Why I Want The Cards to Lose

I've seen a handful of excellent ball games this year.  The Big Ten has been historically good, and Indiana has not only been good, they've been great to watch.  There is ridiculous parity in the game; and while that usually means a lot of mediocre teams, that's not the case right now.  There are a whole lot of good teams, and there have been a lot of good games.  In particular, I think of the Indiana/Wisconsin/Michigan/Michigan State/Ohio State series was phenomenal, and those games rank up with all the classics I grew up on.  But, the one game that really sticks out for me was the first Louisville/Notre Dame game.  It was the most dramatic game I have seen in years, even if it wasn't close to being the best.

For those of you who were tuned in to the game, you were probably reaching for the remote at just about the same time Louisville started to slack off their legendary attack.  They were walking the ball down the court, they were looking up at the clock, they were careful not to foul.  Fans in the arena were digging out their car keys, putting on their coats, looking down the aisle to see if they had to step over people or if everyone else was leaving too.  Those of us who follow such things (I follow both Louisville and Notre Dame) had more or less taken the outcome for granted when Jack "Luke Harangody Jr." Cooley got tagged for foul number five on a horrible call with about seven minutes left.  All in all, it was a customary denouement for a hard-fought game that was all but over.

When the ridiculously improbable comeback started, no one noticed.  With 45 seconds left and Notre Dame down eight, Jerian Grant hurried down the court, hoisted an uncontested three, and canned it for his first field goal of the night.  No big deal, right?  Too little, too late.  Happens all the time in these situations: team way down, hoisting threes, you're going to see a couple go in.  Then after some laxity on the Card's behalf, Grant flies down the court again, cans another three . . . this one contested, but just barely.  A few seconds later, again he's flying down the court; but after two treys in a row, Louisville has started to pay attention.  He's wrapped up (by Siva? I can't remember), runs off an impromptu pick (less a pick and more an obstacle provided by a teammate who wasn't moving at the same speed as Grant), and deposits a third three.

Now, it was a game.

On the next trip up the floor, down three, the Irish put Louisville's Gorgui Deng on the line.  He missed both foul shots, and ND had the ball back with 16 seconds left.

Everyone knew that Jerian Grant was taking the last shot.  Everyone knew it had to be a three.  All Louisville had to do was guard the three-point line, and make sure Russ Smith was all over Grant with one of the bigs running at him when he came off the inevitable pick.  No way anyone drops FOUR STRAIGHT threes in less than a minute, right?

What happened next were two of the most inexplicable mental mistakes I have seen in a long time out of two top-20 college teams: first, down THREE POINTS with almost no time left, Grant knifes down the right side of the lane for a TWO POINT field goal.  Second, instead of employing the "matador defense" and allowing Grant to get the two unscathed, Louisville chose to closely defend him on the drive, and ended up fouling him!  And not a good hard foul, which would have negated the shot and put him on the line for two free throws (thereby still leaving ND one point short with time for only one very brief possession left on the clock), but a contact-in-the-process-of-defending foul, allowing Grant to get up (AND HIT!) the shot, as well as putting him on the line to attempt THE GAME TYING FREE THROW!  Which, of course, he hit.  After that, there was the inevitable Russ Smith brain fart, and the game went into overtime.

From there, the hilarity continued.  At the start of each overtime, Louisville opened a little breathing space, only to be reeled back in by Notre Dame.  Louisville was able to shift back into Full Chaos Mode, but full chaos mode means the maximization of the random, and the random means some breaks go your way, some breaks go the other way . . . and the breaks were going Notre Dame's way.  In the ridiculous scrums that pass for rebounding in U of L games, the ball started to get batted back toward the ND goal.  Louisville would execute their hellish defense for the majority of the shot clock, only to see a desperation lob get tossed across court to an ND player with a wide open shot (wide open mainly because he got totally lost in the chaos, stood still, and watched the defense run away from him).  And, on Louisville's offensive end, there was Russ Smith.

To understand Louisville, all you need to do is watch Russ Smith.  He's fast, he's chaotic, he has a motor like no one else you will ever see.  He is the ultimate disrupter.  On the defensive end, he's always up in your face, on you so hard you can't shake him.  He's fast enough to play the lanes and knock down passes when he's off the ball, and still recover right up in your face when the ball swings back over.  Offensively, he flies around just as much, hurtling at the basket with or without the ball, without a plan, just always flying around.  His outside shots are like Tourette's, more inexplicable mental tic than rational offensive strategy.  He is a Tasmanian Devil, a perpetual motion machine: and usually, at the end of a game, his psychosis has left his opponent on the floor in a heap, with the scoreboard announcing a triumph precipitated by the sheer havoc he has wreaked.

Rick Pitino loves Russ Smith.  He has a whole team comprised mostly of Russ Smith variations: the same hyper-athletic quickness, the same perpetual motion, the same indomitable motor.  The same dedication to Full Chaos.

A descendant of Nolan Richardson's "40 Minutes of Hell", Full Chaos has little to do with the fundamentals: Full Chaos means Louisville's rebounding proficiency has less to do with blocking out, and more to do with everyone charging the basket every time a shot goes up.  Louisville's defensive proficiency has less to do with rotation and position and more to do with overwhelming pressure (Louisville never runs a full court press just to make the guards work harder; they always press to steal the ball).  Louisville's offense has nothing to do with spacing, position, or shooting: it's simply about the sheer number of times they heave the ball at the basket because they are moving so much faster than the other team, and therefore get more opportunities.  Ultimately, like 40 Minutes of Hell, the Full Chaos mode is about making the other team play your way.

And therein lies my problem with the University of Louisville Cardinals, as currently constituted: "playing their way" means totally disrupting the game of basketball as I love it.  Pitino and The Cardinals are successful to the degree that they can turn the game into shit.

I don't blame The Rick for this approach.  His job is to WIN GAMES, period.  Well, that and graduate the minimum number of players necessary to keep the NCAA off his ass.  And keep his players out of jail . . . all of which he has managed to do.  On top of that, he generally has guys that are committed to him and to each other, and try their best to be reasonable representatives of the University.  Anyway, the true beauty of the Full Chaos approach is that he doesn't really need to have top-notch basketball players, he just has to have top notch athletes, which are much more common these days.  He doesn't have to worry about developing his two's mid-range game, he just needs to get him in better shape than the players he will be facing.  He doesn't have to worry about his five's back-to-the-basket game, he just has to make sure he can be more of a dervish than any other five in the nation.  He doesn't really have to teach them too much of anything: most of the core work for the current iteration of The Cards is done by running stairs.  Of course he always has to stockpile a shooter or two to give his offense a little bit of a wrinkle, and having a decent point guard makes his life a whole lot easier.  But, make no mistake: given the choice between a top-notch point that can't play at his speed (say, Trey Burke) over a warp speed point good for one seriously knuckleheaded play every five times down the court (say, Peyton Siva), warp speed wins ten times out of ten.  Again, I don't blame Pitino for taking this approach . . . I mean, look at the guy's record.  It speaks for itself.

I don't root against The Cards because they are lazy or undeserving; on the contrary, they're one of the hardest working teams in the nation.  I don't root against them because of some sort of negative social code that they subliminally radiate: again, all the guys on the team seem like decent enough folk (although The Rick himself is a bit of a skeez), and rewarding hard work is something that we can all get behind.  I don't even root against all Rick Pitino/U of L teams: the 2005 Cards with Francisco Garcia and Taquan Dean was one of my favorites.  No, it's just this current style of Louisville team: I root against them because they destroy all that is beautiful about the game.


And it's not that I don't like defense: I am a Big Ten/Big East fan, after all.  I was raised on Bobby Knight and Gene Keady.  One of my favorite teams to watch is Wisconsin: Bo Ryan's defensive schemes have a brutal efficiency and logic, and are often as beautiful as they are brutal.  I tend to like free flowing games better, but "free flowing" doesn't mean the same as "no defense".


It just so happens that I love the game of basketball.  I love its motion, I love its flow, I love its strategy.  It is a cliche at this point to compare basketball to jazz, but there you have it: there's improvisation, there's discipline, there's melody, harmony, counterpoint, rhythm, syncopation.  Like jazz, there's a lot of ways to do it, and a lot of ways to do it wrong.  As cavalier as I may be in my attitudes toward music, I am a basketball purist: show me complexity, show me motion, show me shapes and designs that I can get inside and marvel at.  But whatever you do, don't turn my game to shit.

Chris Paul is a beautiful player: he moves into zones, sees the shapes of the court before they even materialize, and gets the ball just where it needs to go.  Steve Nash does the same, with an even more eccentric language than Paul.  Larry Bird and Magic Johnson moved in dimensions that others didn't even see.  But Derrick Rose, good as he may be, is nothing more than a human missile as far as I'm concerned.  Alan Iverson was a cannonball.  Kevin Durant?  Breathtaking.  LeBron James?  A dull bully.  I'm not going to sit here and tell you that I don't care whether my team wins or loses, but I will tell you that one of the five best college basketball games I have ever seen is a game that my team lost.

It is entirely likely that Pitino will someday stumble on just the right point guard, a guy that can play at Full Chaos tempo but actually make plays instead of chaos (I think Indiana's Yogi Ferrell could have been that point guard).  If he does, he'll pick up a few other parts, and maybe build a team that is as beautiful as it is fast.  When that day comes, I'll don the red and black and cheer my lungs out.  Until then, I will smile and raise a glass to toast the Cards victories, but I certainly won't get excited about that team.

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Louisville, of course, ended up losing the epic 5 OT war against Notre Dame.  There were several opportunities to win it, but Louisville never put the Irish away.  Or, rather, Russ Smith never put the Irish away.  I have never seen more appalling guard play by a good team in a crucial situation.  Smith was mind-bogglingly bad at the worst time.  Time freezes when the game is on the line, and that's precisely when just running around doesn't work.  You have to make a play.

Louisville has not lost since that game.  For good measure, they beat Notre Dame twice, both by double digits.  They stormed back against a flawed Syracuse team to win the final Big East tournament, and rolled into the NCAAs as the number one overall seed, a ranking that they deserved as much as two of the other three no. 1's, Kansas and Indiana.  They are the most popular pick to win it all, and it's hard to argue that: at this point, it really looks like they could turn any game they play into a steaming pile of shit.  Just don't expect me to like it.

I Know It's Early, But . . .

Famous last words, 'cause you know that whenever you see that sentence, the speaker is just about to totally ignore the fact that "it's early" and go ahead to make a rash proclamation from that shaky base.  Just like when somebody says "no disrespect, but . . . " they're about to disrespect somebody.  Or when they say "taking nothing away from _____", they're about to take away from _____.


Dwyane ("The Typo") Wade, after losing to the Pacers:

"The Indiana Pacers -- and take nothing away from them -- but they don't have a lot of playmakers," Wade said. "Their offense is their playmaker and they do a great job of it, but that's why they play the style of ball they play. That's not LeBron James, Chris Bosh, and Dwyane Wade. That's not our games so we have to figure out with our games and our strengths what to do and that's not us. Yeah, we move the ball and we have offensive sets to get the ball moving, but we're not trying to play like the Indiana Pacers."

Uh, yeah.  They just kicked your ass.  Are you really asking for more?


The implication is that the Pacers play team ball because they have no choice.  Well, that's true (sort of: I wouldn't put Granger in the class of James, Wade, Bryant, or Durant, but he's right there in that second tier with guys like Rose, pre-injury Roy, etc.), but isn't it starting to become clear that you need to be more like the Pacers?  Everybody has said it, including you yourself: there's only one ball.  All you "playmakers" need to become "playmakers" in the real sense - that is, do the little detail-oriented fundamentals-based dirty work it takes to get the job done every single second you are on the floor.  It's not even really clear to me that James and Bosh know how to do that, but at least they have excuses, James having had no college coach and Bosh having had it little better with Rick Barnes, but you had a good coach (Tom Crean), so at least you were taught.  Have you forgotten what it takes?


Then there's this:

"You see guys playing above their heads; there's no secret about it," said Wade, who noted that he feels a bigger bull's eye on the team this season compared to when the Heat were defending champs. "Teams are playing very well against us. There's a lot of things that we have that go against us at times, but we'll figure it out. It's understandable. We understand that we're a team that everyone wants to beat. When they finally do that, it's their playoff game. It's their biggest win of the year possibly, unless they beat the Lakers. I don't think it's going to get too much bigger, so we are not really worried about that."

Well, yeah, except for the fact that the Pacers beat you with their B- game, not their A game.  You may have had an insanely off night, going 1 of 15 from the floor, but Granger wasn't much better at 6 of 21.  We'll give you the benefit of the doubt and say that maybe you shoot a tick under 50%, which you normally do, and additionally leave Granger with his atrocious shooting.  That's a twelve-point swing, and guess what?  You still lose by four.  And, not only did Granger have a bad shooting night, but the Pacers' second most important player, Roy Hibbert, only played 21 minutes because of foul trouble.  So: the Pacers beat you with their top scorer shooting 28.57% from the floor and their vital post defender on the bench for almost half the game.  Doesn't seem like the P were playing "above their heads" to me.


Dwyane, you just need to shut the hell up and play.  You and Bron both.

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I'm not jumping to unreasonable conclusions here: if the Heat play up to their full potential, and the Pacers play up to theirs, the Heat win 10 out of 10 (well, nine out of 10, because there's always the chance that the Pacers do this).  And yes, the Heat took a dump on their home floor Monday.  But it's not as clear cut as that: the Heat didn't just lose this game, the Pacers won it.

And yes, that's the source of my early Pacerish optimism: there are things happening here that haven't happened here in a long, long time.  My optimism has its caution, and I'm careful not to expect too much in the won/loss column yet, but there are definitely things that a drawing my attention:

1. They are showing signs of being able to play defense.  Not shut down defense, mind you, but they're closing down the expressway to the iron, and generally contesting jump shots (except against the Heat, when they just totally collapsed in and offered engraved invitations to the King and the Typo to beat them from 25 feet and out).  They are more and more maintaining decent defensive positioning, and generally making things a little more difficult than they have any time since the O'Neal/Artest/Foster era.  And, with Roy Hibbert emerging as a legitimate shot blocker, guys like McBob and Psycho T can play close, pesky defense, and if (when) they get beat off the bounce, they just turn their men in toward Hibbert, and he is actually capable of erasing a few of their mistakes.  Like I said, they're not the mid-aughts Pacers or Pistons, but at least now you have to work a little to score on them.
2. And speaking of pesky, so far this year, the effort has been there pretty consistently there.  Nobody is wondering around like they're lost.  Again, part of it is the personality of guys like Hansbrough and McRoberts, who have to go big or go home . . . but, beyond that, it's clear that Jim O'Brien doesn't let anyone on the floor who's not willing to go all out, all the time.  Mistakes they will grudgingly live with (not many - for, as the Typo intimated, the Pacer's margin for error is almost non-existent), but not flying around will get you benched until you earn your way back in.
3. Jim O'Brien's motion offense, though very far from being a finished product, is starting to pay off.  Now, instead of just running down the court and chucking up a shot, the Pacers actually look for the best shooter in the best situation AND actually take steps to achieve that situation.  As a result, everyone is starting to look a little bit better on the offensive end . . . especially T J Ford, who, after a failing grade as the primary point guard last year, is coming around as an important catalyst for the offense off the bench.
4. And speaking of O'Brien, it seems like he is finally starting to realize some sort of vision for the team.  Going into this season, O'Brien seemed like a dead man walking, even if the Pacers managed to profit from the ill fortune of others (here I'm casting my eyes in the direction of New York, New Jersey, Philly, Washington, and Cleveland) and shuffle backwards into the playoffs.  But now, more than just exhorting a ragtag group of nobodies to the upper echelons of mediocrity, it seems possible (just possible!) that O'Brien has a vision of how to instill some sort of personality into that motley crew, and further, that he has a program that, given players with the right combination of talent and work ethic, could get the Pacers back to where they were in the Reggie Miller era.

After losing a heartbreaker to the Thunder (there are no more moral victories in Indy), The P stand at 7 -7, which is hardly a world-beater, given their relatively easy schedule so far.  And yet, there is the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, low in candle power though it may be.  For the first time, it seems like maybe, just maybe, this team can be built up instead of blown up.  Certainly there will need to be major improvements, and it is clear that the focal point of the team has yet to arrive (Granger is really good, better than most people think he is - even the ones who think he's good - but, he's Robin, not Batman), but we have here something that the Heat definitely don't have: a good supporting cast.  So far, it is a supporting cast in search of a star, but there is really something here that can be built on.

We know the job of a ball team and its front office . . . or do we?  Answer number one would seem to be to WIN GAMES, but in these days of economic chaos and the capitalization of every last element of our lives, including our sporting endeavors, the main job of a team is to SELL TICKETS.  Of course, winning games makes selling tickets much easier, but it is not the be-all and end-all of a franchise's new reality.  As much as I loved the O'Neal-era Pacers, I was in the minority in this fan base.  Oh, the fans would have gotten behind them if they would have realized their pre-brawl promise, but that support would have been shallow.  Say what you want about Rick Carlisle, but that was an ugly, nasty team.  It had to be an ugly, nasty team to compete with its arch-nemesis Detroit.  It was what was called for at the time.  But the Good, the Bad, and the Crazy always had a short leash with Indiana fans.  And since the debacle at Auburn Hills, the P have been a hard sell, especially after Reggie finally hung it up.

Indiana is the most basketball-savvy fan base around, bar none.  It's not that they prefer high school and college basketball over the pro game, it's just that they have so many choices of top-notch basketball at so many different levels, they're not going to pay attention to a bush-league operation . . . I mean, for Christ's sake, even if you leave the Big Ten and IU and Purdue out of it, you have a Butler team that competes with the big boys year in and year out, and even easy tickets like the University of Indianapolis (alma mater of the Spur's George Hill) and IUPUI can buy you first rate hoop action, and that doesn't even include occasional fits from teams like Evansville, Ball State, and Indiana State, or a top-notch roundball league like the Big East rotating through South Bend, even if the Irish themselves are rather unspectacular and workman-like . . . and then there's the best high school basketball in the nation, and that includes all those trendy East Coast basketball academies.  No, the average Indiana ball fan won't put up with bullshit, because there's quality to be had around every corner.

So how do you serve that fan base?  Good ball.  That simple.  Indiana fans have been resistant to the pro game mainly because of the recent drive-and-kick nature of the pro offense (the very "style of ball" that the Typo is referring to as the anti-Pacers style of ball favored by himself and his Heat boys club).  There is a certain beauty to the one-on-one game of a true basketball genius - I think, in spite of the racial overtones of the anti-NBA sentiment around here, and in spite of the different tastes of the local roundball aficionados, Allen Iverson in his prime would have been well received in Indianapolis - but these days, the drive-and-kick game has completely lost its aesthetic appeal.  Derek Rose is exhibit A in that respect: there is no denying that  he is conscientious, studious, and driven, and there is no denying that he wants to do what's best for his team, and ultimately, there is no denying that his game is first-rate.  But: his game is ugly and uninteresting.  He throws himself at the iron like a chaotic missile, with no grace or art.  In the rare instances he is stopped cold, he kicks it out to a shooter - some guy standing around watching the action - to try to finish the play.  Now, when the driver has some real game to display on the way to the hoop, this approach is fine and enjoyable, but this has led (at the college level as well as the pro level) to an offense where you get a baller with just enough game that you need more than one defender to shut him down on the way to the hole trying to draw the defense into the lane so he can kick to some shooters on the edge.  BORING.  

Contra the drive-and-kick, we have the motion offense.  These days, everyone wants their turn for a solo (is that not the whole offense of the Heat at this point?  Wade and Bron taking turns, and getting Bosh involved when they remember?), but there is more . . . it's like jazz, and I don't make this comparison lightly.  Letting Coltrane run wild while Sanders or Dolphy, along with Tyner, are hanging out on the wings waiting for a kick is one thing, because it's freaking COLTRANE, after all.  And the more chaotic, Don Nelson/Golden State approach, with everyone throwing themselves willy-nilly into the chaos of an offensive possession like the brothers Ayler with Sunny Murray as a trailer, always has a certain car-crash appeal.  But there is nothing to compare to the breathlessness of a free-flowing group improvisation, like Ornette's Free Jazz, with everybody carrying the weight.  It can be free flowing like Steve Nash running the floor with Amar'e and the crew, or it can be orchestrated and disciplined Mingus-style like the 1976 Indiana Hoosiers, one of the best teams in the history of basketball.  Or, there can be the charts of varying complexity that are always run as they should be, like every other Bob Knight team that didn't include Isaiah Thomas.  The thing is this: there is a beauty in the complexity of interplay that is lost in today's drive-and-kick offense.  Hoosiers may not give a shit about jazz, but they do give a shit about hoop and its aesthetic dimension, even if the average Hoosier wouldn't know aesthetics if it bit him in the ass.

Which, in a long roundabout, brings me back to this year's Pacers.  Indiana fans will support a team that tries to run a complex, disciplined game, even if they are not particularly successful in doing it.  If the the old-school dynamics are there, if the hustle and the effort are there, if the game has some sophistication, then the average Hoosier ball fan will credit the effort and patiently wait for the payoff.  Running isolations for Jermaine O'Neal* would have been long-term acceptable only if it lofted a banner in the rafters of Conseco Fieldhouse . . . nothing short of that was acceptable, certainly not the Artest freakout, the gangsterisms of Tinsley and Jackson, or the inability of the second generation of the Miller era to get the job done.  No, the average hoosier looks to roundball for aesthetic fulfillment, and he demands sophistication . . . details big and small, like the '87 Hoosiers flouting conventional wisdom and running with UNLV, just a little slower to keep the game at their tempo, not UNLV's; like ultra-conservative Bobby Knight debuting the first big hybrid guard in '76 with Bobby Wilkerson; like Butler neutralizing the K State guard's brutal full-court pressure by having their 6' 10" power forward Gordon Heyward bring the ball up the court (and any time they tried to take him on, he just kicked it back to the guards who exploited the mismatch): like the standard bearers of the old ABA, a flexible, dynamic bunch that included such HOF worthy people as workhorse pivot Mel Daniels, silky smooth Roger Brown, prototype power forward Big Mac George McGinnis, and more; like one of the five greatest ballers of all time, the very Larry Legend that currently runs the Pacers, and whose credit with the faithful is vast, though moving toward its end . . . 

This Pacers crew can earn that love: for while the bar is unbelievably high, there is much credit given for having your heart in the right place.

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*  Incidentally, Jermaine tweeted earlier this year that he wanted to retire a Pacer.  I very, very much want this to happen.  I know that the fanbase will never be reconciled with Ron Artest, but I really think that the implosion of that Pacers team robbed O'Neal of his rightful place in the Pacer pantheon.  I don't know that we necessarily hoist his number 7 into the rafters with McGinnis's 30, Reggie's 31, Daniels's 34, Brown's 35, or Slick Leonard's blue polyester sports coat, but I think that, when he decides to retire, we sign him, have a Jermaine O'Neal Day at Conseco, and then let him go on his way.  It's only fitting.