Outside Oberlin

NBA Doing Well as a Sleeping Aid For Viewers

By Jacob Kramer-Duffield

A few nights ago I was really exhausted, so I decided to do something mindless and vaguely entertaining: watch an NBA basketball game. It was the Kings and the Jazz, and, as these things go, it was a pretty good game: close all along, went to OT, Kings won by two or three, I think. Ah, yes, here it is: 97–94. In overtime.

Pardon me for asking a stupid question, but doesn’t anybody in the NBA know how to SHOOT anymore? Let’s go over this. In a game between two teams that are chief contenders for the Western Division crown, the winner shot 40 percent from the floor; Utah, long renowned for being a patient team that knows how to pass the rock and choose their shots, came in at 37 percent.

Amazingly, this game was more the norm than not on Tuesday night. In fact, there were several examples of far worse play. Charlotte, in shooting 33.7 percent from the floor, beat Indiana, who shot 35.4 percent, by the sickeningly meager count of 77–66. In only one quarter (the second) did both teams manage more than 20 points. Of the 13 games Tuesday, only three featured point totals for both teams over 100. In three other games, the winner topped the century mark; one of these was Miami’s last-second OT win over the Clippers, 101–99. For God’s sake, the All-Star Game barely went over the century mark.

This just sucks. NBA players, so the story goes, are the best of the best of the best: the best players from the best (basketball) schools in the best (basketball) country in the world. The average salary in the NBA is over $3.5 million; the median is nearly $3 million. WHY THE HELL CAN’T THESE GUYS SHOOT?
I’ll admit that for years I’ve bemoaned the lack of fundamentals in most sports, baseball especially. Nobody can lay down a sacrifice bunt anymore; nobody knows how to pull off the hit-and-run. Leadoff hitters strike out 100 times a year and if you need me to explain why this is bad, or can’t remember when it wasn’t so, then it’s even worse than I thought. 
But baseball is different. There are many other factors in play than the simple hit/not hit dialectic, and the chances of success are always lower (30 percent success at the plate makes a Hall of Famer). Often an out is nearly as good as a hit. In basketball, however, you are on the floor for one reason: to get the ball in the hole. And increasingly, it seems that NBA players are incapable of performing this relatively simple task on a regular basis.
I won’t buy the argument that defense is better than ever, because it just isn’t. There have been some great defensive teams in my lifetime, in my sports-watching lifetime even, and these teams couldn’t hold a candle to them. The Pistons of the late ’80s — that was a defensive team. The Bulls of the ’90s weren’t just Michael Jordan, but both an offensive and defensive juggernaut, scoring (and allowing) more than 100 points a game routinely. The best teams of today are sloppy on both ends of the court, and it shows in both the statistics, watchability and ratings for the NBA.

As a matter of contrast, the Oberlin men’s basketball team, at a respectable and better-than-expected 7-15, averages 70.7 points per game and shoots 40.4 percent from the floor. This is a small, highly selective Division III school known for its academics, not its athletics. That our team could put up statistics one might find in an NBA box score is, well, ludicrous. No offense meant.

So what am I driving at here? Do I have a solution? No, I don’t. NBA players are, as has been frequently observed, punks. The culture of professional basketball is punk-ass culture. I’m realistic — this is not going to change any time soon. Until it does, if it does, NBA basketball will remain no more than a sleep aid. 

Et Tu, UConn?: A Women’s Basketball Report

By Jessica Rosenberg

Snap! It’s the worst sound in the world for people in sports. Other sounds are almost as bad. I’ve seen Purdue forward Katie Douglas, for instance, get knocked over, followed by a highly audible “thud” that actually echoed off the walls as her head hit the wood floor. Fortunately, she was up and around soon afterward, but then, a mere week later, there it was: snap! 

A small scream, perhaps a curse, the player topples over, and she stays crumpled on the court in a horrible little ball as teammates, trainers and coaches crowd around her and fans are mute with shock. Head Coach Geno Auriemma and the UConn fans are feeling that same shock as their star and arguably the best player in the country, senior Svetlana Abrosimova, has gone down with a season-ending foot injury.

Let me first say that I am not exactly an unbiased observer when it comes to the world of women’s college hoops. There is a team of which I am quite proud. The unkind have used the word fanatic. It is true that during Winter Term, I am generally to be found in the vicinity of Mackey Arena (Lafayette, IN), and that if you visit my room there’s a slight chance I am listening to what sounds suspiciously like play by play, but reports of my being seen in gold and black face paint are highly exaggerated. 

So I’m a Purdue fan. I make no apologies for the fact. But since it would be chauvanistic of me to spend this week reporting on the #5 Boilermakers and their double-OT win over Ohio State which I somehow missed, some other division one team will have to do. I’ll focus instead on the team which has won the last two games with a combined score of 243-130, the University of Connecticut Huskies.

Just because there’s nothing to do in Connecticut and no professional sports teams, do not underestimate the quality of this Husky dynasty. (And just to give you an idea of their fans’ devotion: Svet’s parents still want to come to senior night, from Russia, and a number of fans offered to help them pay). I watch their games on television whenever ESPN chooses to air women’s basketball, which is once every four or five months and it’s always UConn-Tenneseee. I almost always have this astute, intellectual comment to make on their play: God damn, but they’re good! 

They are so good, that if they took on the Purdue team that won the national title two years ago, I’m talking about the ones that went 34-1, the ones I worship as deities…the game would still be going on, because it would be in its 82nd overtime. But in the end, UConn would prevail. Let me just name a starting five for you: Shea Ralph, Svetlana Abrosimova, Sue Bird, Swin Cash and Astia Jones. Not to mention having the coolest names in sports, any one of these women would be the best player on any other team. 

Ralph is the emotional leader: she is the poster child for the type A personality, a fact that has led to her protracted fight with anorexia but has also made her the fiercest competitor imaginable. Maybe it’s the muscles, maybe it’s the wingspan, maybe it’s the strangely vampiric eyeteeth but she’s a scary, scary woman, and she would no doubt be prepared to kill you over a loose ball, and opponents know it. 

Bird, all crimson and clover to Svet’s leather and lace, is a babyfaced junior with an unbelievably pure scoring touch. Men’s basketball fans may not remember the sound a ball makes when someone actually shoots it. “Swish.” That’s what you hear whenever Sue gets a look from downtown. And those who still attack the women’s athleticism would do best to look at Cash, who crashes the boards with abandon and then makes it down to the other end in time to throw up a block that sends the shooter crying for mama. 

This team works off an incredible chemistry. The “stars,” Svet and Bird, can score 20 and 30 respectively and the team can still lose, as they did to Notre Dame, because the role players haven’t contributed. And Bird can be held to one field goal, as she was against L.A. Tech, and her team won because when the shooters failed, the gritty players battled down low for boards and buckets and threw elbows and everyone played stifling defense. Oh, and Taurasi came off the bench and did quite well. Did I mention Taurasi? She’s a freshman who has already been unleashed on a few unsuspecting teams. Poor them. Poor everyone when she grows up. 

But while Ralph is the lynchpin, Bird is the scorer, Cash is the boarder and Jones is the banger, Svet, somehow, is simply the best. On a good day, which seemed to be every day recently, she could do anything. She could kill you from deep, she could kill you on short jumpers, she could kiss off the glass, she could rebound, play defense, pass and steal. 

Whenever a team tried to creep back in on the formerly undefeated Huskies, Svet was there to put the dagger in. She’s got the famous temper that caused her to make the news by mugging some opponent in a loose-ball battle (the woman grabbed Svet on the floor so Svet simply rolled over on her, picked her up, and then threw her over again, smashing her into the hardwood. Closet I’ve ever seen to a women’s basketball brawl started up over that little debacle). 

She’s always fighting with Geno, who is smartness incarnate as a coach and a fabulous recruiter to boot. So when UConn won the national title last year and she went straight to him for a gigantic hug, sweat-stains and all, it was a touching moment for those of us who had watched the screaming and the name calling and the benching over the years. Svet has really grown as a player, and we were all pretty excited to see where this final season would take her. To the rehab room, it appears. 

So that’s the state of the state in the upper echelons of women’s hoops. Yet another All-American, the third in fewer than two months, goes down to injury. I figured UConn would take its revenge on Notre Dame and the Lady Vols in the NCAA tournament, and they still could, but now it’s not a sure thing. It’ll be a party come March. I’d love to stay and chat, but the Boilers have a conference game and I have to go find my gold and black face paint.