Tag: basketball

Bracketurgy No. 8

/ Derek Mueller

March already: time to try your luck in the internet’s most fearboding, most kairotic NCAA pool. The trophy is tiny, so tiny in fact that the USPS will refuse to deliver it when you win. Nevertheless, for the eighth consecutive year the EWM Yahoo! NCAA men’s basketball tournament pick’em welcomes everyone to guess against the the savviest basketball futurographers around. There’s no time for biting your nail out of nervous habit (well, okay, but make it fast). Sign up! At no monetary cost to you, join this year’s group on Yahoo!,
Bracketurgy (ID#72844). If you have questions, elbow me gently in the ribs with an email at dmueller at earthwidemoth.com. Invite your friends, frienemies, arch-frienemies, Facebook friends, and pets. Just don’t invite Wisconsin Goobernor Scott Walker because I’d have no choice but to turn him down. The group has room for the next ten thousand people who sign up. What’s at stake is more precious than than a properly re-set alarm clock on Daylight Savings Day: your rep as a predictor extraordinaire, or predictordinaire.


Yahoo! Tournament Pick’em
Group: Bracketurgy (ID# 72844)
Password: ewm
Firm up your picks after the selection show on Sunday, March 13. The latest you
can sign up is five minutes before the round of 64 tips off on Thursday, March
17.

Carrying the Ball Around

/ Derek Mueller

On the elliptical Thursday, lolling slowly-idly through spacetime (i.e., winding across 3+ miles, ending up nowhere). Reeaading Elbow’s “The Doubting Game and the Believing Game–An Analysis of the Intellectual Enterprise,” the well-known appendix essay in Writing Without Teachers (1973) and an essay I am considering assigning for the first meeting of ENGL516 next month. In a future entry, I may have more to say about the essay, its premises, and whether anyone still reads it or finds the believing/doubting dialectic useful anymore. But it’s this passage on basketball that (today) still strikes me as odd-fitting:

If you are playing basketball and someone starts carrying the ball around without dribbling or keeping score wrong, what you do next is not part of the game but part of real life. You can shoot him, you can try to have him locked up, you can cry, you can say you won’t play with him tomorrow, or you can try to persuade him to start playing again by talking to him. Here, I think, believing game has an inherent advantage over the doubting game. The activity of the believing game (trying to share perceptions and experiences) is more likely than the activity of the doubting game (trying to find holes in the other person’s view) to keep people willing to talk to each other if the game breaks down. (174-175)

This must be a pick-up game.  There are no referees, no arbitrators of the game’s rules outside of the game itself. In fact, decorum is, in this case, so delicately kept by participants in the game that it is possible, if anyone in the game decides it is the best solution, to shoot the rule-breaker. That the miskept score or the carrying of the ball would warrant–under any circumstances–shooting the rule-breaker creates dissonance with the idea of hermeneutic propriety (the gains to be had in a generous intellectual manner more willing to try on ideas than to rush into critique). So it’s the extremism of the scenario that, in this particular passage, distracts me from the larger point Elbow seeks to make. The point is that the believing game could restore basketball-rationality to the scene. But it is startlingly difficult to believe these alternatives to verbal negotiation.  Locking up the rule-breaker? Crying? This list leaves me with doubts about whether the believing game holds up when absurd, hyperbolic alternatives enter into play.  Another way: do absurdity and hyperbole gain traction in the predominance of a doubting manner?

Hand Torque

/ Derek Mueller

Smashed my right hand mightily and accidentally into another player’s chest during this afternoon’s REC/IM run. Didn’t suffer jammed fingers, exactly, but something more like a severe twist and wrench–or absurdist bend-back–of digits 3+4 such that I cannot make a clenched fist now and their base knuckles are awful with swelling. I pitied myself along the way back to Hoyt, but after I settled into my office chair and watched this, my banged-up hand felt better. (via)

Benga — Baltimore Clap from Tempa on Vimeo.

Trophy Ceremony

/ Derek Mueller / 1 Comment

College basketball is at long last over for the season. And that can only mean one or more things: we have an official and undisputed winner in the Brick-à-Brack (ID#21100) NCAA tournament pool: Julie Meloni. Given that this is Julie’s second EWM Tournament Pick ‘Em win in, what?, two or three years, we can either 1) urge her to write a ProfHacker entry on the blood, sweat, and tears it took to out-predict the rest of us or 2) conclude that something statistically suspicious is afoot and impose a three-year Pick ‘Em probationary period for this possible (some would say “probable”) violation. Okay, so maybe No. 2 is too scornfully anti-congratulatory. Whatever the case, this second championship elevates Julie into Krzyzewskian ranks. Congrats, Julie!

No, I really mean it. I do. Like everyone else you defeated, I’m sincerely “happy” for you.

I don’t have much else to say about this NCAA Tournament (read CGB’s entry on why college basketball in general comes away a winner after a tournament like this). By the end, I was rooting enthusiastically for Butler. Like this, “Go Bulldogs! Woof! Woof! Woof!” Not really. I mean, I *was* rooting for Butler, but without barking. To be honest, though, I misjudged Duke and Butler as upset specials. Neither of them had even a slim chance in my vision of how things would play out. I had Butler losing to UTEP (first round) and Duke losing to Louisville (second round). Be forewarned: Next season I will keep these hallucinations and blindnesses in mind.

MAC Championship

/ Derek Mueller / 1 Comment

As plainly as I can say it, I’ve never looked forward to a MAC Championship game like I am looking forward to today’s MAC Championship game: Akron vs. Ohio, 6 p.m. tip-off. ESPN2.

Above all, I would like to see Ohio win because one of their freshmen, #3 Ivo Baltic, was on teams I coached in the KC area from 2000 to 2004. Now Ivo’s a 6-9 forward who developed an impressive facility for basketball (although I got to know him because I coached his soccer team when he was even younger). Often Ph. and I would pick up him for practices; he was what my own coach approvingly called a “gym rat,” would leave a practice asking about when would be the next time he could get in the gym. For perspective, and because I am proud of what he has done for himself, here are a couple of photos to contrast with the one below, which D. took after we saw Ohio play EMU at the Convocation Center five weeks ago.

After EMU-Ohio Game

So, easily, I am a fan. And I would greatly enjoy seeing his 9-seeded Bobcats beat the 3-seeded Zips.

The other side of the coin for me, as far as my personal interest in today’s game, is that I once had a try-out in front of Keith Dambrot many years ago.

A Short Bench

/ Derek Mueller

Sunday’s game in the Ann Arbor Men’s League was special. It was the final game of the regular season. With a win, we would move into a three-way tie for first place, at 7-3. We were facing a youthful, full-court-pressing team from Washtenaw CC (their club team, if you will, although they have a deep bench, a coach, and, for Sunday night’s game, cheerleaders). I haven’t played in a game with cheerleaders since 1995; they even twiddled their fingers in the air when we shot free throws.

Our group has been up and down this year. We started 5-0, which was good enough to lock up a sponsor for the state tournament later this month in Midland (why it is in Midland, I have no idea, since all eight teams are from SE Michigan). We started the season with ten guys, more than most carry. One–the only guy older than me on our team or in the division–decided to quit for reasons I won’t bother going into. That left us with nine. Several of our early games were 40+ point routes (against teams in a division below ours). One was a triple OT win against a team that later beat us by 40–our poorest outing of the season. The other two losses came to a close rival; we lost one of those by four points, the other by five. So: although we finished in a first-place tie, we wouldn’t win any of the tie-breakers based on head to head matchups or point differential. So it goes. I don’t know how they’ll settle who gets the trophy.

Why was Sunday’s game special? Well, aside from the eventfulness of playing against a “team” of 18 and 19 year-olds (i.e., babies who were born the same year I graduated high school), instead of having our usual nine players, we had five. Four didn’t show up because of Winter Break, injuries, absent-mindedness, I don’t know. We hadn’t been short-handed like this before. I am too old to be nervous about basketball games in a recreational league. But: it was going to be difficult to hold off a team of fit, pressing youth for four quarters.

The game started off smoothly enough. We were down 31-29 at halftime. Nobody was in foul trouble. I had just one foul in the first half, and fouls are as you might expect the main concern when playing without a single sub. A couple of bad plays (or bad calls or both) can leave you in the unwinnable mismatch, four vs. five. Next, something terrible: in the first 1:24 of the third quarter, I was called for three fouls: two blocking fouls, which might have been charges were I willing to fall onto my back (I’m not), and an official’s hallucination. The new problem: four fouls with 6:36 remaining in the third quarter.

We adjusted (put me on the right frontcourt corner of a 2-3 zone). And–this is why it was special, mostly–I managed to finish the game without fouling out. Also, we won by 12 or 13 points, entirely because our team defense was excellent. We held them to something like 20 points for the second half.

I’m blogging it because I’m pretty sure this is the last league game I’ll ever play in. I will travel to Midland in late March for the state tournament. After that, the only basketball I play will be lunchtime pickup games with EMU’s regulars twice each week. I still enjoy playing for fitness, recreation, and communion, but I like being able to skip a day when I want to, I like being able to go home when I’m done for the day, and I like being able to walk one building over from my office to play among people I know (and who are not absurdly competitive).

Camp

/ Derek Mueller

The 13th annual Native Vision camp concluded earlier today in Whiteriver, Ariz. I had a great time, all in all: a lot of fun working with the campers and catching up with the coaches and pros. I’d like to think I will have more to say about the camp in the next couple of days, but I have a busy week ahead, so we’ll see. Anyway, here’s a photograph of the basketball crew. Notice that there’s a hint of photobomb going on here in that the basketball campers are on the court in defensive position while we are posing for a group photo (this was possible because Coach Frost was leading the campers in the a.m. warm-up).

Native Vision 2009 - Basketball

As Lebron Goes

/ Derek Mueller / 1 Comment

First, because I have not watched any television yet today, I am wondering:
Is it still baseball season?

Ah, well, in that case I will be taking in a few minutes of the
NBA playoffs
later today, especially the match-up between the Pistons and the Cavaliers.
Historically, I have been indifferent about first round series. But the
Pistons-Cavs matchup interests me because it seems the Pistons have almost no
chance whatsoever. Granted, I am a long-time Pistons fan, and I have
enjoyed their streak of success over the past several seasons (what, something
like five consecutive Eastern Conference Finals?). But this season’s
Allenex Iversperiment was an utter bust, and, thus, Detroit is down an
all-star guard. Also, this series reminds me ever so slightly of the late 1980s matchups between a fading Detroit team and the Jordan-led up-start Bulls.
I’d bet a dollar we hear that comparison during today’s telecast.

With all of that said, I’m still not quite a believer that this is the banner year for
the Cavaliers. If Lebron can be guarded, if he can be shielded, if he can be frustrated, if he can slip into a slump from behind the three-point line, then maybe, just maybe the Cavs
will falter. Might not happen versus the Pistons, but one can hope. Or, at
the very least, one can watch a few minutes of each of the first two games of
the series thinking defense.

And just in case Detroit exits the playoffs and does not win a championship
this year, my fan-affinity shifts next to Denver and then Chicago and then
Orlando, mostly because I like certain players on each of those teams.

Finito

/ Derek Mueller / 3 Comments

Did you watch the game last night?  Whatever your answer, I can’t say I blame you. 
What does that mean, anyway, "can’t say I blame you"? I watched, using it as a good reason to stay up and eat jellybeans, until nine minutes remained in the second
half.  Reminded me of the time my good mutt
Tony was
surprised to find himself sniffing around in tie-up-reach of two German
Shepherds, double-surprised when one took him in its jaws, and surprised yet
again when the beast shook him around like a rag doll and tossed him up in the
air like a UNC jump shot in the first half of last night’s drubbing. T.
scamperlimped away and hid under some neighbor’s deck.  By association, it
comes down to this: I’d have been happier if the Spartans won and I’d have been
more interested if the game was ever close.

The pool
is complete, and the victor is Julie M. with 145 picktelligent points. What
stands out to me the most about JM’s impressive finish is that last year she was 12th; this
year she was 1st.  Guess who was 12th this year? Yours truly. This can only
mean that next year I am due to join the elite company of EWM Tournament Pick’em
Champs.

2009  Julie M.  (1 of 24)
2008  Billie H. (1 of 18)
2007  Jason L.  (1 of 17)
2006  Chuck T.  (1 of 11)
2005  Mike J.   (1 of 7)
2004  Jeff R.   (1 of 7)