Past Imperfect is a new series focusing on the history of the game. Every Thursday, RTC contributor JL Weill (@AgonicaBoss) highlights some piece of historical arcana that may (or may not) be relevant to today’s college basketball landscape. This week: the sine-wave career arc of Doughnut Man.

It’s still one of the NCAA tournament’s most indelible moments: disheveled Princeton coach Pete Carril grinning in disbelief moments after his backdoor-cutting Tigers stunned defending national champion UCLA in the first round of the 1996 NCAA tournament. Replayed over and over through the years, the moment resonates because it captures the essence of what college basketball’s great March tradition is all about: little guy beats big guy, Cinderella at the dance, etc. But lost in all those good vibes for the white-haired coaching legend is that the other side in that game, the losing coach seen congratulating Carril on his career-defining victory, in its own way represents college basketball, too. In many ways, perhaps more so.

Pete Carril and Sydney Johnson celebrate the win over UCLA.

No one fathomed at the time that the upset loss would be Jim Harrick’s last as head coach of the UCLA Bruins. A year removed from the school’s first national title in two decades, flush with a contract extension, with a bevy of blue chip recruits on the verge of replenishing his team’s talent level for years to come, Harrick looked to have it all working. Then, in the course of a few months, it was all over. Harrick was out. Assistant Steve Lavin, with no head coaching experience at all, was in as interim coach.

How did it all go south so quickly? The answer is a tale of two coaches, of lies and deception, of risks taken and undying myths writ large. It’s an ugly story, without much grace and lacking humility. It is, in short, the story of college basketball at the highest levels.

*      *      *

It is amusing now to go back and look at statements of outrage former coach Jim Harrick made about his abrupt dismissal by UCLA in 1996. At the time, Harrick was the man who’d brought UCLA back from the ether. The West Virginian had been all smiles hoisting the national championship trophy along with Ed O’Bannon, Tyus Edney and the victorious Bruins. And rightfully so. Harrick had taken a job a slew of previous coaches had tried to tame and done the only thing he’d been hired to do: win a national title again. Favorite sons Walt Hazzard, Gary Cunningham and Larry Farmer didn’t do it. Future coaching legends Gene Bartow and Larry Brown couldn’t do it, either. But the onetime UCLA assistant – the guy who never even played college basketball – did it. And he did it his own way, with style.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Lede.  Groundhog Day came and went and it was another interesting night across the college basketball landscape.  There were the obligatory upsets, the blowouts, the disappointments, and The Jimmer.  But it was a somewhat obscure result between two unranked teams tonight that caught our attention the most.

Michigan State is Getting Swatted By Everyone (AP/C. Jette)

Your Watercooler Moment.  Are the Spartans Kaput? After a holy crapola-inducing beatdown of Tom Izzo’s Michigan State Spartans by twenty points this evening, we have to wonder if the wheels have completely come off in East Lansing.  Otherwise, how else can you explain going to one-win Iowa (they beat Indiana) and allowing a team that has trouble scoring the ball to put up a 41-point first half and shoot 58% from the field for the game?  Somewhere in Europe Mateen Cleaves is rolling over in his pfennigs.  Tom Izzo characterized the performance as the worst he’s ever experienced as the head coach at MSU, a “total letdown… everybody’s hitting shots against us and I don’t know why.”  We wrote earlier this year that Spartan fans shouldn’t fret too much by early losses to UConn, Duke and Syracuse — it’s been the tendency for Izzo teams to take some hits during the regular season only to overachieve come March.  But the recent three-game stretch where MSU lost to rival Michigan at home, came dangerously close to losing to Indiana, and just dropped another one tonight against Iowa, is not representative of an NCAA Tournament team (in fact, Sparty is three overtimes from having lost eight in a row right now).  With the talent that Tom Izzo has at his disposal — even considering the loss of Korie Lucious — those should have been three easy wins.  Instead, standing at 13-9 (5-5), the Spartans are running out of time to ensure they’ll be back in the Dance for the fourteenth consecutive year — two of their next three are at Wisconsin and Ohio State, and there are three other ranked teams left on the schedule.  The MSU offense always comes and goes, but Izzo can usually rely on his defense to keep his team in the game — not so lately.  In the last five games, Michigan State has allowed a minimum of 1.04 points per possession, and four of the Spartans’ worst six performances on the defensive end have come in the last six games.  When players stop guarding and picking up for each other, it’s a sure sign that there are chemistry problems on the team.   If anyone can bring a squad out of such a tailspin, it’s Tom Izzo, but even we’re starting to wonder if this reclamation project is too big for even his talents.  The way we’re viewing it — even with the nation’s #1 ranked schedule, Wisconsin on Sunday in Madison is about as close to a must-win as it gets in early February.

Tonight’s Quick Hits…

• Syracuse Ends Losing Streak.  We have much more on Syracuse’s big win at Connecticut below in the RTC Live section, but let there be no doubt that SU played like a desperate team tonight in order to get the much-needed victory.  Maybe it was all the point-shaving rumors going around (ha), but the Orange showed a focus that they haven’t had in the last couple of weeks, especially on the defensive end, and managed to put the four-game losing streak in the rear view mirror.  The Orange zone gave up eight threes tonight, but only thirteen other field goals, a far cry from the pathetic defensive performances of the last two weeks.
• DJ Gay’s Fadeaway.  If you’re like us, you’re secretly harboring hope that both San Diego State and BYU will get through the rest of their Mountain West schedules to set up a blockbuster showdown for the conference title in San Diego on February 26.  One of the tougher tests that SDSU was going to face was the trip to Colorado State, and had it not been for DJ Gay’s step-back jumper with 1.8 seconds that found all net, our MWC dream game  rematch hopes might have already been dashed.  These are the kinds of game-winners on off nights that occur during special seasons, and Steve Fisher’s Aztecs are well on their way to a spectacular 29-2 type of regular season.

• Read the rest of this entry »

1. Indiana’s Christian Watford broke his hand over the weekend against Michigan State and had surgery on it yesterday; he will be out indefinitely.  This is just another gut-punch to the stomachs of Indiana fans everywhere, as Watford, IU’s leading scorer, represents the third Hoosier starter to miss significant time (Maurice Creek and Verdell Jones III are the others).  This comes on the heels of what was the most promising week for Indiana basketball in quite some time — a win over Illinois and an overtime loss to Michigan State.  Say what you want about Tom Crean as a head coach (and we’ve said a lot), but it’s especially difficult to get wins in the Big Ten when you don’t have your full hand to play with.
2. A couple of other significant players suffered injuries recently.  Tennessee’s Scotty Hopson sprained his ankle at practice on Tuesday and is considered uncertain for Thursday night’s game at Auburn.  According to this story, it was bad enough that he had a protective boot on and he left the arena after practice in crutches.  UT has won its last four games and part of the reason for their improved play has been Hopson, so if he isn’t at 100%, even a trip to Auburn could be troublesome.  Meanwhile, St. John’s announced that forward Justin Brownlee had suffered a fracture of his left thumb during Sunday’s huge Red Storm win over Duke, a game in which he had 20/9/6 assts.  He will wear a splint on the thumb, though, and is not expected to miss any time from practice nor games.
3. Mike DeCourcy writes that Auburn’s Tony Barbee believes that the NBA will go back to the preps-to-pros route as a result of next summer’s collective bargaining agreement between the NBA Players Association and the owners.  He says that he’s been talking to “people” who seem to be in the know, but we question if those people are tied into the owners, management and David Stern — the group that will ultimately drive this decision.  We’re on record stating that both the preps-to-pros and the so-called “baseball rule” are bad for the game of college basketball, but the NBA’s self-interest will rule the day and ensure that names like John Wall, Kyrie Irving and Jared Sullinger have value and cachet behind them prior to entering the league as rookies.
4. We thought this was an interesting article from the Cleveland State Cauldron lamenting that CSU basketball is a consistent winner in a town that traditionally has not had many of those, yet it still has significant trouble getting any kind of attention from anyone in the community at-large.  The Vikings are currently 20-3 overall and 9-2 in the Horizon League with second-place Valpo and traditional power Butler coming to town this weekend.  We agree, Cleveland… get out there and support this team.  They just might end up being one of the best mid-major stories of the year in all of college basketball again.
5. In the inaugural year of this blog, we took SI writer Grant Wahl (who has since moved on to cover soccer) to task over his Magic Eight selections for leaving UNC off his list of teams that would win the title.   That season was 2007-08 and, if you recall, he was right.  Both Kansas and Memphis were on his list, but the Jayhawk obliteration of North Carolina in the national semifinals validated his concerns.  Consider our crow eaten.  After what sounds to be significant negotiations, Luke Winn has revitalized the Magic Eight this season, and his choices are a combination of obvious and bold, as such:  BYU, Duke, Georgetown, Kentucky, Ohio State, Texas, Tennessee and Washington.  As he acknowledges, leaving Kansas, Pittsburgh, UConn and SDSU out are rather huge gambles, but we’ll see how he does as things develop over the next month.

David Ely is an RTC Contributor 

Introduction:

It’s Feb. 1. That means there’s only 40 days left until Selection Sunday, or 40 days left for teams to build up their resume so their bubble doesn’t pop. We’re sure there are going to be a lot of heated discussions about teams hovering within that last four in-last four out zone over the next six weeks. Heck, here at TWTW, we’ll probably change our opinion on certain squads three  or four times until the end of the regular season. It should be a crazy six weeks, but we know it’s going to be fun.  

What We learned

After a weekend that saw 13 ranked teams lose (and the entire top 25 go 22-20 for the week, as Seth Davis pointed out on SI.com) the chic thing to do is talk about the gigantic bulging central part of the bell curve that symbolizes this college basketball season. It’s nearly impossible to make sense of who’s good and who’s bad on a weekly basis, as a team is liable to have a monumental win one night and then lose to a lesser school a few days later. Let’s use Georgetown as an example. Just over two weeks ago the Hoyas were a mess at 1-4 in the Big East and losers of four of their previous five games. Now, they’ve won five in a row, including recent triumphs at Villanova and at home against Louisville. Georgetown isn’t the only school that enjoys playing Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Check out this paragraph from Davis’ Monday column: 

“Texas can lose at USC and then win at Kansas. Tennessee, which should be this movie’s poster child, can win at Villanova and Pitt (at the Consol Energy Center) and lose to College of Charleston and Charlotte. Louisville loses at home to Drexel but beats UConn on the road. Providence loses to LaSalle but beats Louisville and Villanova. Auburn loses to Samford, Campbell and Presbyterian, but it beats Florida State, which later beats Duke. What, you didn’t know Presbyterian was better than Duke? And on Sunday, St. John’s (which lost to Fordham) blew out Duke.” 

Given all this uncertainty, can anyone honestly say with any assurance that there’s a clear-cut elite set of teams? Ohio State might be undefeated, but the Buckeyes have had their fair share of nail biters over ho-hum teams (Michigan, Penn State, and most recently, Northwestern). TWTW would like to put its eggs into Texas’ basket. The Longhorns are this week’s Team du Jour, having torched four ranked teams in the last 13 days, but you wouldn’t be shocked if Texas didn’t have a hiccup or two to an unranked team before the season’s end, would you?

This Tristan Thompson-Nathan Walkup Encounter Accurately Summarizes Texas' Throttling of the Aggies Last Night (B. Sullivan/Dallas Morning News)

Read the rest of this entry »

1. Kansas State’s season continues to implode, as news dropped on Monday that sophomore forward and former McDonald’s All-American Wally Judge has quit the team.  Judge wasn’t a major contributor this season, averaging only 6/4 in about fifteen minutes per game, but he only got a single minute of action in recent games against Texas A&M and Baylor, and he had already missed five games earlier this season due to “personal issues.”  There’s no indication yet where Judge might transfer to, but he hails from the Washington, DC, area, so you’d have to figure that the Big East and ACC schools will be inquiring about his services soon.
2. If you hadn’t heard, Syracuse has now lost four games in a row after starting the season 18-0.  Four-game losing streaks are not common in upstate New York, as Jim Boeheim has only had three teams in his career do so before; and surely none of those started the first two-and-a-half months of the year without a loss.  With a game at Connecticut on Wednesday and the possibility of an absurd five-game losing streak, it’s gut-check time for SU, according to this article from the Daily Orange.
3. It’s been a trying season for West Virginia and Bob Huggins, but even with only eight remaining scholarship players in tow (seven of whom actually play), the Mountaineers used its game over the weekend against Cincinnati to rally around what they have remaining and push forward through the rest of the year.  WVU has been a tough team to figure, what with wins over Vanderbilt, Duquesne, Georgetown and Purdue, but losses to Marshall, Miami (FL), and St. John’s in Morgantown.  The thing is, with Joe Mazzulla, Kevin Jones and the rest, if Huggins can get Casey Mitchell back in action, he has enough talent and experience here to put together another run.
4. Seth Davis’ Hoop Thoughts this week tackles the touchy subject of whether college basketball parity equals mediocrity, a possible turning point to UNC’s season, Mike Rice’s histrionics on the sideline, Rick Pitino’s masterful coaching, and Kemba Walker’s prolonged slump.  And that’ represents only the first half of it.  As always, a great read as part of your can’t-miss list each week.
5. This comes from the sometimes-you-just-need-to-let-it-happen department.  Especially when your team is in the midst of pulling off its greatest victory in years on its presumed home court.  We realize that the MSG security folks are trained to keep people off the floor (and the players out of the stands) in an NBA environment, but they could use a little training up on what we call rushing the court in the collegiate game.  NBA fans don’t RTC — they don’t even know what it is; but for college students, it’s a time-honored and generally harmless tradition used to celebrate huge wins (well, it used to be, at least).  That is, until some d-bag Pinkerton wannabe starts choking a 19-year old for trying to run onto the court and jump up and down with his team.  Are we serious with this?  What did the felonious assaulter think was going to happen here — light the goals on fire and take a dump at center court?  Get over yourself, whoever you are, and we hope that MSG’s draconian security team gets killed for this.

Zach Hayes is RTC’s official bracketologist.

• Last Four In: UAB, Washington State, Richmond, Penn State.
• Last Four Out: Maryland, Gonzaga, Butler, Colorado State.

Analysis:

• With the upheaval at the top of the rankings, there was as much competition for the #1 seeds this week as in any of the previous brackets. After Ohio State as the standout overall #1 seed, Pittsburgh, Kansas and Texas slid into the final three spots. Connecticut likely would have earned the spot occupied by Texas if they had closed out Louisville at home on Saturday. Although the Huskies edged the Longhorns in Austin, the overall portfolio leans ever so slightly towards Texas. As always, this is a fluid situation and could change tonight should Texas fall in College Station.
• BYU also would have been in prime contention to snag a #1 seed if they hadn’t slipped up at the Pit against New Mexico on Saturday. The Cougars boasted the top RPI in the land prior to the loss (Kansas re-claimed that esteemed spot). BYU now joins fellow Mountain West member San Diego State on the #2 seed line along with Connecticut and Duke, who drops to the final #2 seed and #8 overall.
• This past weekend was a major step forward for the Big East in their quest for obliterating the record for NCAA teams in one conference with Marquette edging Syracuse and St. John’s trouncing of Duke. All 11 contenders remained in the field this week and the lowest was Cincinnati as a #10 seed. The Bearcats look like the most vulnerable team in the conference to miss on an NCAA bid with both Marquette (Notre Dame, Syracuse, a plethora of close losses to NCAA teams) and St. John’s (Duke, Notre Dame, Georgetown, at West Virginia) having compiled some exemplary wins. Cincinnati still plays Louisville, Connecticut and Georgetown on their home floor.
• Bid stealer alert! Alabama at 5-1 in the SEC automatically gains that conference’s automatic bid with both Florida and Kentucky having suffered two defeats in conference play. This bumps Maryland just barely out of the bracket.
• Where have you gone Cinderella? The most famous of the last decade’s tournament darlings — Gonzaga and Butler –– both find themselves out of the field this week. The Zags have lost three of four in WCC play including road defeats at San Francisco and Santa Clara, while Butler has now fallen four times in Horizon play after running the table a season ago. Downing St. Mary’s in Moraga or Memphis in February would go a long way for Gonzaga and their ugly #90 RPI. Butler may have to win the Horizon League tournament which could be played in Valparaiso or Cleveland.
• I’d like to formally welcome Penn State to the field! Home wins over Wisconsin, Michigan State and Illinois carried the Nittany Lions into the bracket for the first time. Close losses at Ohio State and at Purdue also won’t be ignored by the committee. While objectivity always comes first in Bracketology, I’d personally love to see Talor Battle in an NCAA Tournament game.

Conference Call

Read the rest of this entry »

1. Anyone who watched St. John’s take down Duke yesterday saw a strange and lethargic facsimile of the Blue Devil squad we’ve seen previously this year. That’s by no means an excuse and isn’t meant to take anything from the Johnnies’ victory, but before you fall victim to the tendency to put too much stake in one game and start selling your Duke stock, we offer you the calming tone of Mike Miller’s take at Beyond the Arc. By the way…whither the Red Storm? There are some bad losses there, but they have wins over Duke, Notre Dame, Georgetown, and at West Virginia. Their pressure-cooker January is over, and now we’ll see if that tough stretch of their schedule seasoned them for the second half of their Big East slate. If so, the Tournament awaits as a reward.
2. Does anyone remember Central Florida? Donnie Jones‘ in-conference move from Marshall to UCF in the off-season (along with his reputation as a good up-and-coming coach) already had people aware of the Golden Knights, and then everybody got wise when they beat Florida and Miami (FL) on the way to winning their first 14 games this year. Since that start, UCF has dropped six straight and find themselves last in Conference USA. The Knights have eleven players who play at least 12 minutes a game, and Jones feels that one of the keys to UCF getting its mojo back is to shorten the rotation to seven or eight players for the last nine games. Unfortunately, that won’t be difficult, now that junior guard A.J. Rompza is out indefinitely with a stress fracture in his foot.
3. Having trouble finding a good comparison for The Jimmer with which to enlighten your unhip friends? Bob Ryan contemplates the methodology and validity of comparing one player to a former player and, in doing so,  offers an outstanding parallel to Fredette that we haven’t seen mentioned anywhere, even considering the unhealthy amounts of time we spend on Twitter and reading the works of our favorite columnists. The article also further justifies why you should be reading Bob Ryan on a regular basis.
4. After the thrills that Butler provided all of us last season (and remembering how nice the people there were to us on our visit there last April), it’s been tough to watch last year’s finalist come back to earth as much as they have this year so far. Even with the early departure of Gordon Hayward, every Bulldog coach and player is aware of the difference between last season and this one: their effort on defense. In the article, Brad Stevens mentions how he’s ready to give walk-ons more minutes if it means better team defense, and Shelvin Mack includes himself in his own assessment, noting, “We gave up 60 points in one half [to Valparaiso on Saturday]. Last year we gave up sixty points in a game.”
5. Even without rooting interest, the best part of this weekend of basketball was the hint of a smile we saw on the face of Kansas‘ Thomas Robinson on a couple of occasions during the Jayhawks’ game against Kansas State. As much as fate has asked he and his little sister Jayla to grow up in the last month, it’s good to see that Robinson even still has the capacity to smile. It would be understandable if he had lost it for a while. One fellow who can relate to what Robinson is going through and recall that kind of loneliness is former Clemson defensive back Ray Ray McElrathbey, whose ordeal from five years ago bears some similarities to Robinson’s. A must-read from the Kansas City Star’s Sam Mellinger.

The Lede.  What a weekend.  Unless you care about the Pro Bowl (and really, other than gamblers, who does?), we here in the college hoops universe had the sports world to ourselves, and the weekend gods in charge made sure that we had a wild and woolly preview of March even though the calendar still said otherwise.  Fully half of the ranked teams in the RTC Top 25 lost over the weekend, and quite a few others including two of the top three teams in America hung on by the skin of their teeth.  What this shows us once again is that there are no dominant teams in basketball this year; even though Ohio State remains undefeated, they’ve had numerous close encounters and it’s clear that the Buckeyes are merely one of a dozen teams with the goods to win six straight this spring.  It should be a wild ride through the remaining five weeks of the regular season; if this weekend’s results are any indication, we should all down a few anti-vertigo meds and strap ourselves in.

St. John's Made the Garden Rock Again Today (Getty/N. Laham)

Your Watercooler Moment.  Duke Destroyed in the Garden.  The last time we saw the Duke Blue Devils so thoroughly undressed as they were in today’s matchup with St. John’s at the Garden, many observers at the time believed that Coach K had lost some of his touch on the recruiting trail and his teams simply could not compete at the highest level of college basketball anymore.  On that day, Villanova used a dominant second half to rattle the Devils with its superior quickness and athleticism, forcing Duke to fire off 22 bricks from beyond the arc (versus five makes) in the game and generally embarrassing a team that had been ranked as high as #1 at one point that season.  Today’s game against Steve Lavin’s fun group of Johnnies was not entirely dissimilar.  Duke looked generally slow, uninterested and incapable of making an outside shot (shooting 5-26 from deep after starting out 1-19) while SJU had all the energy and emotion of a home crowd desperate for a winning program again.  Whether this is emblematic of a bad day for Duke or indicative of a deeper set of problems, we’ll have to see how February goes before making that decision.  Make no mistake, though, today’s result was a major red flag for the defending national champs.  Teams that win titles don’t find themselves down 50-25 to anybody, much less unranked teams.

We have much more on this destruction of Duke from our correspondent’s report from the game here.

This Weekend’s Quick Hits…

• Ashton Gibbs and Jared Sullinger.  A couple of big-time players making big-time shots in the clutch with their teams on the verge of defeat.  #1 Ohio State appeared to be in serious trouble when David Lighty got the ball into Sullinger deep in the post off a steal.  He was fouled and subsequently hit 1-of-2 free throws with three seconds remaining and all the noise and pressure of the Northwestern students weighing on him at the time.  Just another day at the office (21/8) for the impressive freshman.  At Rutgers, it was the junior Gibbs (24/4) who played the role of Mr. Clutch, drilling a 25-footer as the shot clock wound down and the Panthers clinging to a precarious one-point lead.  His three gave Pitt just enough breathing room to keep Rutgers on the fouling strategy, ultimately unsuccessful as Pitt hit twelve down the stretch to salt away another win.
• The Texas Defense.  It’s starting to scare us.  We know that the Longhorn defense is already the most efficient in America, but to put the clamps on an offensive juggernaut like Missouri in holding the Tigers to 58 points (25 below their season average) is ridiculous.  In six Big 12 games, they’re holding teams to 54 points per game, a statistic that is particularly amazing when you consider that three of those wins were against teams in the top 15.  If Rick Barnes can coax a little more offense from his young team, the Horns might end up as the best team in America by March.

• Read the rest of this entry »

It was a game with a result that was shocking not so much for the fact that St. John’s beat Duke, but the manner in which they did so. Coming into the game on Sunday afternoon, the Red Storm had lost five of six after raising expectations with a win over Georgetown at the beginning of an unprecedented stretch of eight consecutive games against top 25 teams. That skid had threatened to put a damper on all the hype that had accompanied Steve Lavin‘s arrival in New York City and his much-ballyhooed incoming freshman class, but for one afternoon all of that was forgotten as the Red Storm put on as dominant of a performance against such a high caliber opponent as any St. John’s team has had since the days when they were still called the politically incorrect Redmen, Lou Carnesecca roamed the sidelines, and Walter Berry and Chris Mullin donned the uniform. Today, the newest generation of St. John’s players turned in a performance that certainly made Carnesecca and Berry (both in attendance today) proud.

St. John's Brought Back Ancient Memories This Afternoon

Behind a full court press than left Duke looking sloppy and some hot shooting, the Red Storm ran away with a 93-78 victory that was not as close as the 15-point final margin indicates. In front of a sellout crowd of 19,353 at Madison Square Garden that was nearly 50-50 in terms of allegiance to Duke or St. John’s, the Red Storm played their best basketball of the season and took advantage of the Blue Devils playing their worst. Even though Mike Krzyzewski seemed to imply in his post-game press conference that this game was an isolated incident, it does raise questions about the defending champions. On one hand we can probably discount Duke’s 5-for-26 shooting from 3-point range (and 1-for-19 before a late hot streak after the game was out of reach made the final numbers more respectable) as an aberration, but there were several other aspects of the game that should not be dismissed as easily.

• Duke’s lack of athleticism: Last season Doug Gottlieb caught some heat from Coach K for calling the Blue Devils “alarmingly unathletic.” While it may not have been the politically correct thing to say, there was some truth to the statement. Outside of perhaps Mason Plumlee, none of the current Blue Devils will amaze any NBA scout with their athleticism. This doesn’t mean that Duke isn’t athletic enough to win the title (their biggest losses from last year’s championship team are Jon Scheyer and Brian Zoubek, who were probably the two least athletic players in last year’s starting line-up), but it does mean that this Duke team isn’t going to blow any elite team off the court with their athletes, and, in certain situations like today when their shots are not falling, they are vulnerable to inferior teams.

• Read the rest of this entry »

Game #121. RTC heads to Madison Square Garden (aka “The World’s Most Famous Arena”) as the defending champs invade The Big Apple.