Monday, January 31, 2011

01/31 Quickie: Super Bowl, Pro Bowl, Kobe, Duke, NHL ASG and More

It's Super Bowl Week -- prepare for the over-saturation now.

Frankly, it's a week that makes Quickish all the more valuable -- cutting through the noise and clutter to bring you only the really good stuff to help you keep up. Please pop by today -- and all week, culminating with the Super Bowl in-game stream, which should be amazing.

*Mock the Pro Bowl all you want (and you did), the game had a ton of viewers. (But the game itself was unwatchable; it's like a Zen koan.)

*Celtics thump Lakers in LA: Not for lack of Kobe scoring, but for a serious lack of defensive effort by the defending champs.

*Oh, and then there was KG telling a Lakers ball-boy he had as much of a chance as "Bin Laden" of getting an autograph from him. Sometimes KG's dickishness is cool; mostly, it's not.

*Duke gets throttled in NYC: One of those games Duke-haters love to watch -- you'd think I would like the close calls more than the beat-downs, but nope: I love the beat-downs more. Of course, it means nothing in the grand scheme of what matters -- the NCAA Tournament. (Remember Duke getting crushed by Georgetown this time last year?)

Duke is still the team to beat; that said, they can't possibly repeat the gift-wrapped bracket path they had a year ago. That, more than anything we saw yesterday, is the biggest impediment to repeating. (Continuing not to have Kyrie Irving hurts too.)

*More CBB: So who's Number 1? Ohio State? OK, but let's file away the fact that a Northwestern team that slowed the pace of the game to a crawl -- but, more important, had absolutely no interior presence (literally: NU has the worst center in major-conference basketball) -- and nearly knocked them off. That's no resume-builder. And yet I can't believe in Texas -- at least not as a team to win six straight in late March, which is all that counts. What this weekend did, more than anything, was preclude you from feeling particularly good about ANY team's chances of winning it all.

*More NBA: Heat close out Thunder in OKC. I think we just saw the birth of a new (and not-fake) NBA rivalry. They may only play twice a year -- and never meet in the Finals (let's give it 3 years or so) -- but there's an obvious enmity. I mean, the normally staid Kevin Durant was inspired to call Chris Bosh "fake-tough," which is hardly controversial. Let's be real: Did anyone think Bosh WAS tough?

*NHL All-Star Game: Personally, I loved the "pick-sides" format, and the game was a goal-scoring frenzy. As a non-fan (I realized this weekend it's not fair to call me a "casual NHL fan" anymore), I tuned in a few times while watching other games, which is all the NHL can ask for from non-fans. (They won't want/need me anyway; they need the ASG to bolster support among the faithful, which I think it did.)

*Super Bowl mania: There was plenty of Gator gear for my kids when they were born, but if the folks in the nursery at the hospital wrapped either of them in a Yankees towel (like they do in Pittsburgh), I would have gone mildly ballistic.

*So many awesome reads on Quickish from this weekend. Head over and scroll down, hit the "More" button a few times and in less than 3 minutes, you'll get a ton of interesting perspectives and a slew of great reads for later.

-- D.S.

1 comment:

Ride said...

I’m so tired of hearing about the favorable draw that Duke got last year in the tournament. I wonder if people actually follow college basketball or just repeat what their favorite ESPN analyst says. From the 2nd round to the championship, Duke didn’t play a team outside of the top 16 in the final Pomeroy rankings or outside the top 20 in the final RPI rankings. Please find me another team with this tough of a draw:

Cal–15 in Pomeroy, 20 in RPI
Purdue–16, 16 (probably a bit high without Hummel)
Baylor (practically a road game)–6, 9
WVU (the team that should’ve gotten the other #1 seed, right?)–8, 4
Butler–12, 12

I'm pretty sure you won't 'approve' this comment, because it might require some leg work for you to refute my points. Have a great day.