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Post by Kapitan on Feb 8, 2020 21:56:34 GMT
It sounds like you had some really fun times in your journalism days, plenty of great stories to tell (and don't be afraid to share them!). You also had an inside look at things which most people did not; that can give you a different perspective sometimes, too. Honestly it was heaven! I only ever covered basketball, but I covered all basketball: Gophers, Timberwolves, St. Paul Slam (minor league team for which I also interned, meaning I got all the scoops from, uh, myself), small college, and high school. After college a friend and I co-managed a website for 2-3 years that was remarkably fun and relatively popular, but we were kids with no clue how to make a business work. We both had real jobs simultaneously, and of course those increasingly took priority before we just kind of fizzled out with the site.
As for stories, how about this: when the Wolves hosted the Rockets in the 1997 playoffs, I got my first taste of playoff basketball. As one of the coaches was talking to the national media, then-Rockets forward Charles Barkley was walking past, behind the media. Among the prominent "journalists" was former NBA wing Reggie Theus, who worked for some network or other at the time. Barkley shouted out, interrupting the proceedings, "Reggie Theus, if I was pretty as you, I'd walk around naked!"
Everyone turned around to see what was happening, but Barkley didn't even slow down. He was gone. So, with a few chuckles, everyone just proceeded.
Another quote I loved, but regarding far less prominent people, was when the minor league Slam signed former Gopher legend and brief NBA guard Melvin Newbern. I asked Clem Haskins (still the Gophers coach at the time) to say a few words about Newbern so I could use them in a story about that. He gave me one of the best quotes ever: "Melvin was the kind of player who, he'd get inside your shorts on both ends of the court and make you like it."
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Post by Sheriff John Stone on Feb 8, 2020 22:07:02 GMT
More great stories! I think you should give serious consideration to reviving some kind of website or blog. That's where your passion seems to be.
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Post by Kapitan on Feb 8, 2020 22:13:58 GMT
I think you should give serious consideration to reviving some kind of website or blog. That's where your passion seems to be. Funny you should say that ... stay tuned. (But it isn't going to be basketball.)
And by the way, are you implying I'm not passionate about my job? Like the conference call I described yesterday!? I'm shocked and offended!
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Post by Kapitan on Mar 7, 2020 18:13:57 GMT
It was probably inevitable, but regardless, it has come: there is local chatter about Gophers men's basketball head coach Richard Pitino's job security.
Everyone knew this team would struggle somewhat, as they had seven new players (two transfers, one grad transfer, and four freshmen). They also lost two senior starters (guard Dupree McBrayer and one of the program's best ever, power forward Jordan Murphy) and one junior wing to the NBA (Amir Coffey). So nobody was calling for a Big Ten title.
But the team brought in some very solid talent, including two freshmen generally considered to be in the lower reaches of the national Top 100 recruits (German wing Isaiah Ihnen and Texan wing Tre Williams). The two transfers (point guard Marcus Carr and combo guard Payton Willis) were both known quantities who were assumed to be the starting backcourt, which they have been, and one always expects a grad transfer (Turkish power forward Alihan Demir) to perform immediately.
The team struggled early with a tough schedule, but did get up to 11-8 at one point. However, both Willis and sophomore wing Gabe Kalscheur--assumed to be the two best shooters on a roster that (like everyone else) was going to feature 3s--have struggled, especially with consistency. Demir has looked more than a step slow and not sufficiently athletic or strong for the Big Ten. The freshmen have rarely seen the court, at least until recently.
So now they have gone 2-8 since that start, and sit at 13-16.
The young talent is still good, especially Ihnen, who might become a real star. There are also two talented prospects signed for next year (guard Jamal Mashburn Jr and Chicago-area big man Martice Mitchell), and remain in the hunt for local guard Kerwin Walton, a Top 100 prospect. And sophomore center Daniel Oturu is the only big man in the country averaging 20 and 11.
If Pitino is fired, Oturu seems more likely than not to declare for the draft. (He might anyway.) The recruits may well back out of their commitments. We may even see other players transfer.
It's a classic case of how good do we expect to be? Is mediocre--occasionally winning an NCAA tourney game, occasionally finishing in the top few spots of the conference, but then also going through some valleys in which we're just below .500--good enough? More accurately put, can we reasonably expect that some yet-unknown replacement could do better? Especially when the post-Clem Haskins coaches have never been much better than this? (Dan Monson, Tubby Smith, and Pitino all fell into that sometimes pretty good, sometimes mediocre cycle.)
The harshest judgment on Pitino has been his whiffs in local recruiting. Since 2012, we have had more McDonald's All Americans than we'd had in total before then: Tyus Jones, Reid Travis, Rashad Vaughn, Tre Jones, Matthew Hurt, Jalen Suggs, Dawson Garcia. Pitino has landed none. In fact, in the past three years he offered 22 local kids and got 3 (Oturu, Kalscheur, and power forward Jarvis Omersa). Meanwhile freshman point guard is great at Stanford, freshman forward Zeke Nnaji is excelling at Arizona, sophomore point guard McKinley Wright is an impact star at Colorado, freshman forward David Roddy is having a strong first year at Colorado State, and so on.
If we can't land local talent, we're in trouble: in case you didn't know it, Minnesota is not exactly a vacation destination, especially for a winter sport! High profile out-of-state recruits are rare, with some exceptions having come in from Michigan (mostly in the Haskins era) or Tennessee (Smith era).
Anyway, we will see it play out within the next couple of weeks. Tomorrow is the final regular season game, and then we have the Big Ten tourney. Then it's decision time.
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Post by Sheriff John Stone on Mar 15, 2020 4:09:11 GMT
Rick Pitino is back in college basketball:
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Post by Kapitan on Mar 15, 2020 12:29:22 GMT
Where he'll be coaching former Minnesota Gophers PG Isaiah Washington, who will be a senior next season there. It's somewhat ironic since the elder Pitino criticized the Gophers' point guard situation last season, when Washington was the only (true) point guard on the roster...
And the younger Pitino--Richard, who coaches the Gophers--apparently is being given another year on the job. I'd expect he's got a mandate to make (and maybe win a game in) the NCAA tournament to keep his job. And he better land a few of Minnesota's prospects!
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Post by Sheriff John Stone on Mar 20, 2020 0:01:32 GMT
ESPN launched some "Greatest College Basketball Player Of All-Time" brackets. Looks very interesting and a lot of fun to debate:
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Post by The Cincinnati Kid on Mar 20, 2020 0:38:43 GMT
I may be a little biased, but Oscar Robertson should be no lower than a 2, and probably a 1. Is stats were ridiculous in a time before the three point line existed. It's kind of crazy that UC not only didn't win a national championship until the year he left, but they went back to back and should have won a third if not for questionable officiating.
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Post by Kapitan on Mar 20, 2020 0:46:31 GMT
Mixing genders makes it really tricky. Eras, too, for that matter.
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Post by Sheriff John Stone on Mar 20, 2020 1:47:21 GMT
I may be a little biased, but Oscar Robertson should be no lower than a 2, and probably a 1. Is stats were ridiculous in a time before the three point line existed. It's kind of crazy that UC not only didn't win a national championship until the year he left, but they went back to back and should have won a third if not for questionable officiating. Obviously I didn't see "The Big O" play college basketball - I'm old but not THAT old, though I do remember him in the NBA - but, yeah, his college career stats are incredible (33.8 ppg and 15.2 rpg). Cincinnati didn't win a championship while Oscar was there but they went 79-9 including two Final Four appearances.
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Post by Kapitan on Mar 22, 2020 13:28:29 GMT
Duke sophomore point guard Tre Jones (a Minnesota native from Apple Valley, a suburb just southeast of Minneapolis) declared for the draft. He's a physically strong, hard-nosed guard who really competes defensively and can score in traffic, but who also distributes the ball well. He isn't a great shooter, but he could become adequate.
What amused and slightly saddened me was his statement as he came out, that he came to Duke to win a title but that didn't happen, and so now he had to move on. Uh, Tre, you're a sophomore. You could come back to compete for TWO titles if you want to.
But that's the stigma on college basketball players. The blue-chippers are mostly expected to be one-and-done, or two-and-done at worst. After that, you've lost your elite recruit status and typically just become a run-of-the-mill journeyman type. It's a shame. I miss the (long, long gone) days when the only guys who declared early were the guys who were more or less ready to make the jump and contribute immediately in the NBA. Now we literally have more early entrants than we have draft slots.
Tre Jones will be a first round pick, most likely, somewhere in the latter half of the first round. That means he'll probably go to a pretty good team and most likely be a backup at best, a D-Leaguer quite possibly. He's going to be just fine, of course. It's just a shame for college.
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Post by Kapitan on Mar 23, 2020 16:00:09 GMT
The Illinois High School Association YouTube channel has every boys basketball championship game (both class A and AA) from something like 1972 in full online.
C'mon, Cap, would anyone want to watch 30-year-old high school games?
Yes. Yes, I would.
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Post by Sheriff John Stone on Mar 26, 2020 15:44:16 GMT
41 years ago today - Michigan State beat Indiana State - Magic Johnson vs. Larry Bird.
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Post by Kapitan on Mar 26, 2020 15:47:32 GMT
41 years ago today - Michigan State beat Indiana State - Magic Johnson vs. Larry Bird. Two of the 10 best players in the history of the game, in my opinion, and I think two players who are becoming criminally underrated lately, as a new generation doesn't remember seeing them. (Along those lines, I've seen NBA players tweeting their Top 5 lists, etc., and you'd be amazed. This morning one I saw was 1. Lebron. 2. Jordan. 3. Kobe. 4. Shaq. 5. Nowitzki. I would put two of those guys in there, though not in that order. The other three ... nope.)
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Post by Sheriff John Stone on Mar 26, 2020 15:52:58 GMT
41 years ago today - Michigan State beat Indiana State - Magic Johnson vs. Larry Bird. Two of the 10 best players in the history of the game, in my opinion, and I think two players who are becoming criminally underrated lately, as a new generation doesn't remember seeing them. (Along those lines, I've seen NBA players tweeting their Top 5 lists, etc., and you'd be amazed. This morning one I saw was 1. Lebron. 2. Jordan. 3. Kobe. 4. Shaq. 5. Nowitzki. I would put two of those guys in there, though not in that order. The other three ... nope.) Magic and Bird would be in my Top 10, but they both fall short of my Top 5. For the last couple of years, my Top 5 has been, in no particular order:
1. Wilt Chamberlain 2. Michael Jordan 3. Lebron James 4. Kareem Abdul-Jabaar 5. I can never decide; for awhile it was either Oscar Roberston or Jerry West or Bill Russell
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