dwight howard – Rush The Court

Big East M5: 01.24.13 Edition

Dan Lyons — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 12:45:51 +0000

Just days removed from being the top ranked team in the nation, Louisville has fallen on tough times. Back to back losses to Syracuse and Villanova has Rick Pitino noticeably upset about his team’s play. After the Villanova loss, his venom was directed towards the Cardinals’ free throw shooting, at the expense of a pair of basketball stars: “It was really a simple answer to why we lost. Basically we were Dwight Howard or Shaquille O’Neal. We came down we had a six-point lead and it could have been eight. Could have kept coming down and extending it but our free throws were [...]

Anthony Davis Named a Finalist for USA Olympic Team: Should He Make It?

EJacoby — Thu, 03 May 2012 17:16:48 +0000

Evan Jacoby is a regular contributor for RTC. You can find him @evanjacoby on Twitter.

As international basketball continues to gain steam, so does widespread intrigue in the Summer Olympic Games. The upcoming 2012 London Olympics will include some tremendous competition for the heavily favored United States, such as a Spanish team that can boast a monster front line of Pau Gasol, Marc Gasol, and Serge Ibaka. To counter that front line, and as a side effect of several unfortunate injuries, the Americans are in need of some serious size of their own. As a result, college basketball’s reigning National Player [...]

Welcome, Dr. Emmert: Please Don’t Mess Up…

rtmsf — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 22:56:22 +0000

Yesterday on Seattle radio station KJR, NCAA president-elect Mark Emmert gave an interview with host Mitch Levy where he discussed his thoughts on some of the hot-button topics impacting collegiate sports. Dr. Emmert, who will assume his post on November 1 of this year, is currently the president of the University of Washington and the former Fulbright winner is widely recognized as one of the savviest up-and-comers in the world of academic administration. His rise up the ranks from an assistant professor (Northern Illinois) to Vice-Chancellor (Colorado) to Provost (Montana State) to Chancellor (UConn and LSU) to President [...]

Coach Animosity of 1-and-Done Rule Forgets How It Was…

rtmsf — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 20:11:41 +0000

We ran across an interesting article from Fanhouse’s Brett McMurphy over the weekend that delved into the continuing discomfort that many college coaches have over the 1-and-done rule in light of an NBA Draft on Thursday night that will see anywhere from eight to ten freshmen selected among the lucky few. We understand their complaint. They want continuity in their programs. They want to be able to plan ahead without having to wonder each and every offseason who is staying and who is leaving. Most importantly, they want to be able to hang onto a stud for two or [...]

Coach K to Coach Team USA in the 2012 Olympics

nvr1983 — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 04:10:32 +0000

We have already laid out our thoughts on the possibility of this occurring earlier, but it’s worth bringing up again because USA Basketball made it official today that Mike Krzyzewski was returning to lead Team USA in the 2012 Olympics in London. For as much hate as he gets as the coach of Duke, we have to say that he has done a great job of rebuilding USA Basketball with Jerry Colangelo although that it can be argued that his best attribute was that he didn’t bench his best player (see George Karl in 2002) or select a [...]

Adidas Plays “What If. . .”

nvr1983 — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 17:01:12 +0000

Adidas has just released a new series of commercials featuring several prep-to-pro stars pretending that they went to various schools.The ads themselves are fairly interesting, but I would be more interested in your thoughts on where these guys (and other prep-to-pros) would have actually gone and what impact they would have had on those programs. Would they have led their schools to multiple championships or would they fail to live up to expectations? Would Tracy McGrady win a round in the NCAA tournament? I know that CNNSI used to do a feature like this making an imaginary NCAA [...]

2008 NBA Draft Live Blog

nvr1983 — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 21:36:39 +0000

Well this is sort of unplanned, but rtmsf asked me to do this and I’ve got nothing else to do tonight so I figured I would throw up a live blog of the events.

7:30 PM: Everybody’s favorite commissioner/megalomanic David Stern walks to the stage. Pretty weak response from the crowd. Minimal booing and almost no response to a mention of the WNBA. I think Isiah and Dolan have broken the New York fans.

7:38 PM: Stern announces the Bulls’ selection of Derrick Rose. Kind of anti-climatic, but surprising how quickly the consensus swung from Michael Beasley to Rose in such a [...]

No more OJs at USC?

nvr1983 — Mon, 12 May 2008 23:48:06 +0000

I’m not even sure where to begin with this post. Here at RTC, we have discussed OJ Mayo several times most recently in what rtmsf myopically thought would be a final retrospective on the latest OJ to grace the USC campus. As pretty much everyone knows by now Mayo has been implicated in a rather large scandal involving Bill Duffy Agency (BDA) and Rodney Guillory, who appears to have been essentially hired by BDA to bring Mayo to them.

Most of my knowledge on the topic comes from Kelly Naqi’s Outside the Lines report I saw on Sunday morning while I was staying [...]

NBA Playoffs – JV Conference Preview

nvr1983 — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 01:32:51 +0000

It seems like the general consensus among NBA analysts is that this will be Boston vs. Detroit in the conference finals unless Lebron goes off for an entire series. I’m hoping to provide a little more insight than that with a preview of each opening round series and brief predictions of what I think will happen for the rest of the conference playoffs. I won’t expound upon the later rounds in great detail as I’ll probably mess up my first round picks making the subsequent previews meaningless.

First Round #1 Boston vs. #8 Atlanta: This series looks like the biggest [...]

Thoughts on Memphis-UCLA

nvr1983 — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 22:29:49 +0000

We’ll provide you with a more in-depth analysis later, but we figured we would offer some of our early thoughts.

1) Derrick Rose and Chris Douglas-Roberts totally dominated this game. UCLA didn’t have an answer for either one of them. It looked like Rose wasn’t attacking as much when UCLA put Russell Westbrook on him, but for some reason Ben Howland decided to keep Darren Collison on Rose for most of the game until Collison fouled out with 2:53 left. As much as we hate to say it, Billy Packer was right when he kept on saying that Westbrook [...]

Where are they now? (Championship Edition)

nvr1983 — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 19:18:53 +0000

We found an interesting piece in ESPN.com’s Daily Dime last week. They decided to list players from recent championship teams that are still in the NBA. They happened to miss a few players who we added. We might have missed a player here and there. If we did, leave a comment with an update on their status since it’s hard to keep track of all these leagues around the world.

You may notice that the number of NBA superstars from championship teams has decreased in recent years with the exception of Carmelo Anthony. We feel it is pretty clear [...]

Night in Review: March 14, 2008 (Part 2)

nvr1983 — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 17:45:21 +0000

Back for the second part of the review after a short 2+ hour nap.

Pac 10 – We’ll get the late game over with first since it was past our East Coast bedtime (had to get up to watch a bunch of 9 year-olds “run” a 5k at 8 am). #11 Stanford beat #22 Washington State 75-68 behind Brook Lopez’s 30/12/3 for the third time this year. Basically the Cougars don’t have anybody who can match Lopez inside and not even a 12/20 showing from 3 could save them. Not much to say here except it sets up a rematch of the [...]

Billy the Kid Fallout

rtmsf — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 23:15:48 +0000

As expected, the college hoops/NBA blogospheres have been abuzz with thoughts on the reasoning behind Billy Donovan’s decision to leave Florida for the Orlando Magic, as well as speculation as to how well BTK will do when he gets there. As we said on Thursday when the news was breaking, it’s unlikely that Donovan will become an abject failure in the NBA like his mentor Pitino in Boston or several of the other successful college coaches who made that jump – most notably, Carlesimo, Calipari, Tim Floyd, Mike Montgomery and even switching sports with another ex-Gator, Steve Spurrier. [...]

Billy D… isney World?

rtmsf — Thu, 31 May 2007 18:31:29 +0000

Breaking news on all the major sites today is that Billy Donovan has been offered $42M over seven years to leave the University of Florida to become the new head coach of the Orlando Magic. According to team officials, as reported by the Orlando Sentinel, the wunderkind is expected to take the job. This comes on the heels of a week-plus of speculation as to why Donovan had not yet signed an extension worth reported $3.5M annually with the Gators.

We’ve been down this road before with Billy D. – a mere six weeks ago, in fact. But somehow with the ridiculous dollars being mentioned and the “nowhere [...]

Does March Madness matter in May and June?

rtmsf — Thu, 31 May 2007 16:50:54 +0000

Wilbon, as usual, is up in arms.

Today we wanted to take a moment to examine an idea put forth by the inimitable Mike Wilbon in Monday’s Washington Post. Wilbon’s essential take (written after game 3 of the Detroit-Cleveland series) was that much of Lebron’s struggles in late-game situations of the NBA playoffs is directly attributable to his lack of “big game” experience, which his predecessors (Magic, MJ, Bird, etc.) honed and developed during the crucible of March Madness. He wrote:

LeBron’s bigger problem is never having learned how to play these kinds of high-stakes games in college — and now having [...]