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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Regarding the oft-made observation that a conference team's win in the tourney validates the conference. You disagreed. I'm with you on that. So is Clark Kellogg, who made the point repeatedly in the studio.
As to your happiness with CBS, two caveats. First, with no sister-nets to spin to, we are stuck with what the local affiliate gives us and what the network decides it cuts into. I miss the days when ESPN would telecast every single game. Admittedly, some were on tape delay in the middle of the night, but if you really wanted to see a game, or every game, you could. Second, once a game was in the can, CBS darn near forgot it ever existed. There was lots of "upcoming games" listed in the crawl at the bottom, and all the current games were updated at the top, but it was hard to get results of already-played games if you came in late.
Otherwise, your point about the coverage of the game at hand is right on.
Tim Howe
Wauconda, IL
I completely agree with you that CBS's coverage is a beautiful thing. But you've left out the best part about it, and maybe missed the point altogether when you declared it to be so juicily throwback. The great thing they do, the thing that is actually completely innovative is: cut to another game when the current one gets boring. Huzzah!
Ok; so the 10-second line becomes an endline. The defense knocks the ball away and it crosses this endline. Who gets possession? The other team, of course, just like it would for the other three out-of-bounds lines.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the great revelation of the first two rounds: free, live streaming video of the games! How wonderful was it be freed from CBS's determination of which game we should watch? I completely agree with everyone about the greatness of CBS's conservative coverage, EXCEPT when it comes to switching among the games when it gets down to crunch time.
During Friday's late games, I once again had the image of CBS managing this critical task by giving a senile grandpa a remote control. I was watching the games at a bar, and can’t recall which games it was. But several times we threw peanuts at the plasma screen when they interrupted an play in a fairly close game with 3 or 5 minutes to go, and jumped to time-out huddles where the whole country knew the trailing team was going to foul as soon as the ball was inbounded.
I can just hear grandpa saying "well, hold on now, we don't want miss the inbound. Now where is that confounded quick-view button . . . ."
JLS mentions how he likes when refs officiate with their mouths instead of their whistles when defusing a conflict. I find that practice, along with officiating with a whistle on a play following a dust-up (as in the quick off-the-ball foul called on one of the participants in the previous confrontation just to “settle things down”), completely ridiculous. Refs, I think, should restrict themselves to passing judgment on what happens and should avoid actually controlling the action on the court except as players adjust to the officials’ calls. Refs, for example, don’t step in and prevent a player from traveling before he does so because that’s a basic rule that any player should follow, but they often talk an angered player off the ledge, influencing his behavior in relation to the rules without actually punishing him. Preventing one team’s transgression puts that team’s opponent at a disadvantage because the refs have purposely guided a player’s behavior in a way advantageous to him and to his team. The rules have corresponding punishments for violating rules; let the refs control a game that way.
And I think they would if college basketball’s rules were more reasonable regarding technical fouls. If a tech didn’t also count as a personal foul, refs would likely be more inclined to actually call one when warranted, and they may actually be less inclined to cop out with the double technical or with no call at all. And speaking of cop-outs (cops-out?), what’s with all the jump balls on blocked shots? Doesn’t the offensive player actually have to land with the ball as the defender blocks the shot as the offensive player travels all the way to the ground? And as for another rule change, I wouldn’t mind if that play were ruled a travel, which would make more sense to me and which would reward the defense for offensive ineptitude.
Freddie deBoer proposes lowering the rims in the women’s game, an idea that would actually make some sense, though 9’ seems a little too low. Maybe 9’6” would be a fair compromise. As for that other big difference between the men’s and women’s game (that is, the size of the ball), I disagree that women would acclimate themselves to a larger ball. Compared to men, women already struggle with the smaller ball that they currently use, and that ball handling and shooting “are the strengths of the women's game already” is an idea commonly proposed to bolster the perception of women’s basketball that just doesn’t hold up, at least under my quick and rudimentary look at some statistics. Here are the numbers for field goal percentage, turnovers, and assists by team in the NBA for this season and the WNBA for 2005:
FG% NBA: Median 45.2, Range 42.9-48.2; WNBA: Median 42.8, Range 40-45.2
Assists/game NBA: Median 20.65, Range 17.8-26.6; WNBA: Median 15.2, Range 12.7-16.9
TO/game NBA: Median 13.6, Range 10.8-16.9; WNBA: Median 14.7, Range 12.5-16.8
But wait, women’s games are 40 minutes while men’s are 48:
Assists/min NBA: Median .43, Range .37-.55; WNBA: Median .38, Range .32-.42
TO/min NBA: Median .28, Range .23-.35; WNBA: Median .38, Range .31-.42
Better stats for measuring shooting and ball handling may exist, but these were are the ready and pretty standard, so I used them. The numbers for turnovers especially suggest to me that women’s basketball has bigger problems than being relatively ground bound and that it’s not as fundamentally sound as people say.
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Salon headlines in your mailbox
