Clusterf*ck: Stage Three

So, Stanford finally got around to actually hiring a coach.

Not, mind you, a coach with a day of head coaching experience, or one who is likely to be loyal to the school (not that I'm implying that blind loyalty is a virtue, but you know that if the guy is good, Duke's going to snag him when Krzyzewski retires), but a coach nonetheless. And for what it's worth, at least he's a total unknown rather than a known mediocrity like Doug Oliver. To slip into baseball prospect-speak, he's got the tools and he's got the upside-- he just doesn't have any kind of track record.

Unfortunately, the process took so long that the team's highest-rated recruit, Miles Plumlee, has asked out of his commitment to attend the school. I honestly can't blame him a bit. The team next year is unlikely to be a strong one. He'd be likely to see a lot of playing time, but that's about all that one can say on behalf of the '08-09 Cardinal. It's not impossible that Dawkins can talk him back, particularly because-- as a Duke assistant who undoubtedly ran into his brother Mason during Duke's recruitment of the latter-- he probably knows the guy and the family somewhat. As I joked to my dad, maybe he can get Coach K to give him a call and tell him to take the education. But it's no sure thing, and if he ends up going elsewhere, it will be a major loss and one that could very probably have been avoided.

Others have already done a better job than I ever could of critiquing this bestiality of a coaching process from the journalist's perspective. I encourage any of my, optimistically, two readers to check the link-- it's almost like reading The Decline and Fall of a Major Program. Despite a pretty solid record of success in the Johnson years, the program's prestige has collapsed to the level of a third-tier BCS program, where your choices in coaching hires (and, I fear, recruiting) are between raw guys with theoretical upside and known quantities with none. Bob Bowlsby, the Stanford Athletic Director, now gets to contend with the notions that the school is

a. cheap (not willing to pay market rates for a BCS school, not willing to extend Johnson and risk the possibility of having to buy him out, not willing to pay for an experienced coach) and
b. stupid (letting the Coach of the Year walk, having no apparent backup plan, not realizing that prevaricating would make recruits question their commitments).

So the program is facing a total rebuilding job in more ways than just on the court. The team's prestige has also vanished. I've never been one to complain about arrogance-- that would be part of the Lectures On Hypocrisy Series in my own case, I have to admit-- but when arrogance leads to decisions that don't make sense (like playing margin games with your coach and hoping he'll take it like a good boy) it turns into hubris. The Icarus-like flight path of the Stanford program over the past 5 months and change would be a fitting subject for any Greek tragedy, if it wasn't for the sizable amount of sheer incompetence involved (Daedalus, whatever his faults, was never accused of incompetence).

More on the Plumlee situation as soon as things shake out. I'll presage my upcoming preview (to be appearing around mid-June) of the forthcoming season by saying this: Where Stanford was a solid #3 in my "early hunch" thoughts, which assumed that both Robin Lopez and Miles Plumlee would be playing for the program, it's currently sitting at #8, and I think I might be overly homer-istic to even put it that high. 10 scholarship players? No height whatsoever? Lawrence Hill playing the 5?

Ugh. That's my take on the entire situation.

Johnson leaves Stanford for smelly swamp

...er, excuse me, bayou.

Link.

My initial shock at seeing this dissipated once I learned that the LSU job pays twice as much. That knowledge, however, begs the question: why does LSU pay twice as much?

Let's face it, LSU is not a basketball powerhouse. They did make a run to the Final Four two years ago, to be sure. But that was the first real sign of life in the program since the Shaq years, and even the Shaq teams were not particularly good at anything other than blocking shots (incidentally, Jarvis Varnado of Mississippi State somehow ended up exactly tied with Shaq for the single-season block record in the SEC, which must be a little frustrating since he didn't get credit for a single block after about the 6 minute mark of the first half of MSU's last game against Memphis and thus had about 26 minutes to break it-- and wow, did that tangent end up being longer than I expected). Stanford won 4 titles in a major conference during the last 10 years. I couldn't even tell you the last time LSU won a title.

So from a prestige standpoint, there's little question that Stanford is the superior job. And yet, it pays less. This is not logical from a market standpoint. High-prestige jobs should land high-value coaches, who should earn the best salaries and obtain the best returns in terms of ticket sales.

Of course, anyone who's read anything I've ever written about economics knows that I'm a frequent mocker of the "everyone is rational" school of economic theory. People act like idiots all the time, and right now it appears that one or both of Bob Bowlsby and Stanford's budgetary committee are idiots. If Bowlsby had the chance to extend Johnson at competitive rates and didn't, he's an idiot. If he wanted to and the committee wouldn't pony up, they're idiots. Johnson is a good coach who earned conference-wide recognition this season, and losing him to a literal backwater of college basketball (man, those Louisiana puns are flying thick and fast today) reflects really badly on Stanford as a program.

Now we enter the "rampant speculation" phase of things, so let me state from the outset which horse I'm backing: Mark Fox. As a former Johnson assistant, he helped recruit a lot of the players which were involved in Nevada's 2004-2007 run of tourney appearances. He's familiar with Johnson's style and offers a semblance of continuity. He's not particularly tied down in Nevada, as most of his best players are leaving. And he's, you know, good. His record has actually been better than Johnson's since he took over the program, although we all know that raw W/L record is oft-misleading in college hoops.

We'll see what happens. The new coach is going to have his hands full, that's for sure. He has to recruit 5 new players for 2009, rerecruit the incoming commits, and convince the current players not to transfer. That is one hell of a rebuilding job. The athletic department had better make a hire quickly, because there's a lot of work to be done.

Man, that was quick

Friday morning, I'm writing confidently about the Cardinal's chances to win against Texas.

Monday evening, or about 80 hours later if you're keeping score, the Trees have been embarrassed by Texas, which was in turn embarrassed by Memphis, and the season is over. Oh, and the best two players, not to mention collectively over half the team's offense, are skipping town.

That, friends, is a crummy weekend. 

Although my disciplined failure to pick Stanford over Texas in that game might end up earning me the big bucks in the office pool if Kansas wins the whole thing. I actually aced that region, which is nice since I blew five picks in each of the other three, for a solidly mediocre 75% prediction rate. From this point on, I promise that I will not refer to anything office-pool-related until next spring, because rule #1 of office pools is that absolutely no one but you cares about your success or failure in them.

Looking back at the Texas game, I'm wondering where my analysis broke down. I'm not sure it did, other than that Texas shot a whole lot better than Stanford did. The Cardinal were, trying to remember here, something like 10 of 55 on the game on jump shots, which is utterly horrific. Virtually all of their points came on layups and tip-ins. Good teams simply won't give you enough of those to win a game in which you give up more than about 50 points (I include the caveat so as not to be disproven by the UCLA-Texas A&M game from last weekend).

One thing I definitely remember-- both teams had an identical number of shots from the field. Texas made 10 more of them. That's really bad, particularly when you consider that Texas is not a particularly hot-shooting team in its own right. For one night, anyway, Stanford was just ice cold. Brook Lopez tried to carry the team, but he fatigued down the stretch under the pressure of designated fatso Dexter Pittman, and no one, his brother included (Robin was a -20 in points for this game when he was on the floor) picked him up.

Now comes the news that Robin Lopez is declaring for the NBA along with his brother. The loss of Brook was as much of a lock as anything in college ball, so I can't really be despondent about it, but I feel like Robin is making a mistake here. His stats for this year are significantly depressed by the fact that Brook played so many minutes and took up such a high percentage of the team's offense. His offensive rating was actually not much lower than his brother's, although ratings do tend to go down with greater possession usage, so take that with a grain of salt.

But imagine the kinds of numbers he could put up playing 30 minutes a game as the primary inside scorer, rebounder and shot-blocker. Probably not equal to Brook's this year on the offensive end, but it's hardly a stretch to envision 15 points, 10 boards and 4 blocks a game from Robin at this level, and those are absolutely lottery-pick numbers from a 7-footer who's only 21. As it is, his much less impressive stat line from this season will not impress NBA GMs, most of whom probably have not absorbed the full range of analysis that Mssrs. Pomeroy et al have developed over the last couple of years. To be sure, he had a good NCAA tournament (and looked good on semi-national TV) and can still impress people in workouts (and he will), but I don't see him rising higher than a late first-round pick... although that does create the odd potential scenario of both him and Brook being drafted by the same height-challenged lottery team. Perhaps that's the notion they have, but I don't think it's terribly likely.

In any event, I suspect that by declaring early, he's cost himself somewhere around $3-4 million in guaranteed money when all is said and done (obviously a rough estimate, and we'll see how much it turns out to be when the draft actually rolls around). He can still play his way into the NBA-- but it's a lot easier for him to play his way out of it.

I watched the Stanford women's game tonight, which was pretty fun-- they were insanely hot shooting the ball (what, 67 percent from 3?), and Candace Wiggins, who I've decided is pretty much the most awesome athlete ever, dropped 41 points on a very good Maryland team. The team as a whole scored 98, which is near-ridiculous for a high-level women's game (for perspective, the other regional today was 56-50). It's going to take a near-repeat effort AND better defense to beat UConn, which already beat the Stanford women on a neutral court earlier in the year. So, uh, go Rutgers, I guess.

Still, it's nice to see her break through to the Final Four. She deserves the chance to be honored on that kind of stage. I might post a wrap of that game once it's over, or perhaps a mixed Final Four Saturday/Stanford women wrapup on Sunday. I'd better write as much as I can in the next 8 days, because after that it's a prolonged college hoops wasteland until next fall (and given how the roster looks right now, probably more like fall of 2009... although perhaps that's a good thing considering that I'll be in law school next fall and probably pretty busy). We'll see whether the muse takes me.

Breaking Down the Horns

Let's go position by position to analyze this matchup.

PG: D.J. Augustin-- Alright, if you care at all about college basketball, you know who this guy is. Close to 20 points a game, deadly range, and great passing ability. An underrated part of his game, and of Texas's game in general, is that on offense they virtually never turn the ball over. (This is actually true in reverse for them defensively-- they don't turn people over much. I'd expect a pretty clean game tonight.) He's not an excessively efficient scorer (1.34 points per shot) but Texas's strong offensive rebounding game helps this out somewhat. He's unquestionably a great assist man-- 5.8 assists a game. Texas clearly has the edge here matchup-wise, and I'd expect to see Anthony Goods given Augustin as a defensive assignment.

SG: A.J. Abrams-- For a guy with as pure a stroke as this guy, you would expect him to post better than 1.20 points per shot. That's efficient enough, I guess, but it doesn't really seem to warrant the hype around him. He's not a slasher (60% of his field goal attempts are 3s) which will make him much easier for Stanford to defend than Jerel McNeal. Still, they can't give him open looks. This position is an edge for Texas, but not as much of one as one might think. Johnson, who lacks quickness but is otherwise a good defender, will probably man up with him.

SF/Wing: Damion James-- Justin Mason typically plays most of the minutes as the #3 guard. I don't think he'll be seeing a lot of action today, though, because Texas will have to put bigs on the floor to stop the Lopez twins. James is a dynamic rebounder, averaging a double-double. He's also a knockdown 3-point threat, making it the more odd that he can't shoot free throws. He's just 56% on the season. At 6-7, he'll have a height edge over Fred Washington, meaning that Fred's goal will be to push him to the perimeter rather than allow him to post up and collect misses. Definite edge to Texas here.

PF: Connor Atchley-- A guy who kind of came out of nowhere this year, Atchley is an efficient big who doesn't score or rebound a ton (9 points, 5 rebounds a game) but avoids turning the ball over. He's an excellent spot-up jump shooter, so he can probably pull one Lopez out of the paint if Augustin needs to drive the ball. Nonetheless, he doesn't have remotely close to Brook Lopez's scoring power and ability to take over the game. Huge edge for Stanford here.

C: By committee-- A group of guys including the big, big, big Dexter Pittman, the lanky but undersized Alexis Wangmene, and Gary Johnson (OK, some of these are not literally going to be playing the 5, but it's the best way to conceptualize the group). It's hard to characterize this bunch-- let's just say that they combine for about 10 points and 8 rebounds, which is decent, but are undersized. Big edge to Robin Lopez, who's developed his offensive game to go along with what should be a major defensive edge at this position.

Overall I actually like this game better from a matchup standpoint for Stanford than I did Marquette. Texas plays a lot of zone defense and doesn't force turnovers, meaning that Stanford should be able to get post entries to the Lopezes and rack up offensive rebounds, not to mention move the ball on the perimeter so that they can get open shots there. Texas is good at challenging shots but not particularly great at other aspects of defense, and since Stanford can't shoot anyway, their offense may not be overly affected by this.

On the defensive end, Texas has a lot more spot-up shooting than Marquette does-- Augustin is a great guard in all respects, of course, but Abrams is an outside guy and Justin Mason, their usual third guard, probably won't play as much as usual due to matchup issues. Atchley is hugely outclassed athletically by the Lopezes, so most of their frontcourt production is going to have to come from James. Overall I think the smaller number of threats enables Stanford to create pseudo-double teams (a guard and a Lopez) on inside shots without as much fear of Texas exploiting a mismatch somewhere else. Texas is not an up-tempo team, which really plays into Stanford's hands-- while not as slow as Stanford, Texas was below average in possessions per game this year.

However, let's not kid ourselves. Texas is a very good team and they're playing a semi-home game. The latter, plus the generally higher quality of Texas's players, certainly makes this game no easier to win than the Marquette game and probably a bit harder. Stanford is the underdog here, but not by as much, perhaps, as one might think.

Pac-10 note: Washington State fell yesterday; they were simply outclassed by North Carolina's scoring ability. I'd like to recognize just how good their senior class was this year. That program had nothing-- but nothing-- when Low, Weaver and Cowgill showed up. Their steady improvement and the great coaching of the Bennetts turned that program completely around. My hat is off to them.

Match Point

Meaning:

1. The final point in a tennis, volleyball, or other volley sport which, if won by the leading side, will result in a victory for that side,
2. A somewhat clever and ironically appropriate Woody Allen film which includes Scarlett Johannsen (who I still cannot believe is not at least 30 years old by now, and no, that's not a comment on her looks, obviously) and several musings on the role of luck in human affairs, viewed by the author a week or so ago,
3. The new Official March Madness Certified Greatest Shot in Stanford History (eclipsing the absurd Nick Robinson runner to beat Arizona and keep the unbeaten season alive in February 2004).

Stanford 82, Marquette 81 (OT)

I don't know how much more there is to say about the game. Obviously, I was both right (that these teams were a razor's edge apart talent-wise) and wrong (in thinking mid-game that the game would fall on the other side of said razor's edge). Perhaps if I keep at the writing thing long enough, I can learn to contain my neuroses a bit better-- or perhaps not; it may be unavoidable. I still have no idea whatsoever who would win a seven game series between the two teams. I do know that there's no possible way such a series could have been this gut-wrenching, thrilling and historic unless it went to game seven, which is why March Madness is unbelievably awesome and the NBA playoffs, frankly, suck.

I'm sure there will be more pseudo-mystical musings on the nature of luck and its long-term effects once the season is over, but right now there are still more games to play. I'll be back in the next day or two with a full breakdown of Texas and a matchup analysis. My first glance take is that Texas may actually be a better matchup, because they're more dependent on stationary shooters than penetrators, and because their depth sucks, particularly in the frontcourt. Augustin is still a huge problem, though.

Incidentally, the Pomeroy Ratings see this game as a literal coin flip-- 50% for each team. It's going to be mighty fun, and unlike the agonizing runup to last Saturday, at this point the Cardinal are playing with house money-- they've gotten over the second-round hump, they've gotten as far as their seed indicates they ought to and they're playing a higher-seeded opponent. There's nothing to lose-- and no talking head can ever take away the glorious reality of Saturday's finish.

What was that about the nightmare scenario again?

Halftime, Marquette up by 6 points. Stanford can't hit outside shots (Anthony Goods had, I think, one point in the half), Brook Lopez is in foul trouble, and the defense has completely fallen apart over the last 10 minutes or so, as Marquette scores at will on penetration and kickouts.

Oh, and Trent Johnson, who had been changing up defenses on the fly to try to keep Marquette contained, just got tossed from the game on consecutive technicals (following, I might add, a truly atrocious call in which a Marquette player who tripped trying to split a double team inexplicably received a foul against Lawrence Hill). This handed Marquette four points, by the way, and they promptly proceeded to reel off a bunch more before Stanford finally got things under control to end the half down only six.

This is one of those "Cassandra moments" where you predict the worst, no one else apparently seems to notice, and then it happens exactly like you expected it to. At least it will probably all be over in an hour. Unfortunately, so will the college career of Brook Lopez, and quite possibly that of his brother as well. What a shitty way to go out.

Feel free to panic now

Yes, the nightmare scenario for Cardinal fans has come to pass-- despite getting a 3-seed in the Tournament, the team is matched up in the second round with an opponent which is a. guard-dominated, creating a mismatch (upsets happen far more in mismatches than in situations where teams play similar styles), b. faster and press-happy (we saw how well that worked out last season), and c. severely underseeded (Marquette ranks 12th in the Pomeroy rankings at last count).

Stanford 77, Cornell 53

Some quick thoughts on this game before I move on to the real heart of the matter, the Marquette breakdown/panic attack:

Ivy League quick is nothing like Pac-10 quick. Stanford's players were sticking like glue to virtually every Cornell player, with the result that until the scrubs came in at about the 30-minute mark, Cornell barely got off an open shot of any kind. Louis Dale, the Ivy League player of the year, went approximately 0-for-50 in the first half, and their other shooters weren't doing a heck of a lot better.

If Stanford can bottle some of their outside shooting from this game and sprinkle it over the court before Saturday's throwdown, they should win easily. It's been a while since the team looked like a genuinely good shooting club from beyond about 10 feet, but all three of the major outside threats (Anthony Goods, Landry Fields, and Kenny Brown) knocked down a couple of 3s.

The team continues to suffer some rebounding lapses at times on the defensive end, which I find kind of inexplicable. For the first, eh, 10 minutes or so, Cornell was hanging around on the glass. Eventually the team exerted themselves, but given how well Marquette rebounded against Kentucky, they're going to need to avoid lapses like that or risk finding themselves on the short end of scoring runs. Both of the last two losses (UCLA in the Pac-10 tourney, USC the week before) were at least partly the result of being severely outworked in rebounding by smaller teams.

Now, the panic-mongering:

Granted, Stanford has played and beaten guard-happy pressing teams before, but none of this caliber. Dominic James is healthy and looks as explosive as ever, on top of which he's shooting well from outside. Jerel McNeal is like a sped-up arcade version of Louis Dale, the guy Stanford disposed of yesterday. And while none of their players is very tall, they have some Joevan Catron-type long-armed guys to at least confuse the issue on the glass and allow for gang-rebounding.

The keys to the game are very simple-- shoot well, avoid turnovers against what will inevitably be a strong press, and find a way to stop guard penetration. These are the three things that this Stanford team, otherwise an extremely strong squad, is the absolute worst at doing. They'll get some easy buckets for the Lopez twins, but I'm not even sure they're going to be able to put both of them on the floor at once. Perhaps a station-to-station approach could beat the press, using the Lopezes as "bases" for the smaller guys to work around to move the ball upcourt? As far as I know, this has never really been tried.

In the halfcourt defense, I think the team is going to have to use a zone. It sucks that Marquette is going to get open 3s off of it, but the alternative-- tons of layups and fouls on the Lopez twins-- is that much worse.

Let me put this in as blunt of terms as possible. I think Marquette is the favorite in this game. Not by a huge amount, mind you-- it's basically a coin flip. But the favorite nonetheless. It's hard to believe that Stanford could have the bad luck to be paired with what's not only the most underseeded team in the entire tournament, but also a stylistic nightmare. Then again, bad luck-- in one form or another-- is pretty much the story of the NCAA tournament for Stanford since the last Elite 8 run in 2001. It's going to take real skill to play around this. Let's hope the Cards exhibit it, because I don't think I can bear to see another round of we-told-you-so finger-wagging from self-righteous media types who don't bother to look under the surface and realize that Marquette is, you know, actually frigging good at basketball.

Big Red, or Big Red 11?

That's the question that tomorrow's game will answer. (In case the reference is opaque, here's a hint. One of the Stanford players is number 11. I'll let you guess which one.)

OK, so Cornell really shouldn't be able to hang in this game. That doesn't mean they won't, of course. This is March Madness. Here's the deal on Cornell-- they're a highly balanced offensive team whose offense stems from the play of their point guard. He averages about 13 points a game, shoots 90 percent on his free throws (and gets quite a number of them) and dishes to the team's leading scorer, a 6-6 sharpshooting wing of the species forwardus midmajorus. Translation-- he's a knockdown shooter but no threat off the bounce.

So you've got your defensive matchups. Anthony Goods needs to play good perimeter D on Cornell's point, while Freddy Washington and Lawrence Hill dog the small forward position to prevent any open looks from the outside. Sounds simple enough. Cornell also deploys a 7-footer, kind of a project player but one who's put together a pretty nice season despite having spent his first 2.5 seasons of athletic eligibility on the bench at two separate colleges. Somewhere about December, the coach called him up and he responded. I think Stanford can pretty much shut off penetration from Cornell's exterior, meaning the game will hinge on their ability to pressure the 3-point arc.

The key Stanford offensive player? I'm going to say Robin Lopez, who's going to be guarded by a man who is several inches shorter than he is. If Robin can make Cornell pay for double-teaming his brother, Stanford should have a pretty easy time scoring in the paint. There's little reason for Stanford to go extensively to the outside shooting game in this one. I like the concept of shooting high-arc midrange shots which will bounce high off the rim if they don't go down-- Mitch Johnson is pretty good at this-- and letting the Lopezes play volleyball on the interior.

Overall this is a strong matchup for the Cardinal, but no game in the tournament is easy. Meanwhile, all Stanford fans need to dig out their rabbits' feet for the first game of the Anaheim set, in which Marquette (very good team, horrible matchup) plays Kentucky (mediocre team, near autowin). Somehow Kentucky has clawed their way into the picture this season after being essentially left for dead at the side of the road in early January. Can they claw one more win out of this season? Best hope so. Marquette's perimeter quickness is going to shred Stanford's defense. If the team has a bad shooting game in that putative matchup, or Marquette puts on a lot of full-court pressure, it could get ugly.

Speaking of big, red and the numeral 1, the Big Red One is the longest serving divisional combat unit in the U.S. Army and served a major role in World War II, fighting in North Africa, Sicily and at Omaha Beach during the Normandy landings. This is apropos of absolutely nothing, but at least you can say you learned something.

Bracket Thoughts

Some general notes on the bracket before I dive into the Stanford-Cornell pairing:

1. As some have noted, the committee did a really, really bad job of creating interesting mid-major vs. high-major matchups. Consider this: in the bracket, there are seven teams seeded 8 or better that are not from a Big Six conference.

Guess how many of those are playing major-conference opponents. Answer: two. One of those is the bizarre Xavier-Georgia matchup which came about because of an automatic bid. The other one is an 8-9 game.

Quite frankly, this bugs me. It seriously limits the number of predicted mid-over-high wins in the tournament. It's very possible-- depending on the matchups-- that there may not be a single game in the tournament where a non-BCS team other than Memphis or Xavier is actually a favorite over a BCS team.

It took me literally a minute to figure out a scenario where Drake plays Villanova instead of Western Kentucky. (Switch those two, then switch UConn and Vandy.) Butler-South Alabama could have been fixed (and another anomaly avoided, see below) by simply flipping Arizona and USA! Arkansas and Kent State can then be flipped to eliminate another needless mid-mid pairing.

I don't have much of a problem with treating Xavier and Memphis like high-majors, since they basically are. Ditto Gonzaga, which would easily be Davidson's biggest scalp in recent memory. But seriously... Drake-WKU? I thought BracketBusters was a month ago.

2. Someone please pass a rule exempting West Coast schools from the 9:30 AM time slot. Saint Mary's and Gonzaga are massively disadvantaged in their first-round games by this factor. (Gonzaga gets to play a semi-away game to boot... see below.) So is Portland State, if anyone cares. There's just no reason why those games have to be put in those time slots.

3. What looked like an anomaly last year (Louisville getting Texas A&M in Kentucky) now appears to be a full-blown, ugly trend. Far too many lower seeds are gaining advantages by receiving cushy draws close to home. It's not quite as bad as the women's tournament, where if you're lucky enough to host you get home games even if you're a 12 seed, but it's getting there. There are, depending on how you reckon it, between 4 and 6 "semi-home" games in the first round. 2-4 of those are #1 seeds. The others are a pair of #10 seeds, which is ludicrous.

Ultimately, these gaffes give the bracket an air of rushed carelessness, which is exactly what you'd expect. The committee had to create eight contingency plans for games on the last day. Is it any surprise that these weren't exactly well thought out?

It just makes no sense to me that the selection show has to immediately follow as soon as the last game is done. Seriously, CBS, would it kill you to give them a frigging hour to look things over and tweak the bracket to produce better matchups? I spent, max, 5 minutes figuring out a small number of bracket tweaks that would have made a far more interesting bracket (IMHO, of course). I understand that this year the conference tournaments were a perfect storm of nightmare scenarios (literally a perfect storm, in the SEC case), so I don't really blame the committee. I do blame CBS. Do they have such contempt for their viewers that they think an hour of pre-selection debate and discussion would destroy the show's audience? I just can't see that happening. People will tune in because they want to see where their team is playing, whether it's on at 3 pm, 4 pm or 4 am. (The latter not suggested for other reasons.)

Oh well. At least it makes my 7-10 upset picks easy.

Better lucky than good?

That's got to be what UCLA is telling themselves at this point.

UCLA 67, Stanford 64

Somehow or other, UCLA again defeated Stanford despite Kevin Love doing his best (injury-induced, to be sure) Daven Harmeling imitation-- all jump shots, no post play-- and the team shooting free throws like they were at those carny stalls with the heavy balls and the 18-foot rims. Somehow they managed to get by on an assortment of H.O.R.S.E. shots from Darren Collison, who seems to have taken his Angel of Stanford Death role somewhat seriously of late.

There's something about UCLA that just provokes panic in opponents. I'm not really sure what does it, but every game it seems like the opposing team goes through a stretch of about 5 minutes where they make every possible wrong decision, and for Stanford, that stretch came between about 7 and 2 minutes to go in this one. UCLA hit a couple of buckets to go up 55-48, and then the wheels suddenly fell off of the Stanford offense. Instead of pounding it into the post or moving the ball around the perimeter, the "offense" suddenly became off-balance 12-foot prayers from the middle of the lane and turnovers. Lots of turnovers. The team sort of recovered its composure after a while, but a pretty spirited comeback in the last couple of minutes ended with a halfcourt heave clanking off the side iron. It didn't have to be that way.

Trent Johnson needs to use this game as a lesson for the team. Something like "Look, guys. We have a good defense. We know we can shut down the opposition's offense to give us a chance to get back into games. But the only way that's going to happen is if we run OUR offense, because quite frankly we suck at 'panic offense.'" Which is true; as I said, in a sloppy game, Stanford's advantages are largely nullified.

More to come soon, once Stanford's NCAA fate (seemingly, a 3-seed in the Anaheim subregional... but which regional, and which other 3 teams standing between them and the Sweet 16, TBD) is known.

Championship Saturday

I love this day. Teams, bids, great matchups. Just finished watching a pair of great finishes in the UNC-Va. Tech and Wisconsin-Michigan State games. I still don't understand how Wisconsin wins basketball games, but they appear to be good enough at it that I'll give them the benefit of the doubt...

Meanwhile, another excellently played game in the Pac-10 ends up with a Stanford victory.

Stanford 75, Washington State 68

It's remarkable to note that this was actually something of a blowout. Washington State did not ever appear to have an answer for the Lopez twins. Their bigs got in foul trouble and were totally ineffective offensively, and Stanford rebounded missed shots seemingly at will on the offensive end. Brook Lopez was simply a force of nature, with 30 points. Even he couldn't seem to believe how much he was scoring.

Washington State was able to stay in the game on the scoreboard mostly with unconscious three-point shooting. While I grant you that a bunch of the ones that went in were open looks, a bunch of them weren't, either (notably the shot on which Daven Harmeling picked up a four-point play). Kyle Weaver did everything he could, including making a number of threes himself (his scoring tends to come around the rim, not on outside shots). But Washington State simply lacked the skill and height to hang with Stanford in this one. I wish them well in the tournament-- they're such a fun team to watch, with their great offensive ball movement, passion for the game and veteran players. They're one of the smartest teams in all of college ball. But Stanford is pretty smart too, and they have a lottery pick. It makes a difference.

It'll be interesting to see how this afternoon's final goes. UCLA is missing Mbah a Moute, which is going to mean a lot of time for relatively crude bigs Lorenzo Mata-Real and Alfred Aboya. Still, I can't see Stanford having a great chance of winning. It's essentially a road game, the team has to be tired with 3 games in 2 1/2 days, and their defense is really dependent on high-energy ball pressure, while the offense is going to need crisp execution to avoid turnovers. In a sloppy game, UCLA has every advantage, and conference tournament finals-- thanks to the ridiculously compressed schedules-- are almost always sloppy games.

It's been a fun year in the Pac-10; let's hope the final game is equally fun-- and that it's not really the final game. UCLA-Stanford IV in the national semis? Not likely, but stranger things have happened.

See, that was a good game

Every time I periodically get depressed about this Stanford team, they have a way of showing me something that reenergizes my hope for them to make a deep NCAA tournament run.

Stanford 71, Arizona 56

The score was not that bad ultimately, but the score really doesn't reflect how much of a blowout this one became in the second half (after an even first half). Whenever a team that was way down suddenly comes roaring back in the second half, announcers will talk about "a tale of two halves." Well, this one was like that without the first-half deficit. The game went from a nailbiter to a snooze in the space of about 5 minutes of clock time, 5 minutes in which Stanford's anaconda-like play style squeezed the life out of Arizona on both ends of the floor.

First, the defense-- Arizona was able to generate some pretty easy points in the first half by getting helpers to leave Jordan Hill alone. He had four or five dunks in this one, but that was about the extent of 'Zona's easy buckets. Once Stanford shifted to a bigger lineup with multiple shotblockers, this became far less of an issue. Arizona could penetrate, but if they went up for a shot it would be blocked, and the only big man, Hill, was still covered by a Lopez.

The big lineup was also crucial for the team's offense. There wasn't a lot of subtlety to it-- throw the ball up there and let guys crash for easy layups. Arizona's blockouts were terrible in this game, allowing Fred Washington to sneak in and collect a bunch of garbage. And obviously it's not easy to block someone out when he's seven feet tall and can just reach over your head to grab balls. Arizona's short lineup really crippled them on the glass in the second half.

I've talked before about the importance of dictating matchups to your opponent. As soon as you take out your center because your opponent has put 4 guards on the floor, you've agreed to play by his rules. There's a reason he wants to play by those rules-- his team is better at it! Arizona tried to dictate that the game be played mid-major style-- lots of guards, slow tempo, one shot per possession-- because they lacked frontcourt (indeed, any) depth, and they did so by overwhelmingly using 3 guards plus Chase Budinger, who's a shooting guard masquerading as a college forward.

Trent Johnson was having none of that. There was pretty much no point in the game at which at least two of the Lopezes, Hill and Finger-- all standout rebounders-- were not on the floor. He recognized that even though Budinger and McClellan can take Brook Lopez and Mitch Johnson off the dribble in theory, it just doesn't matter when they'll never get to the rim to finish. He wasn't forced to trade defensive mismatches for offensive mismatches the way, say, Duke does all the time. Net result-- Arizona gets annihilated on the offensive glass, and Stanford walks away with a remarkably easy victory, while Kevin O'Neill licks his wounds and (if he's a reflective man) wonders how he was so soundly beaten by Trent Johnson in the coaching war.

Cal's disappointing season comes to an end with a thrashing at the hands of UCLA, setting up two genuine neutral-court semifinals. Weird, I know. Isn't this the Pac-10 tournament? USC and UCLA square off for the rubber match, while Stanford and Wazoo get fundamental with each other (not in that way... get your mind out of the gutter) for the third time this year. The first two were great basketball, albeit of the "not crazy-running-up-and-down" variety, so there's reason to believe this will be more of the same.

Ugh

Saturday's games left a distinctly foul taste in my mouth.

USC 77, Stanford 64

Let's start with the Stanford game. No one-- I mean NO one-- showed up for this game wearing crimson except for Kenny Brown. The entire rest of the team looked apathetic, disinterested, bored. Even Taj Finger wasn't diving for loose balls. Look, I understand the UCLA game was irritating. I understand this game wasn't going to affect the final conference standings. I understand it was early in the morning and the players were worn out after Thursday. But come on. USC had at least four or five dunks off of offensive rebounds. The Cardinal were outrebounded by 16 by the worst rebounding team in the conference. Defense seemed to be optional; Trent Johnson eventually had to go to a zone because no one was bothering to mark their man. And the team took a whole bunch of astoundingly poor shots. It was an absolutely pathetic performance which did a ton to erase whatever goodwill the media community had toward the team after they were robbed on Thursday.

Next, the UCLA-Cal game. From a conference standpoint, it's probably as well that UCLA won it. From the standpoint of "wanting to watch basketball, not pro wrestling," it was about as bad as it gets. At least the Thursday travesty was only a single bad call. Here's the full sequence of events that had to happen for Cal to lose this game:

1. Kevin Love makes a miracle double-clutch three, making the score 80-79 Cal.
2. Cal inbounds to Ryan Anderson, who is obviously hacked by the defense. The ball goes out of bounds. No foul is called.
3. Despite the ball clearly going out off of two UCLA players, the referees give the ball to UCLA.
4. UCLA's next shot is blocked out of bounds with 6 seconds left.
5. Ball is inbounded to Josh Shipp, who is cut off on the baseline by great defense from Eric Viernesal and hoists a prayer over the backboard. Despite this being every bit as illegal as taking a jumper from a sideline inbounds and having it go through the net, the officials count the basket with 1.5 seconds to go.
6. Cal throws the ball into the frontcourt, where Shipp punches it into the stands. Although punching the ball is a violation-- which should cause the clock to stop as soon as it occurs, like a kicked ball-- the officials run 8 tenths of a second off the clock, eliminating Cal's ability to catch and take a dribble or pump fake. Predictably, given that the team can only catch-and-shoot, the final shot falls short.

I don't believe I've ever seen a team up by 4 with 20 seconds to go lose a game without doing a single thing wrong before. No missed free throws, no turnovers, nothing. Cal played a perfect end of the game and was hosed by a combination of freakish UCLA luck and one of the worst officiating sequences since the 1972 Olympic final.

Next, the ASU-OSU and WSU-Washington games. These were not televised. FSN's decision to show random non-live programming instead of Pac-10 basketball irritated me on numerous occasions this year, although at least this time most of the time was taken up by the ACC women's tournament. Couldn't the Pac-10 games have gone to FSN+?

Finally, the Oregon-Arizona game. Jerryd Bayless is called at a key point for a double foul, after being essentially mugged by a ringer off the Oregon bench. It's his third foul of the first half, and from that point onward, Oregon is never challenged (although their unbelievable shooting-- I don't recall perfectly, but they may not have missed a 3-pointer in the entire second half-- might have made the result inevitable anyway). The final game of the season perfectly symbolizes the whole year for Pac-10 officiating-- not merely anal-retentive and asinine, but incompetent as well.

Aren't we all looking forward to the Pac-10 tournament now?

Wednesday, Cal faces off with Washington for the "designated Cinderella hopeful" spot, while Oregon State gets creamed by Arizona again and finally stops doing everything in its power to lower the conference's RPI. Quarterfinals are Thursday, with Stanford facing Arizona and Cal-- if it survives Washington-- facing UCLA again. In LA. Again. Thank you, powers that be, for beneficently granting UCLA and USC multiple extra home games every season. It's not quite as retarded as Memphis getting the C-USA tournament on its actual home floor every year, but it's close. Considering the fact that EVERY SINGLE OTHER MAJOR MARKET IN THE PAC-10 HAS AN NBA FRANCHISE, one would think that perhaps the tournament could be rotated around the five "nexi". One would apparently think incorrectly.

That's enough griping for one day, I think. Hopefully I'll have time soon to break down the all-conference selections (which, except for the curious choice of OJ Mayo over Jerryd Bayless for First Team, were actually pretty well put together).

Speechless

Utterly speechless.

UCLA 77, Stanford 67 (OT)

I'm not even going to attempt to analyze this game. I don't have the stomach for it. Suffice it to say that a well-played, hard-fought Stanford road victory at a national powerhouse was negated-- utterly negated-- by one of the worst calls I have ever seen in my life. Lawrence Hill plays textbook perfect defense to block a Darren Collison drive with 2 seconds left-- and gets called for a foul. On the fucking best free throw shooter in the entire Pac-10 conference. Regardless of the number of replays you look at-- and there were at least two, one of them on the X-mo slow motion camera-- Hill's arms did not so much as graze Collison's. If there was any body contact whatsoever, and I'm not convinced there was, it was incidental lower-body contact initiated by Collison. Even at full speed, it was one of the most obvious clean blocks I've ever seen.

The officiating throughout this game was as godawful as Pac-10 officiating usually is, but that call was something else. You thought the Villanova foul-90-feet-from-the-basket call was wrong? (And it was...) This was worse. Not only was it the officials deciding the game instead of the play on the court, which has to happen sometimes, it was simply a flagrantly bad call. It would have been a flagrantly bad call in the first minute of a game. And it decided both a. a top-10 matchup, and b. the Pac-10 conference title. You think that might have been a time to let them play, refs?

The overtime at that point was a foregone conclusion. There's no way you recover from that. Just despicable.

Happy belated win...

You may have heard something about this around these parts, but Brook Lopez is good at basketball.

Stanford 60, Washington State 53

I have to be honest with you-- I was not enamored of Stanford's chances of winning this game from the get-go (I thought it was basically a toss-up with how well WSU has played on the road) and seeing the team shut out for 5 minutes and down 13 in the first half didn't exactly assuage my concerns.

Then came a gift Robin Lopez slam on an inbounds play to end the half, and a quick run to start the second half and put the Cardinal back in it. The key to that run was unquestionably Brook Lopez. His signature play for me as a Cardinal will probably remain the play on which he was double teamed, drew a foul on a contested fadeaway 12-footer, and somehow made the shot.

WSU had no answers. Baynes could body him but had no chance to stop him from taking a shot other than by fouling; Cowgill couldn't hold post position. WSU Hoops notes that Stanford has generated two of the three highest Free Throw Rates (the ratio of made free throws to attempted field goals) on the season against WSU, normally a highly disciplined defensive team.

We also got to see a little bit of that big-man chemistry that occasionally shows up when the Lopezes are on the floor together. It makes a lot of sense, really-- they're both taller than everyone else out there, so why not just pass the ball where the defense can't reach it? Robin Lopez had a couple of assists, and both of them were on essentially effortless baskets by Brook.

Taj Finger, as usual, was the unsung hero. 8 points and 3 rebounds doesn't really tell the tale-- he made the biggest shot of the game (a 3-pointer-- normally he has a mediocre outside shot, but somehow he has a knack for hitting them at the right moments) to tie the game for the first time since it was 0-0, and if I recall rightly, WSU had exactly two points from there until the end of the game.

The defense, as usual, put the other team through an involuntary clinic on Contested 15-foot Fadeaways, and although WSU is good enough that they came away with 11 assists, the team only made 6 baskets overall in the second half. A remarkable job to shut down one of the most efficient offenses in the country.

Honestly, I kind of hope these teams meet up again in the Pac-10 tournament (maybe in a 2 vs. 3 semifinal game). It's just good basketball. One word of advice to WSU though: don't break out the bright red uniforms against Stanford. Stick to maroon. It's bad form to yoink the other team's colors, and I have no doubt, in the inevitable Gregg Easterbrook paraphrase, that the Basketball Gods were displeased by that display of sartorial hubris.

Up next? Only UCLA on the road. I don't want to say it's for all the marbles-- it strikes me as eminently possible that Stanford could move into a conference tie by beating UCLA, then lose an exhausted follow-up to USC and end up second in the league anyway. But it's sort of a prerequisite for even getting to the point of playing for all the marbles. Or half of the marbles. Or something.

The annoyingly quick turnaround time (Saturday's game is at 11 AM) does mean that if the team gets down by a bunch, it might be better to capitulate and regroup than to expend a ton of energy on a comeback. It sucks, but sometimes these tradeoffs need to be made. Let's hope the game stays close and entertaining throughout so that these perverse incentives don't come into play.

Cal ended any hopes by gacking up a game to Washington in which Joe Wolfinger (no, I haven't heard of him either) scored 17 points, and is essentially playing for an NIT bid at this point.

I'm hoping I'll be able to see tomorrow night's game, but I may not. With luck I'll be able to slip out the door of the George Washington "admitted-student reception" around 7:30 after the food and before the heavy-duty schmoozing, and then dash home to only miss the first couple of minutes. We'll see.

Weird evening

Last night's Stanford game was not televised. Unfortunately, the Cal game was, for two reasons... one of which I'll get to in a bit. The other?

Well, I have a confession to make. I hate those little scroll bars that they have at the bottom of the screen when my team is playing and not on TV. They freak me out. Every time I'm about to see the score, I get really nervous. Since I don't like this, I have a tendency to try and change the channel. The worst thing of all is when I see the score and I'm not expecting to (especially if my team is losing).

This is pure OCD on my part. I don't think it signifies anything other than that I care too much about sports... and anyone reading this kind of already knows that.

In any event, Stanford managed to pull out a close one over Washington, 82-79.

The game wasn't really as close as it seemed-- Stanford was up five with under 5 seconds to play before Washington hit a meaningless three-- but it certainly wasn't a blowout, either. Jon Brockman had one of those "Hi, I'm a POY candidate even though my team is crap" games that you always fear out of him, and Stanford's defense was uncharacteristically porous. And the rebounding sucked. It's been a while since Stanford has needed to shoot well to win a game, and fortunately the team responded in this one.

Several box-score oddities in this game. First off, Washington had a very strange starting lineup. Apparently Romar was just throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what stuck, because two of his bench players individually outscored the combined efforts of every starter other than Brockman. Or maybe he was "sending a message," or something. I don't know. The starter/bench distinction always seemed kind of forced to me anyway, leading to such foolishness as ESPN's Dana O'Neil calling Russell Westbrook a "top bench player" at a time when he was averaging over 30 minutes a game, far more than multiple UCLA starters. As far as I'm concerned, if you're in the top 5 in minutes, you're a starter-- and if your coach inexplicably decides to play the first 3 minutes with his hand behind his back, I really don't care. But no one asked me.

The other really odd thing was this. Stanford shot exactly 50% from the field. OK. Nothing overly odd there. But every single player save two also shot 50% on his shots. Exactly. The only two who didn't were Lawrence Hill, who made 2 of 5, and Landry Fields, who made his only attempt. I'm pretty certain this is up there with "18 out of 20 Oakland A's pitchers have names in the first half of the alphabet" in terms of actual relevance to anything.

Stanford will now face Washington State, and the effort they put forth last night isn't going to cut it against Wazoo. The Cougars played an inspired game against Cal, holding the Bears to the floor and then dispatching them with several well placed whacks with a tire iron last night. Cal's defensive issues showed up again, as the Cougars made 10 of their first 11 shots in the second half (although to be fair, some of them, like Taylor Rochestie's crazy dipsy-doo heave from 12 feet, were just flat-out lucky) and the team was shut out for the final five minutes of the game.

Stanford needs to do several things to win here:

1. Wield Brook Lopez as the primary offensive option. Goods is going to have a tough time shaking the Cougar defenders.
2. Keep Fred Washington on Derrick Low to shut down Wazoo's outside shooting game.
3. Don't let the Cougars generate the free points off of steals that they used to run away with the Cal game.
4. Beat them up on the boards-- it's the only reliable way to generate extra possessions and extra shots against the super-slow-mo offense that WSU runs.

We'll see if the Cardinals can pull this off. WSU is another one of these weird inverse road-home split teams that the Pac-10 is seemingly full of this season. I daresay it's not going to be easy. The game is pretty much a must-win for the Cardinals to have any possible prayer of catching UCLA for the conference title, as I simply don't envision UCLA losing to either Cal or Arizona at this point. Meanwhile, a loss opens up the possibility of WSU (and possibly USC) eking out a tie for second place in the conference-- an eventuality Stanford would really rather avoid if possible.

Well, one of them has to lose

Full disclosure: I came out of this game more irked by the failures of the Cal team than impressed with the successes of Stanford... so apologies in advance if the tone seems more negative than warranted.

Stanford 79, Cal 69

It's not really a coincidence that 2 of Stanford's 3 best offensive performances in conference play (120+ offensive efficiency rating) have come against the Bears. This team cannot play defense. At all. Particularly on the perimeter. It's inexplicable. The team's defense has actually gotten worse from last year, when it was without Hardin, without Jordan Wilkes, and without Knezevic.

A lot of it (not the perimeter problems, though-- I'm not sure how to put it other than that Jerome Randle is really, really short) seems to have to do with DeVon Hardin, who's gone from one of the better defenders in the conference to a near non-factor. He was completely outplayed by Brook Lopez last night, even though Brook did not have a great game overall.

I'm not sure what's wrong with Hardin, but something is. He seems disinterested, almost apathetic. He fouled out with 5 points and 5 rebounds and just sort of shrugged his shoulders.
I think he may be too nice for his own good, which is an odd thing to say. He doesn't seem to have that "I'm better than you are" vibe that, say, Brook Lopez does... and so he ISN'T better, even compared to guys he ought to be better than. The game ends, Cal loses, and he's joking around with guys on the other team. The elite guys don't do that-- when they lose games, they try to kick holes in the locker room walls.

He seems like a nice man, talented, a hard worker, and quite intelligent. But if I'm an NBA scout, I look at him and see a lack of killer instinct. To be an elite pro athlete, you have to be profoundly conceited, almost delusional. You have to think you're better than guys even when you clearly aren't. Hardin is smart enough to know he isn't, and nice enough not to lie and pretend he is. And that may prove his undoing as a pro prospect.

In any event, Cal's NCAA tournament chances seem close to finished. The team will have to spring at least two upsets in the next three tough games (and hold serve against Washington) to go into the Pac-10 tournament 9-9, which seems to be the minimum plausible record-- although a run to the finals might get it done if the team was 8-10 (3 wins and 1 loss in the tournament would make the Bears 11-11 overall).

In Stanford news, we had an Anthony Goods sighting (20 points), which is something the team is going to need a lot more of. He's been plagued with various maladies this year and his shooting has been off. If he can find the stroke, there's no limit to how good this team could be.

Robin Lopez's offensive game also continues to improve, as he hit a couple of very nice shots at key points in the game. He may not get to where Brook is if he stays another year (heck, he may not ever get there), but it's not out of the question that he could climb into the lottery picks in the 2008 draft.

Up next are the Washington schools. Stanford really needs to take care of Washington for seeding purposes. With Siena bouncing around the 90s in the RPI, Stanford could enter the tournament without an RPI sub-100 loss, which is nice-- but Washington is 120th in the RPI. It also goes almost without saying that losing to Washington would knock them out of realistic hopes at the conference crown. Meanwhile, Cal faces an utter must-win in Washington State.

I'll continue to update the Pac-10 bubble situation for the next week or two, as well.

Pac-10 Bubble Trouble

In lieu of the usual Friday post (because the Bay schools had the night off yesterday), I figured it might be time for a little Pac-10 Bubble Watching.

So let's look at the teams in order of the current standings, and see how they stack up. (Note: Magic #, the number of games a team needs to win to squeeze into the NCAA field, EXCLUDES opening-round tournament wins. Thumping Oregon State in LA will not impress anybody.)

UCLA: 26-3, 14-2
Remaining games: Stanford, Cal
Status: Lock
Seed floor: 4

UCLA is coming pretty close to locking up a protected seed in the tournament; 1 win in the remaining 3 games should obtain them a #2 seed (and of course a #1 is still there to be won if the team is a clear winner in the conference). An extended losing streak is not really an issue at this point.

Stanford: 24-4, 13-3
Remaining games: @ UCLA, @ USC
Status: Lock
Seed floor: 4

See above. At this point the team can't do worse than second in conference with one hypothetical bad loss in the conference tourney. A #1 seed isn't off the table if Stanford wins out. Not that it's a likely scenario, but what the hey.

Odd note: Stanford's seed floor is as high as UCLA's, even though their realistic (read: not assuming a road win at Pauley) seed ceiling is probably at the 2 line. Why? Because their remaining opponents are better, and losses to them will be less damaging.

WSU: 21-7, 10-7
Remaining games: Washington
Status: Favorable
Magic #: 1
Chance of Achieving: 85%

Soft nonconference (not their fault-- who wants to travel to Pullman in winter?) means this team will probably need 11 wins to feel totally safe. A season sweep of USC and ASU does guarantee the Cougars the tiebreaker over the Trojans if needed for the tournament, but that could be a bad thing as it might lead to a third matchup with arch-nemesis Arizona. The Cougars would be well advised to put Washington away. Given the shambles the bubble finds itself in, though, one win may not even be necessary.

USC: 18-10, 9-7
Remaining games: Cal, Stanford
Status: Favorable
Magic #: 1
Chance of Achieving: 83%

I just can't see this team getting dropped with 9 wins. The SOS is impeccable, the team has the win over UCLA, and they have OJMAYOZOMGZORZ!!!!!1!1! on the roster. Hackett was back and played decently against Arizona, making it even less likely that they'll be docked for games where he didn't play. The team laid an egg against ASU, so they should probably win a game against the Bay Area to feel safe.

ASU: 18-9, 8-8
Remaining games: @ Oregon, @ OSU
Status: Bubblicious
Magic #: 2
Chance of Achieving: 50%

The RPI and SOS hate this team. Inevitably, that will cause Jay Bilas to love them, but he's not on the Committee. (I like Bilas a lot, but he does have a bit of a bee in his bonnet about the RPI.)

The win over USC was the first needed win in what seems like a best-of-three for a bid; the Devils now need to pick up a road win at Oregon or a tournament win over (probably) USC, plus handle Oregon State.

Cal: 15-12, 6-10
Remaining games: @ USC, @ UCLA
Status: Dead

While Cal might be technically alive for a bid with 5 straight wins to the conference tournament final, that's sufficiently unlikely that I think Cal's tournament chances can be officially declared dead.

Arizona: 17-12, 7-9
Remaining games: @ OSU, @ Oregon
Status: Sweating
Magic #: 2
Chance of Achieving: 60%

The apocalypse scenario of a home sweep by the L.A. schools strikes. I still think 9-9 or 8-10 with a win in the conference quarters gets it done, especially in light of the overall weakness of the bubble. For obvious reasons, the OSU game is now an absolute must-win.

Oregon: 16-12, 7-9
Remaining games: ASU, Arizona
Status: Sweating
Magic #: 2 (and that's iffy)
Chance of Achieving: 45%

Honestly, I don't know if 9-9 and a first-round Pac-10 tournament loss would get the job done here. Beating UCLA would really help if it was one of those three wins. Otherwise I suspect it will depend on what the final Pac-10 pecking order looks like. If Oregon looks like the seventh best team with this resume, I think they will end up one of the last teams out.

Washington: 16-14, 7-10
Remaining games: @ WSU
Status: Dead

Washington does the conference no favors by eliminating both itself and Cal on the two legs of the Bay Area road trip.

Oregon State: Who cares?
Remaining games: Arizona, ASU
Status: You gotta be kidding me

Oregon State continues to play "lame Beaver" for the conference. (Get it? I can't say "lame Duck" because Oregon is the Ducks... oh, forget it.) Good thing, too, because neither tonight's victor Oregon nor either Arizona school can absorb a loss and have its bid chances survive, and the same will likely be true of the #7 team in the conference tournament.

It's going to be very hard for the conference to get 7 teams in. This is a shame, because it really is an awesome league. There just aren't enough wins to go around, particularly with Washington suddenly snarfing a couple of wins from putative Tourney squads. Right now, it looks like the top 6 in the league are UCLA, Stanford, WSU, USC, Arizona and the winner of the critical ASU/Oregon game-- and it also looks like that's going to be it for the conference. Of course, things can (and will) change rapidly from here on out. I'll post another update during the run-up to the Pac-10 tournament.

Injuries? Feh. I'm an A's fan. Suck it up.

Apologies to the two people who will actually read this for taking so long to get it up. Really just pure laziness on my part.

Stanford 67, Arizona 66

...and wow. I thought the officiating in Thursday's game was bad. This game made it look like the three officials in Thursday's contest were the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

(Extraneous comment: Am I the only one to whom the phrase "Holy Ghost" sounds utterly stupid? I mean, Ghost? Seriously? Do the GhostBusters go after him? And can someone please explain the whole Trinity concept to me, period? Believe it or not, as an amateur Byzantine-ist, I know a fair amount about early Christian theology. I still don't understand how you can get three-Gods-in-one, or indeed what the point is supposed to be. Islam and Judaism at least have clarity on their side.)

In any event, it was awful. The first half was basically whistle-free; at one point Robin Lopez was literally tackled during a loose-ball situation and no foul was called. Then we get to the second half, and there's whistles blowing all over the joint. Everyone, by now, has probably seen the final play (where Brook Lopez was "fouled" by Chase Budinger on what appeared to be a totally clean block), but I can't even count the number of times that Jerryd Bayless lunged into the paint and basically threw himself at his defender and got a foul call. Got old mighty quick, I have to say.

Give the kid credit, though. He made free throws like his family would be executed if he missed one. 16-for-16, I believe. Amazing. Talk about a premium talent. He's up there with Kevin Love, Brook Lopez, Malik Hairston and Ryan Anderson in contention for All-Conference honors, and a darkhorse for Player of the Year.

One thing is very clear, and it's that Arizona is nothing-- NOTHING-- without Bayless. I can't remember a team where one guard dominated the offense to such a degree. He scored 75% of their points against ASU! That's borderline unbelievable at any level.

And that segues into my lecture du jour, which is about injuries and the selection committee process. Arizona seems like they will get a pass on their 1-3 stretch early in Pac-10 play in which he was injured and unavailable. Now, as a Pac-10 true believer, I think Arizona is basically an NCAA tournament team anyway-- and their RPI and SOS back them up even if they finish in the bottom half of the league. But that doesn't mean they should get a pass for overrecruiting a small roster and neglecting their bench. If they get in, it should be because they earned it.

We know that teams' performance is weighted by the committee based on who was and wasn't playing in a given game, and who will or won't be around for the Tournament. The infamous hosing of Cincinnati after Kenyon Martin broke his leg, where they were dropped to a #2 seed for no other reason than that a player was hurt, is the most obvious example. But there have certainly been others. Heck, Stanford might get a mulligan on the Siena loss, which is even less excusable given that Brook Lopez was absent due to suspension, not injury.

In my mind, this is one form of the cardinal sin (are there enough religious metaphors in this post?) of "projection seeding." Teams should be seeded based on performance-- period. Not who you think will advance, who has the best players, whatever-- the 4 #1 seeds should be the four teams that did the most work during the regular season. And injuries simply don't factor into that. Your #1 player, who comprises 50% of your offense, was out? Golly gee. Perhaps you should have recruited or developed some better players to pick up the slack. You think Kansas is going to notice if one of their starters is out? Shit, Brandon Rush missed like 1/3 of the season and the team was undefeated in his absence. Why? Because they go 10 deep with quality players, that's why.

As far as I'm concerned, there is no such thing as a game that "shouldn't count." Pro teams don't get to throw out games where they were missing key components. If they did, the A's would have made the baseball playoffs last year, based on their undefeated 2-0 record for the season.

It's not OK to seed a team based on the perceived quality of their tournament roster vis a vis the rosters that they had during various pre-tournament games. The only fair way to seed-- keeping in mind, of course, that college athletics are never really "fair" given teams' disparate budgets and recruiting capabilities-- is to seed and admit teams based on what they accomplished. As Joe Lunardi pointed out the other day, if it's just a beauty contest based on the roster, why bother to play the season at all?

I'm sure I'll have more to say on this later. For now, suffice it to say that while Arizona has a legitimate beef about the officiating-- although I think the cardinal errors more or less balanced out, that's not an excuse for committing those errors-- they have no beef for the loss of Nic Wise and Brett Brielmayer to injury. Resilient teams deal with injuries by inserting quality backups, not by whinging to the powers that be about how their losses shouldn't matter.

The thrill of OT victory...

and the agony of OT defeat.

ASU 72, Stanford 68

Well, there you have it, opposing NCAA tournament teams. Watch this film to find out how to beat Stanford-- outrebound them (at least relative to the average opponent; I'm not sure whether they technically ended up ahead or not, but it was very close), outhustle them to loose balls, make them miss free throws (not actually that hard) and pay off the referees.

Seriously, this was an atrociously officiated game, starting with the fact that the refs couldn't seem to find their whistles in the first 15 minutes of the game, with the result that virtually no one was called for a foul for ANYTHING. Since Stanford has... oh, about five times as many post players as ASU (I approximate here), this clearly ended up favoring the Sun Devils.

Another particularly galling example of incompetence was when a ball which clearly, visibly to the TV eye, deflected off an ASU player trying to make a steal and bounced out the Stanford end was inexplicably given to ASU. Given that the game went to overtime, it's very possible that that play decided the game. I forget if ASU scored on that possession, but even if they didn't Stanford might have on the other end. So call it a 75% chance of being a game-changing play.

Also deciding the game was Stanford's clutch free-throw shooting, which quite frankly wasn't. On FIVE consecutive trips to the foul line stretching from regulation into OT, the Cardinal missed the front end of the free-throw attempt. (This is worse than missing the back end, because you can't rebound the miss.) This is not good enough.

It really irritates me when that strategy works, for a whole variety of reasons. First off, it's not basketball. It's like deciding the end of a hockey game by shooting penalty shots. (Oh. Wait. The NHL does that now, too. Well, let me put it on record that it's a pretty retarded way to end a pro hockey game.) Secondly, it arbitrarily rewards one skill (foul shooting) at the expense of others-- why should that particular skill be de rigeur for closing out tough games? And perhaps most importantly, it makes games drag on FOREVER in an endless succession of free throws and timeouts. It's like the basketball strategy equivalent of the Special Olympics. Even when it works, it's still retarded. And usually, it doesn't work.

Well, anyway, Stanford needed to be able to win an OT game with no Pendergraph on the floor (he fouled out as part of the end-game hackorama) and simply whiffed on the opportunity. I cannot figure out why they had so much trouble defending James Harden. Everybody in the building knew that he was going to take the shot for ASU every single time down the floor. I mean, box-and-one? Constant double-team? Something? Please?

Aargh. I don't expect them to win every game, certainly not every road game, but this was a really crummy way to lose to a team which once again (like Oregon) was visibly not as good.

Cal was taken apart by Arizona, marking the first time this year that both teams have gone down on the same day. As good as the wins over the Washington schools felt, these games feel equally bad.

When is winning not a good thing?

Well, in college hoops, it's when you beat a bad team in a game where you played poorly, solely because the opposing team is terrible.

Stanford 71, Oregon State 56

The benighted Beavers weren't much of a threat. They have a habit of allowing ridiculous runs to their opponents, and this game was no exception, as Stanford basically blew the game open with a 15-0 stretch to close the first half.

The fact remains that this was one of the team's worse games of the season. Not on the level of the Siena game, or the USC game, or even the first Oregon game, but distinctly weaker than the excellent stretch of play which preceded it. They continued to hold the opponent's assist count down (OSU had only seven on 20 field goals) but shot poorly from the floor and committed a dizzying array of turnovers, including several really boneheaded ones. Brook Lopez stepped out of bounds at least twice, and I think Mitch Johnson did once as well.

Moreover, the team's defensive efficiency was only 90.3 in this game. That's relative to 100, so it was above NCAA average-- but keep in mind, Oregon State is a terrible offensive team. The defense Stanford played Saturday was par for the conference course this year-- and given that the team's offense is likewise rather average, that's not going to be good enough to win on the road this weekend. Let's hope it was a one-game aberration.

Up next: James Harden, Jeff Pendergraph and whoever else Arizona State throws out there. This is a tough road game, but it's a good matchup-- Stanford eats halfcourt teams for lunch. It's a game that ought to be won.

Cal got absolutely poleaxed by Oregon on Saturday; I didn't see the game courtesy of Comcast SportsNet, but it sounds like they were victimized by unbelievable Oregon shooting. These things happen, sadly. Cal's in a really tough bind at this point-- they need four out of seven games, and five of the seven are road games. The most plausible scenario would be wins over the Arizona schools on the road and the Washington schools at home. Doesn't seem all that plausible to me. I guess anything can happen, but Cal is not a good defensive team.

Demolition Derby

I'm pretty sure that's what last night's game felt like if you were an Oregon Duck.

Stanford 72, Oregon 43

In a stark contrast to the first meeting between the two, where the tempo and run of play were largely controlled by Oregon, Stanford utterly dominated this game from the start-- and did it with the "big lineup" that (not to toot my own horn excessively here) I advocated before that game. It's unfortunate, because I think if Trent Johnson had used it more extensively there, the team would now be 9-1 in conference play-- but he should also get credit for recognizing that the strategy of going small to try to play with Oregon on the perimeter was ineffectual and changing course.

Last night's game wasn't televised, so other than the running Opposition Assist Count (Oregon had six last night-- rather incredible when you consider how good their offense actually is) I don't have a lot to analyze here. I did, however, see most of the Wazoo-UCLA game.

UCLA is clearly the best team in the league at this point. Washington State really doesn't turn the ball over very much-- Stanford only forced four in an overtime WIN-- but for a stretch of about 5 minutes in the second half, they might as well have dipped their hands in a vat of lard. That's how easily UCLA was getting steals. I think you have to chalk it up to UCLA's defense-- it's not particularly great at field goal percentage, but they are unquestionably exceptional at forcing turnovers and the complete package is a national top 10 unit.

Their offense is also excellent, although it has odd weaknesses for a college offense-- particularly an inability (and unwillingness) to shoot the 3-pointer. Still, they generate enormous numbers of easy shots and can hit from midrange, with the result that on a per-possession basis UCLA is a bare fraction worse than Kansas for the top unit in the country. A lot of this is because of Kevin Love, who keeps impressing me more every time I see him. He's the interior scoring threat last year's Bruins needed so badly.

It's kind of odd to watch, because Love looks like a football player-- squat, kind of flabby, no discernible neck. Yet the guy is an absolute powerhouse. He was routinely scoring through double teams, and not just by tossing shots over them (as Brook Lopez is somewhat prone to). He would simply force his way out of them. He's a vacuum on the rebounding glass, he can hit from outside if you play off of him, and his oft-remarked-upon passing strength probably generates 4-6 free points a game on fast-breaks appearing out of nowhere.

It's going to be interesting to see where things shake out with regard to him and the NBA. He's a true center, but he's very short for the position at the NBA level. Can pure strength overcome the inevitable prejudices of scouts against his height? Or will someone take him and attempt to convert him to a power forward? If it's the latter, his draft stock will probably slip a bit.

It would certainly be interesting to see what he could do with four years at the college level. One hesitates to say he would rewrite the school record books (this is, after all UCLA) but he could win Conference Player of the Year multiple times. Not that I, as a fan of two other Pac-10 teams, would be particularly thrilled to see them play against him twice each. Regardless, I don't think it'll happen. He might stay one more year; I can't see him hanging around any longer. At some point, there's just nothing left to prove.

Cal notes: the Bears have some kind of issue with Oregon State. It just never seems to go well when those two match up. The Bears did pull it out but it was a damned near run thing, to paraphrase Wellington.

One must-win down, two more to go. The game against Oregon tomorrow should be a fun and high-scoring affair. Win that, steal one on the road in Arizona and maybe we're talking an NCAA bid in a few more weeks.

Stanford obviously isn't in that situation right now, but seeding-wise they would be strongly advised to not mess around with OSU tomorrow. I hate these "gimme" games-- nothing good can happen even if you win, and a loss is a disaster. At least in this case it wasn't brought on voluntarily through scheduling.

Rip the shit... till my bone collapse

That's what I tried to do to the chair downstairs when the Cardinal finally pulled off their heart-stopping, pulse-racing win over Washington State. Simply an unbelievable game-- one of the two or three best I've seen all season.

Stanford 67, Washington State 65

At the risk of sounding too much like a fanboy and too little like an analyst... this was a hell of a clutch performance. OK, the free-throw shooting was kind of unclutch (for both teams) and the Cardinal could have done better on their last possession than a contested 18-foot heave through traffic. But clutchness is more of a mental toughness thing anyway-- and we saw that on display yesterday. The team had a couple of opportunities to fold after getting down by 9 or so in the second half-- and both times, they fought back to get into the game again.

There's no question what factor made the largest difference in this one-- it was Lawrence Hill. 4 of 6 from 3-point range, 18 points, 8 rebounds. Not a stunning performance, but a very good one-- and it seemed like every 3-pointer came at a crucial moment, stopping a run, giving the team the lead, and so on. Lawrence Hill is an odd bird-- his oddly rotating jump shot is kind of symbolic-- but he's unquestionably a big-game player. He was huge in last year's UCLA upset that essentially carried the team into the NCAA tournament, and huge again in today's nailbiter.

I've also got to give props to Trent Johnson for this win. The hidden turning point of the game was when he moved Fred Washington to guard Derrick Low instead of Kyle Weaver. Weaver ran wild a bit-- he had a career-high in points-- but Low, after going on something like a singlehanded 9-0 run while "guarded" by Kenny Brown (sorry Kenny... facts is facts), was shut down for essentially the balance of the game. Combined with the Lopezes fouling out Aron Baynes with limited impact, this left the Cougs with only one good scoring option on the offensive end. Great game management to deal with the loss of Anthony Goods to an ankle sprain (which explains why he had so few minutes in Thursday night's game... I was afraid of something like that when I saw the box score).

This was an awesome statement win for NCAA tournament purposes. It's hard to overestimate the value of a good road win against a tough opponent in a hostile environment. Stanford's excellent road/neutral record (7-2) is going to pay dividends come tournament time, and well it should.

Ryan Anderson watch: 33 points and 17 rebounds against Washington. Just another day at the office.

The road sweep might be even bigger for Cal than it was for Stanford, as it essentially resurrected their season. The Bears have a legitimate shot at a Tournament berth now; it's probably going to take 5 or 6 wins down the stretch and into the Pac-10 tournament to do it, but that number sure looks a lot better than the 7 or 8 wins it looked to take BEFORE last weekend.

Draft buzz

Stanford 65, Washington 51

I'm not going to dwell on last night's Cardinal game, which wasn't televised at all (Can someone work on this? Please?) except to note a rather remarkable number from the box score-- Stanford allowed all of FOUR assists in this game. Overall Stanford's conference opponents are averaging a mere 9 a game; on the season, it's 9.5. Those are pretty remarkable numbers. Essentially what they're saying is that the only way to score on the Cardinal is to penetrate or somehow isolate one guy. Stanford's won 6 games out of 8 with both Lawrence Hill and Anthony Goods in severe shooting slumps, and that goes a long way toward explaining how. Defense doesn't go into a slump, I guess.

And now for something completely different...

In the wake of last night's modestly stunning Cal upset of Washington State 69-64 at home, noted Norse god and 30-point scorer Ryan Anderson seems to have finally popped onto the national radar screen. Kind of. The powers that be in the college game continue to studiously ignore him (apparently his 1.5 points per adjusted shot can't beat out OJ Mayo's 1.2 for a Wooden Award finalist's nomination, in spite of the fact that--even without adjusting for tempo and ball usage-- he's still outscoring and outrebounding Mayo on a per-game basis), but the guys who are actually paid to evaluate talent-- NBA scouts-- are starting to take a bit of notice. He was also "mentioned in dispatches" by ESPN's Andy Katz, for whatever that's worth. Katz points out that he's made 20 of 37 3-pointers this year, which is incredible for a conference that plays the kind of defense (see above) that the Pac-10 does.

In this piece, Chad Ford ranks Anderson as a rising talent. He's still listed as a late first/early second round pick on ESPN's big draft board, but I suspect if he keeps dropping 27 on good defenses like he did last night, he'll probably make his way up the chart pretty quickly. He sees the key to Anderson's potential value as his improved rebounding skills-- often an indicator of a willingness to "get physical" and something that might inveigh against the popular stereotype of jump-shooting white big men, which is that they're not willing to bang for balls.

In this piece, John Hollinger analyzes the draft class according to a metric he's developed to help predict the NBA success of college players-- and Anderson comes off extremely well, given that he's perceived as being primarily a scorer who lacks the freakish athleticism that NBA coaches crave. He is, in fact, the second-highest rated non-freshman, and the formula suggests that Anderson should be as high as a late lottery pick this year and definitely a first-rounder.

It's going to be extremely interesting to see where Anderson's stock ends up after this season, especially relative to teammate DeVon Hardin (who was far bigger on the radar screen prior to the season) who provides a pretty easy point of comparison. My hunch? He'll declare for the draft, but pull his name out and stay another season to ensure that he'll get picked very high, along the lines of what Brook Lopez did last season.

Meanwhile, the aforementioned Twin seems like a near-lock for a top 10 (probably top 5) pick after this season, which sadly more or less guarantees that he won't be returning for his junior year. He's pretty much capable of scoring at will at the college level at this point. That's the curse of today's college game-- the better the players get, the more likely they are to leave. Being a minor league baseball fan must be a similar feeling. I continue to wish that the NBA would abandon the ridiculous one-year rule (creator of media abominations like O.J. Mayo) and institute a system akin to baseball-- let guys go pro out of high school, but give a college 3 years of a player before he can declare as a junior.

As usual, no one asked me.

Analysis Double-Dip!

For everyone's reading edification, I'll link to the positive, upbeat Cardinal coverage rather than the morose Bears coverage...

Stanford 82, Cal 77

Before I launch into the box score, let's get a couple other things out of the way. First, the game wasn't shown on FSN. Instead, they chose to show... the simultaneous (and intense) Wazoo-ASU game? (Side observation: who would have thought, three years ago, that we'd be saying THAT?) Nope. The Arizona marathon... and a golf recap. OK. Nice work, boys. Instead the game was kicked to obscure Comcast SportsNet, which I don't receive. I ended up watching most of Georgetown-WVA instead.

And second, despite being (by all reasonable measures) more of a Stanford fan, I was kind of rooting for Cal in this one. The Bears have a really, really tough road to hoe at this point. They've only got 4 home games left in the conference to hit the magic number (my personal opinion) of 8 wins. So it's either a. beat Washington State at home, plus Washington and an upset on the road, or b. Spring TWO road upsets from a candidate pool of USC, Arizona, ASU, WSU and Stanford. My BearJection has them at 7-11 and an NIT bid. The good news? I think they'll be a better team next year. Their top incoming recruit is a guard, while their top outgoing player is a center, a position the team has more than locked up for the foreseeable future.

Now, how did the Cardinal win this one? The simple answer is that they did what no one else has managed to do this season: shut down Ryan Anderson. Kind of. He did put up 11 points and 8 rebounds, so it's not like he was exactly invisible out there. But considering his season averages, you've got to consider that a victory.

Second: generate free-throw opportunities. Each team had the same number of field goal attempts and Cal made 4 more of them (admittedly Stanford hit 4 more 3s), but Stanford shot 38 free throws to Cal's 19. Getting into the bonus can be incredibly lucrative in college hoops, and Stanford was (incredibly) into the DOUBLE bonus halfway through the second half. They didn't exactly make the most of the opportunities (24 for 38 from the stripe is less than 60%) but simply having so many more of them made a big difference. Corrolary to this was that they got DeVon Hardin, who otherwise had one of his best games of the season, into foul trouble and eventually out of the game. Hardin, frankly, can take Brook Lopez on the offensive end, and when he was in the game he shot 7 of 9 from the field.

The final key factor I want to touch on is this: Stanford was able to get away with playing a ridiculously "big" lineup in this game because of Cal's shortage of quality guards. By my count, the Cardinal used 5 guards in the game, but played them for only 66 player-minutes. In other words, for at least 14 minutes of the game, the Cardinal had 4 forwards on the floor (most likely Washington, Hill, and the Lopezes). To me, this screams "drive-and-kick!" The problem is, or was, that the only guys who could drive the ball for Cal were the same ones who would receive the kicks-- Patrick Christopher and Jerome Randle. Randle had a good day as a point guard but a dismal day as a shooter, and Christopher couldn't do everything by himself. The two teams seemingly kind of agreed to play the game as a battle in the post by mutual consensus, and Stanford's bigs won the dogfight.

It's unfortunate. Cal played a strong game overall. They had balanced scoring, made their free throws, had a good assist-to-turnover ratio (16 assists-- Stanford typically holds opponents to around 10) and shot well against a national top-10 defense. Cal made 50% of its 2-pointers, which is doing extremely well against Stanford. Had they posted this kind of game against any of the three previous opponents to whom they lost (Oregon and the Arizona schools) they would have won. This is what is known in baseball circles as "underplaying your Pythagorean record," (and if you have no idea what I'm talking about, I'll go into this in more detail at the end of the Pac-10 season) and it's enough to cause Ken Pomeroy's ranking system to place them, as of this writing, 311th out of 341 teams in "luck factor."

Wasn't in the cards...

for me to see either game last weekend. You see, I am, or at least have been (I've been a bit lax lately) an avid participant in that protean pasteboard pastime, Magic: the Gathering. Many of the readers of approximately my age will recognize the game. Unfortunately my local player group tends to meet on Thursday nights... and I was at a tournament Saturday to inaugurate the release of a new set of cards. So. Not much in the way of firsthand observations to offer here. Instead, I'm forced to resort to flippancies, like noting that Brook Lopez appears to have a facial tic in his photo on the Stanford website. Nothing like a little Bell's Palsy to liven up any photo, eh?

Stanford 56, Arizona 52

Stanford 67, Arizona State 52

In an ironic rejoinder to last Sunday's loss, Stanford won the Arizona game at the free-throw stripe. The Cardinal hit 9 of 11; the Wildcats 6 out of 13. Then Arizona turns around two nights later and ices a no doubt extremely frustrated Cal team at the free-throw stripe. College basketball is weird.

In both games, the Cardinal did an outstanding job of limiting the opposition's scoring through tough defense. ASU's 2-point shooting in the second half was a miserable 2-for-14, and for the game it wasn't much better-- 9 for 33. That's barely over half a point per shot. Arizona was not quite as bad (34 points on 43 2-point attempts). Still, in general, if you can hold your opponents to under a point per 2-point attempt, you're doing good. Keep in mind the general rule of 1-point-per-possession, and the fact that many possessions end in turnovers.

I was a little worried-- OK, I was extremely worried-- about Mitch Johnson getting broken down by Jerryd Bayless all night long. He looked lost at times trying to guard Tajuan Porter last week. But to his significant credit, he hung on and helped hold Bayless to a mere 9 points.

Stanford shot better than the opposition, but not a lot better-- about 44% for each game. I feel like the team is more balanced offensively when they don't try to constantly force the ball in to Brook Lopez. Lawrence Hill and Anthony Goods are basically both in severe slumps at this point, and I think it's because they're hesitant to take shots sometimes.

In other news-- poor Ryan Anderson. The guy is simply playing out of his mind right now, and the team has nothing to show for it. He scored 62 points over the weekend in a pair of losses. I honestly cannot recall any instance of a team with a 30-point scorer in consecutive games losing both of them. It's almost unthinkable in college ball. The problem is that in the ASU game, Cal couldn't defend at all (99 points? To a team that slow?) and in the Arizona game, Patrick Christopher, the other major offensive force, was a complete nonentity. This is just setting me up, I can tell, for a good long late March/early April rant about the inevitable hosing-in-end-of-season-awards crap that routinely happens to good players on bad teams. I'm still not actually convinced that Cal is a bad team, but right now their record is unquestionably bad... so whatever.

Desperation time for the Bears now. They absolutely have to have this weekend's game against Stanford. You cannot go 1-4 at home in conference play and have any aspirations for the NCAA tournament. Realistically, they have little hope in two road games and will be significant underdogs in 3 more. They need wins, now, if they want to have a hope of reaching the 8-10 mark which will be required for plausible at-large consideration.

Now blogging from a new location...

I've been having some frustrating issues with the interface on my home computer, and finally got around to posting this at work.

Oregon 71, Stanford 66

There's no worse feeling than losing a close game to a visibly weaker team. There were so many ways Stanford could have won this game-- make ANY three-pointers, shoot better than 50% at the free-throw line, not allow 5'6" guys to get layups, shoot a non-airball on the final meaningful possession...

I mean, Oregon played well given their limitations. They're a great passing team-- that much was obvious from the number of seemingly impossible situations they extricated themselves from when they penetrated inside. They know how to shoot, they know what shots to take, and they make a lot of them.

That being said... basketball is a game of height. Stanford dominated Oregon in height and should have dominated them in the run of play. My comments of the other day were somewhat prescient, in the wrong way. There were pretty much three types of game here-- the parts where both Lopezes were in the game, the parts where only one was, and the parts where neither was. And # of Lopezes was pretty strongly correlated with whether Stanford was winning or losing the game.

I don't want to sound like I'm blaming Trent Johnson for the loss here. Somewhere along the line, your players have to make some shots. But I felt like he didn't appreciate the total dominance that having two Lopezes in allowed Stanford to have on the boards and inside the arc. With them both in, Oregon's only prayer was to bomb away from 3 and hope they hit a bunch.

Let's hope some lessons have been learned for Thursday's game against Arizona. Zona isn't the same as Oregon-- their scorers are really only three deep, to the point where a triangle-and-two defense actually makes quite a bit of sense-- but the same basic premise applies. Dominate the height game, and you'll dominate the entire game.

Bayless and Budinger are going to score. A lot. But if "a lot" is 15 points each instead of 25, Stanford can-- nay, should-- win easily.

This is an absolutely critical weekend for both Bay Area teams. Stanford needs a sweep to stay in the Pac-10 title hunt. Cal needs at least a split to keep their bid hopes on track, and a sweep-- according to Joe Lunardi, ESPN's bracket guru-- would definitely put them into the field. I'm going to be missing tomorrow night's game, unfortunately, and perhaps Saturday's as well... so I'll probably be filling the time by raving a little more about how good Ryan Anderson is.

Bad Sports Metaphors 101

Is Trent Johnson a pizza chef?

A sushi guru?

Or perhaps the guy behind the counter at Baskin Robbins?

Stanford 66, Oregon State 46

I ask the question because so far, he seems to be pretty good at mixing up the flavor of the day to stop a given opponent. I observe the bad metaphor because, frankly, I like quality writing, and food metaphors are, pretty much by definition, excluded from that category.

The inimitable and unreplicable baseball blog FJM has an entire category of howlers related to the misuse (perhaps I should just say "use") of food metaphors in bad sports journalism. I'm just doing my small part to keep them in business.

In any event, tonight Robin Lopez came off the bench for the first time in his collegiate career so that Stanford could run a quicker, smaller lineup out for the first couple of minutes. It worked like a charm. The Cardinal rung up most of the final margin of victory by the first TV timeout (I use the term loosely, because the game wasn't televised) and at that point, the game was essentially over. Lawrence Hill finally broke out of his inexplicable (the word is the Chronicle's) 3-pointer slump by hitting 3 of 4. The rest of the team basically got their minutes, racked up some decent numbers, and got out of the building with a solid whomping of a clearly inferior opponent.

Again some props have to go to Stanford's defense, which frequently has opponents simply looking befuddled at how they're supposed to score the basketball. OSU shot a miserable 17-for-56 and racked up a mere 6 assists. Their only double-figure scorer, Omari Johnson, accomplished the feat by attempting 15 shots.

The question at hand now is: what lineup is best suited to stop Oregon on Sunday? Does Stanford go big and try to simply play above Oregon's heads? (The Ducks are virtually big-man free once again this year, something that Ernie Kent has worked hard to address with next year's massive incoming class.) Or do they play small and try to run with Oregon? I'm inclined to say "go big," myself. Oregon is not, despite the guard-heaviness, a particularly aggressive defensive team. It's more "roughly 20 minutes of heck" than "40 minutes of hell". I think Stanford can dictate the flow of the game to Oregon, force them to deploy bench players that really shouldn't be playing in games this important, and foul out Maarty Leunen by using the Lopez twins copiously. We'll see if Trent Johnson agrees.