Archive for January, 2009

If you haven’t been feeling like yourself lately I’ll take the blame for that. I haven’t posted on here in about a week. And this was just after I told the Greenville News I update 3-4 times per week.  Hopefully this essay/short novel will make up for it and you will forgive me. We have played 3 games since I last blogged, here is a little bit about each of them. I’m going to start making you click the link under this text from now on to read the rest of my posts so the home page isn’t ridiculously long. Hopefully you can handle it.

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Wow. I just woke up and looked at the TV schedule and today is probably the best basketball day of the season so far. Last weekend we were on the road and the Saturday games looked like they’d be decent games (FSU vs. Duke, Kentucky vs. Vandy, Michigan State vs. Kansas, West Virginia vs. Marquette). They almost all turned out to be blowouts. FSU made a late run and so did Vandy, but for the most part even those games weren’t really competitive.

Here’s what I recommend watching:

12:00 PM: Notre Dame @ Syracuse. ESPN. This should be a good game. After playing Notre Dame I know that they are a good team and have talent up and down their roster. With the exception of Luke Harangody and Tyrone Nash, Notre Dame is more of a finesse team. Their 3 man Ryan Ayers is 6′7″ and can get really hot from behind the 3 point line. Their 4 man, Luke Zeller can also shoot 3s and has excellent touch. Their PG Tory Jackson can also shoot and is extremely quick. Syracuse seems to be the opposite. They try to dominate with their physical play from pretty much every position on the floor. Devendorf is a great shooter but only a couple other players on their team shoot much from the outside. Onuaku has the second best FG percentages in the nation and let me know if this is powerful enough for you. Johnny Flynn, however, might be the most physical on Syracuse. Don’t believe me? I love how Flynn Plays the game. He plays with more heart and emotion than almost anybody in college basketball. Paul Harris is another guy that can score the basketball with ease. Not much of an outside shooter but is athletic and can make midrange shots all day.

1:30 PM. Georgetown @ Duke. ABC. Georgetown is coming off of a great win over Syracuse. Duke most recently took care of Georgia Tech. Its always fun to watch games at Cameron indoor and this is definitely the highest profile non-conference home game for the Dukies. My brother was actually supposed to be at this game with some AAU teammates, but his high school team scheduled a game at the last minute.

3:30 PM. Wake Forest @ Clemson. ESPN. Clemson’s LittleJohn Coliseum might be the most underrated place to watch a basketball game in the nation. I’ve been there 4 times. 3 times as a spectator, once as a player. I’d like to forget about that 1 time as a player. I saw them lose to UNC last year on a a buzzer beater, beat BC last year, and take care of Alabama earlier this season. I don’t know much about Wake this year. I played against Aminu in high school a little bit but thats about it. Clemson seems like they have a lot of depth from what I saw at the Alabama game. They have shooters and strength inside, a lethal combo. I also played against Tanner Smith and if I’m not mistaken, he and Aminu used to be teammates at Wesleyan before Aminu transferred to Norcross University. Littlejohn will be an awesome environment for today’s matchup. Our shootaround is from 3-4 with pregame meal following so I won’t get a chance to watch the beginning of it. Keep your eyes out for Tarzan chilling under the basket. He’s at every game.

8:00 PM. College of Charleston @ Furman. Comcast Sports. By now you should be ready to watch some real basketball. College of Charleston will be looking for some revenge after we beat them on TV at our place last year. We’ll be trying to make it a 2 game home winning streak against CoC.

Other games of interest:

• 3:00 PM. Davidson @ Georgia Southern. SportsSouth.
• 3:30 PM. Arizona State @ UCLA. ABC.
• 4:00 PM. Illinois @ Michigan State. ESPN.
• 6:00 PM. Pittsburgh @ Louisville. ESPN.

I probably forgot some but this list should be good enough to convince you to turn the TV on and enjoy some of the best basketball of the year.

Classes started back up at Furman on Monday. I’m a business major so my schedule this term consists of 3 business requirements and my fourth class is a general education requirement. I’m taking Accounting, Organizational Performance and Behavioral Analysis, International Marketing, and Philosophy. Last semester I underloaded and only took 3 classes so this term will be a little more challenging.

I didn’t get a chance to write about it but over the break I was able to catch up with a few friends I hadn’t seen in a while. Noah and I made the 40 minute drive over to Presbyterian College and I got to see my AAU teammate, Pierre Miller, run point for the Blue Hose. PC had a rough night and lost to Radford, but Pierre scored his season high (at the time) 15 points. It was fun to just catch up - we hadn’t really talked much since I was helping him get his assist totals up for the Atlanta All-Stars 3 years ago.

I also made it over to Clemson to watch the Tigers stay undefeated after playing Alabama. The starting PF for my high school team my senior year, Robert Stoffel, is a student at Clemson and our starting PG is a manager for the Crimson Tide, and one of our most vocal fans, Will Hammonds, is Robert’s roommate.

We got back from Chattanooga at around 2am after we lost to them at their place. I didn’t do a whole lot yesterday. I slept in, went to the mall with some teammates to pick up my new contact lenses and got some lunch.
When we got back to Furman the students were arriving and it was good to catch up with people about how their breaks went. At around 11:30 I was getting ready to have a snack before going to bed. 2 seconds before I opened the freezer to get some sausage biscuits (the only food I actually had in my room) the power went out. It came back on for a few seconds, went off, came on, and finally went off for good. Some of the football players on our hall were going to watch a movie with us and this completely ruined our plans. This did however give me the opportunity to use the line from the end of this SportsCenter commercial after grabbing my roommates flashlight.

We were unable to watch our movie and the entire building was pitch black.  After twiddling our thumbs for a few minutes we came up with an idea that pretty much every group of guys sitting around in a power outage would come up with: A prank call to public safety to get more details about the outage.

Here’s todays youtube video:

Whats up everybody? We just got off the bus from Birmingham to Chattanooga.  I have to give major props to the Krystal corporate office across the street for having free Wi-Fi when our hotel does not.

We played Samford yesterday and lost. I don’t really want to talk about the game much. I will say that they had an amazing arena. I was really impressed.  It could have just been the backdrop, but I’m fairly certain that their rims were a few inches taller than 10′.  At first I thought I was just imagining it but then at least 3 of our post players got hung during warm ups.  Ironically, we had one of our best shooting nights of the season.  I shot the ball well but had far too many bad plays and am disappointed in the way I played. The good news is that we have no time to dwell on the Samford game because we play again tomorrow.

Tonight we went to Sticky Fingers in downtown Chattanooga.  The topic of classic movies came up in my section of the table and I let everybody know that I was “that guy” that didn’t watch many movies as a kid. When I was growing up, I spent most of my free time watching the Milwaukee Bucks stink up the court instead of watching movies.  I kid you not, literally 3 seconds after I finished saying “I’ve also never seen Rocky” a waitress came into our section asking if anybody from our team had dropped a DVD in the lobby. When she held it up it was labled “Rocky”.  This is probably the craziest thing that has ever happened to me.  My team decided I should claim it and take it for obvious reasons.

I noticed that the restaurant had free bumper stickers and I took advantage of this by pulling my first “prank”. I don’t claim to be a master practical joker like Mark Titus (If you haven’t noticed by me linking to his site in every other post I’m obsessed with his blog) but I did manage to get stickers on the backs of Neil Duval and Justin Dehm.

We lost to Western Carolina at home yesterday.  We played an ok game. We were down by 2 at the half and ended up losing by 11.  The game was close for almost the entire second half.  Bryson Barnes had a great dunk with around 5 minutes left to cut their lead to 1. The next possession we had one of their guards trapped just over halfcourt but he managed to get a pass off to Brandon Giles who got a dunk of his own.  We had a couple of empty possessions and they made the most out of their possessions late.  Like the title says, we couldn’t capitalize.  We got the dunk and had the momentum but couldn’t keep it.  Their leading scorer fouled out with like 6 minutes left but we couldn’t capitalize on that either. Giles scored 20 points in the second half.  What really hurt us was not capitalizing on open shots and free throws.  We were 5-20 from 3 which is unacceptable because we are all very capable shooters.

Today we went over the film of the game and lifted weights.  We went out for dinner as a team and I’ve been hanging out watching college basketball, watching the NFL playoffs, playing Madden 09, and playing with my Christmas/Birthday present (by the time you’ve read this I’ve taken off the “lunch box” from the back).

I’m going to get some extra shooting in this week which brings me to this great youtube video of Tim Duncan having trouble handling “the gun”, a rebounding/passing machine. Enjoy.