THREE PARTING THOUGHTS ON ONE SHINING MOMENT 2008
After a few hours of sleep, a few hours of work, a few cups of coffee and reading more than a few other people’s takes, our final thoughts on last night’s championship game:
Not to be Debbie Downer, but … : You go on a date. Dinner? Mediocre. Dessert? Too small. Parking? Ridiculously expensive. But you get home, the action in the bedroom makes up for it all, and you chalk it up as a altogether excellent night. You then proceed to make the exact same plans the next time you have a night free of the rugrats. Are you lying to yourself a little? Yeah, but you are at least aware of it, and choosing to remember what matters most.
We understand this tendency of us fleshbots - but it makes for too-rosy-by-half reporting at times. The party line this morning was that last night’s game was excellent from start to finish, which is only half right. In the first half, Memphis couldn’t make (or create) a decent shot for Rose or CDR, and Kansas let them stay in the game with pisspoor rebounding. Neither team was passing the ball effectively (each team netted 11 steals, which is awfully high for a championship game, and there a dozen or so more available), and a Jayhawk team that normally relies on the deep ball shot a less-than-mediocre 13 percent from behind the arc.
So, yes, the ending of the game was fantastic, and deserves to be remembered as such. But let’s not pretend that we were watching 40 minutes of world-class basketball. (But, of course, that’s OK, because we got what we signed up for. We’re just being honest with ourselves.)
The Unsung Hero: Now, to shine a more positive light (because after all, we enjoyed the game, didn’t you?), where is the love for Darrell Arthur? We know that the MOP had to go to Mario Chalmers … it just had to … but Darrell Arthur was the real player of the game for Kansas. 20 points, 10 rebounds (5 offensive), solid defense in the paint? His play opened up the lane for Kansas, and more importantly allowed the Jayhawk perimeter players to concentrate on CDR and Rose.
Never let the truth get in the way of a good story: Not to pick up the flag in the never-ending bloggers vs. MSM war, but last night’s game provided a perfect example of how it is often a blogger who gets the story right. Every where we looked this morning, writers zoomed in on Memphis’ notoriously terrible free throw shooting as their raison de la mort. Gary Parrish at Sportsline? Free throws. Andy Katz at ESPN? Free throws. Weintraub and Feinstein? Inter alia, free throws. Even usually top level blogs, like Deadspin and Rush the Court, fell for the party line.
We aren’t saying that Memphis didn’t lose the game because of missed free throws - they did, at least in part - but it wasn’t due to their normal bad free throw shooting. In fact, their strategy seemed sound - the entire final two minutes, the ball stayed in the hands of their two GOOD free throw shooters, CDR and Derrick Rose. They just hit a streak of bad luck at the wrong time. MJD gets a tip of the cap, or theoretical dollars, or whatever it is we give out on the internet as prizes these days, for getting the nuance of this story right.
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First off, thanks for mentioning us in the same sphere as Leitch and Feinstein (hopefully “Season on the Brink” Feinstein not the Sports Reporters one).
I agree that FT shooting wasn’t the only reason Memphis lost the game. There was also the fact that they got killed on the inside and Calipari’s curious decision to keep setting picks for Rose even when it wasn’t working and they didn’t need it early in the game. Calipari was granted a temporary reprieve on the latter when Bill Self went to the box-and-one.
That said, it’s hard to argue that Memphis would not have won the game if they had just hit their FTs down the stretch. It’s not even like I was expecting them to knock them down like Kobe in the last 2 minutes, but 1/5 is awful and the 4 misses looked bad (only Rose’s first one had a chance of going in). While Memphis certainly had the ball in the right players hands at the end of the game, it’s a sad state of affairs when your go-to guys barely shoot over 70% for the year. I’m not sure if Calipari just said “Screw it. We’ll blow people out so FTs won’t matter” and rolled the ball out on the court every day at practice because I don’t think he had any other choice, but to dismiss his team’s Achilles heel in the media. With guys that can hit from the outside and have decent form, Memphis should at least have a couple guys up near 80% to give the ball to at the end of the game.
It can be argued that CDR and Rose choked at the line. It’s been too long since I took a stats class, but I’m sure somebody could figure out the odds that 2 guys who shoot ~70% would end up making 1 of 5 FT. I would also guess that the probability of that happening would be pretty low, which means that there probably was a choking factor involved particularly on CDR’s part, but in the end the game did come down to FTs. If Memphis managed to make 2 of those 5 FTs, the Chalmers 3 would have only affected the people betting in Vegas (barring a LJ 4 point play).
Comment by nvr1983 — April 8, 2008 @ 7:35 pm
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Bullshit. Memphis lost because they quit attacking at the end. Instead of attacking Kansas’ press, they caught the inbounds pass, and waited to be fouled. A shitty foul-shooting team plays to take foul shots. They lose. Of course, that strategy might work if Kansas doesn’t doesn’t do just about everything right down the stretch, so credit is due the Jayhawks. The missed free throws were huge, but it shouldn’t have been about that.
Comment by Mr. Wrong — April 10, 2008 @ 1:09 am