y2K bug ended life on the planet Earth as we know it; fun’s favorite player Marcellus Earlington showed why he’s fun’s favorite player; Roberts is very active – regarding the latter two it’s obvious that a year working with Mitch Richmond really paid off for them and kudos to Coach Chris Mullin for sacrificing some production last year to allow these two fine student athletes to adapt to college, because as the great Steve Lavin once said “Some things are more important than winning,” although in Lavin’s case what was more important than winning was a getting a table at Rao’s where he could stuff himself with carbohydrates, the fat slob; hopefully Williams has some sort of lingering injury because he looks like less than he looked like last year; if Rutherford is forced to play point for extended periods of time this year is going to be even longer than it’s already going to be; Champagnie seems to have some basketball instincts; Sears does not; and David Caraher looks like Tim Doyle lite, which is unfortunate because he can’t transfer to Northwestern.
* Hoping Jim Gaffney and company shake off their early season rust: they called only 49 fouls, which isn’t even two a minute. They did though accord SJU the home field advantage for a change, because SJU got away with a lot of things they might not get away with against Villanova, which need I remind you last year played an entire game without committing a foul. Off the top of my head, Heron’s forearm shiver to some guy on an inbound play; Figueroa pushing off on a step back three; and Earlington routinely hooking guys on his way to the basket.
*Announcers though were in midseason form. Sarah Kustok – who’s a pretty chipper person considering her father is in prison for murdering her mother (she testified on his behalf) – said eight minutes into the first game of the season that Marcellus Earlington was assuming a bigger role “thus far this season” than he had last season and then the rest of the time she and Brian Custer babbled about sneakers.
* Yes I know wags, hopefully I shake off the early season rust as well.