We have arrived at the point of intense sorrow and unyielding insanity, courtesy of schools such as Mercer and Tennessee. Here now is the Sweet Sixteen update on the Tuesdays With Horry bracket pool, complete with all the requisite rage and aloofness of conflicting personalities and varying degrees of emotional currency.
For every great office, there is an office pool come March. A test of brute strength, statistical analysis and, more than anything else, a test of pure luck. At its most, college basketball is thrilling and heartbreaking, and college basketball pools are both of those emotions taken to extremes. Here now is the 2014 Tuesdays With Horry NCAA Tournament bracket pool.
You may ask yourself, “Why, Blog Lord, is there a picture of Rik Smits and Patrick Ewing at the top of this week’s 3-Pointer?” There are a number of reasons, some better than others: firstly, I am going to the Netherlands for my final undergraduate spring break, and the Netherlands has produced exactly one (1) decent NBA player, Smits. This is a celebration of that. Second, ’90s NBA is best NBA, although we might be catching up with this era. Finally, it sort of looks like Ewing might block that Smits shot, which was probably the last great thing any Knick or Knick-related entity did on defense. Elsewhere, Phil Jackson and the Knicks are a teenage pseudo-romance, and the Heat and Pacers, sans Rik Smits, are struggling, but they’ve earned that. Also, we may finally have seen the last of one of the most brilliant point guards in NBA history.
The ongoing grotesque carnival of human misery that is the New York Knickerbockers “basketball” franchise is at it again, with reports surfacing that the team met with 11-time NBA champion and maniacal guru Phil Jackson about possibly becoming the next head coach to stroll the sidelines of Madison Square Garden. No word yet on incumbent Mike Woodson’s reaction yet, though I have an idea of what it might look like. Elsewhere, the Lakers receive a full-on franchise posterization courtesy of their in-house rivals, and LeBron is not into sleeves.
AP Photo/The Wichita Eagle, Fernando Salazar
With a 68-45 drubbing of the Missouri State Bears last Saturday, the Wichita State Shockers capped off an undefeated regular season, the first since the Jameer Nelson-led St. Joe’s Hawks went 27-0 in 2004. The Shockers have lived up to their name, rising to #2 in the AP poll and sending waves throughout the country. This team is carefully constructed, with Gregg Marshall as its puzzle master, and it just might have the formula to be able to take the Missouri Valley Conference to the top of the mountain for one shining moment.
Jason Collins officially became the first openly gay professional athlete to play in one of the four major North American sports this week, and the immeasurable positivity surrounding his situation has rendered any predicted backlash moot. Elsewhere, LeBron becomes Bane, as if he wasn’t that already, and Boogie Cousins returns to his scheming, maniacal ways.
In a strange twist of events, the All-Star Game was the actual best part of this year’s All-Star Weekend. Kyrie Irving lit up the Crescent City, scoring 31 points and adding 14 assists in a record-breaking game during which both teams cleared 150 points. Saturday night’s festivities, long the most exciting of the break, failed to deliver. Elsewhere, the trade deadline passes, coming in like a motorcycle and going out like a tricycle. Also, the KD-LeBron dichotomy is heating (thundering?) up, though both just seem to want to play their own brands of basketball.
LeBron James made Mount Rushmore a trending topic earlier this week for reasons entirely unrelated to the giant presidential faces carved into the side of a granite slab in South Dakota. From coast to coast, people got all up in arms about who the four best basketball players of all-time are, if that is the criteria necessary to earn a spot there. Elsewhere, Carmelo Anthony wants to win a championship (don’t we all?), and Pierre the Pelican finally gets a makeover, just in time for All-Star Weekend in his hometown.
Sports are so arbitrary when you really think about it. It’s just a collection of athletes, exhibiting an arbitrary set of skills, governed by an arbitrary set of rules. You can throw a ball through a hoop? Good. You can throw it through a hoop behind this line? Even better.
It’s the arbitrary nature of sports which leave me finding them rather meaningless at times. When a man throws an oblong ball and another man catches it, the action doesn’t directly affect anything in the outside world. Wars are still fought. Diseases still kill. A ball passing through space doesn’t alter race relations or alter prejudices. It’s just an object traveling through space.
The halcyon days of Blake Griffin as “the world’s best dunk artist who just happens to play professional basketball” are over in Los Angeles. Without Chris Paul, Lob City has managed to go 12-6 without their leader and guide, Chris Paul, and Griffin’s magisterial performance in a losing effort against the Heat on February 5 was one of the most exciting and thought-provoking games of the season. Elsewhere, Dan Gilbert is doing his best not to foster a Steinbrenner-Martin relationship with Mike Brown, and the Lakers played out an near-video game scenario against those very same Cavaliers. Also, the Brow is an All-Star for the very first time, and Damian Lillard can destroy anything with a basketball in his hand.
Tuesdays With Horry 
