Random Musings

There's been so much going on lately, but with the whole Vegas trip things at work and in life have been even more hectic than usual. While I have some time today I wanted to post some thoughts on a number of issues.

1. The Lebron James saga took an interesting turn this weekend in my mind, with word came down that even as of Monday morning, Tom Izzo has "not been able to get in touch with" Lebron James regarding Izzo's decision about whether or not to take the Cleveland Cavaliers coaching job. Not been able to get in touch with him? After all this public exposure now, for days on end? I'll tell you what: if you're a Cavs fan right about now, the fact that Bron-bron hasn't even taken a single call from Tom Izzo all this weekend is just about the worst possible news you could hear, and I think it speaks volumes about James' motivation and what he is thinking at this moment about his future. I mean, James could have at least spoken to Izzo (cuz how the hell can Izzo possibly make this decision without knowing knowing if it includes or excludes Lebron?) and could easily have given him some kind of comfort that the two could go together to Cleveland in 2010, that he would need one more big star on the team first, something, anything if James was feeling all lovey dovey towards the city of Cleveland right now. But clearly he is not. Izzo is now in a ridiculous position, because on the one hand he can't leave his school and his players hanging for weeks on end here, but on the other hand, if he takes the job and Lebron comes back, Izzo has a championship-ready team immediately on his hands and that's what his expectations are going to be. But if Izzo takes over the Cavs and Lebron decides to go elsewhere, well then what Izzo is taking on is a 100% completely different job in every way, one where he will be lucky to even make the playoffs and where his success will be measure perhaps in games won over successive years but not at all by championships or even post-season performance at all. So Izzo of course has desperately been trying to reach Lebron now for what, four days on end, and so far, nothing. Lebron's head is elsewhere right now, it's as easy as that, and as I said that is the worst sign yet I've seen for Cavaliers fans.

2. I finally saw on espn.com sometime on Sunday night that the U.S. managed to come back and tie England in the World Cup on Saturday. Not that I personally care, but that late U.S. goal has got to be the best thing that ever happened for espn or whoever is making money off of the popularity of the World Cup telecasts in the United States. I still don't know who that is because lord knows I'm not watching those matches. Nobody needs to wonder why soccer has never made it in this country when all these matches so far cumulatively have totalled about 8 goals scored. But in any event, I don't know who our next opponent is or when we will play them, but I'm sure I will hear about it via the various media outlets I am bombarded with on a daily basis because we managed to tie that first match against England. After giving up a goal to the Brits just four minutes in to the match, we could very easily have given up hope and then I can assure you, nobody in America who is not a first- or second-generation immigrant would have given two craps about that game or any other soccer matchup left this year. Instead though, we Americans can continue our every-four-years delusion that this time maybe we have caught up and will finally get to hoist the World Cup trophy in 2010. Dream on.

3. The Philadelphia Phillies have flat-out lost the eye of the tiger, it's as clear as a bell and you could see it after about two weeks into this season. It's like they came out this year, started winning a few games, and then decided that they were already in the World Series for a third straight year so they just needed to coast until they got there. You need to hear proof that this team is grossly under-performing on offense right now? The Phillies are dead last in the National League East with just 272 runs scored in 61 games this season. This team that led the National League in runs scored each of the past two seasons -- and didn't really lose anybody of note in the offseason (if anything, we replaced the defensive-minded Pedro Feliz with the far superior offensively Placido Polanco) -- now has scored seven fewer runs than the Nationals, 11 fewer than the Mets, 24 less than the Marlins and 40 runs fewer than the division-leading Braves. The Phillies deserve every inch of the deep, deep hole they have dug for themselves this year, and it's a shame too because Roy Halladay has been just about as good as advertised with an ERA under of 1.96 and a stellar 1.02 WHIP (plus a perfect game) through now 13 starts as a Phillie, and Cole Hamels looks to be bouncing bad pretty decently from a crappy 2009 as well. J. Happ's been on the injured list all season and is looking to get healthy soon as well, so from a defensive perspective the team is faring ok. But on offense it's like this juggernaut with Rollins (albeit injured much of this year so far), Victorino, Utley, Howard, Werth, Ibanez, Polanco et all is simply a different team entirely. And I can't help but notice the correlation between our offense really sucking and our team allegedly getting caught stealing those signs from the bullpen in the outfield a few weeks ago. I still think it sounds silly to suggest we would possibly sit a guy in the bullpen with bino's if we wanted to steal signs, but I've never been one to deny the facts either, and the timing of the stealing signs thing obviously matches up more or less exactly with now this month-long streak of offensive ineptitude for the Phils.

4. Hey, are there any bloggers out there cashing yet in the 2010 WSOP? I certainly did not pull my own weight in this regard in 2010, that's for sure, only playing the one event and never putting up much of a fight. I know Columbo was in my event as well and fared far better than me, but I believe busted also short of the money, and I think I heard as well that Garth, LJ, Blood and a few others have fallen short of the money as well. It feels like just a few short years ago that we had like 5 or 6 bloggers making it decently into the money in WSOP tournaments. Maybe that's happening again this year and I just don't know it, I don't know. But otherwise, are we getting worse as poker players the longer we blog and play poker together?

5. With Las Vegas 2010 now just a fading memory, it is already just a few weeks until the Hammer Family's annual July 4 beach trip. And with how things have been at work lately, that shizznit cannot come fast enough. With the July 4 holiday coming on a Sunday this year, we are now in the last year before a several-year jag where the placement of the holiday will make travel and work plans very annoying. But this year, Sunday is perfect, my office is closed on Monday so it will definitely make the travel and traffic planning much easier on everyone this year. But enjoy it while you can. July 4 will be on a Monday next year (not the end of the world), but then a Wednesday, Thursday and Friday in the three years after that, which can always kind of suck for those of us working stiffs.

March Madness

Happy Passover to all the tribe members out there. I had another great seder on Monday, including some of the most delicious and tender steaks I have ever made. Of course, the 6 inches of rain that fell in my area over the preceding day and a half put a little bit of a damper on my plans to fire up the Weber again this early in the season, but with the help of three good-sized pans and a nice stovetop, it all worked out great in the end.

The family spent a good deal of time sitting around talking about this year's NCAA tournament, which has really been an amazing one. In the end it comes down to a 5 seed playing a 5 seed on one side of the Final Four (Butler vs. Michigan State), and a 1 seed vs. a 2 seed in Duke vs. West Virginia on the other side. I don't remember the last time we had two seeds as low as 5 both battling it out on one side of the Final Four bracket, and frankly it's pretty damn rare that even a mid-major conference team like Butler makes any appearance in the Final Four these days. The thing that is so interesting about this year's tournament is not to me so much the teams that made it, but the teams that didn't. To think that in this of all years, Kentucky did not make the Final Four, Kansas did not make the Final Four, and Syracuse did not make the Final Four, that is truly amazing. That right there is like a third of all the first-round NBA draftable players in all of college basketball on those three teams, and not one of them could win four games in a row in the Big Dance. In a year where otherwise, the talent just seems to be spread much more thinly than in previous years.

Which brings me to the first point I was keying on with my family this weekend. This year, moreso than maybe any other year I can remember, the Final Four is truly not about the players. It's about the coaches. It could have been totally about the players, if John Wall and DeMarcus Cousins and Patrick Patterson from Kentucky were matching up with Wes Johnson, Andy Rautins and Scoop Jardine of Syracuse, or Sherron Collins, Cole Aldrich and Marcus Morris of Kansas. But instead, it's Butler, it's Michigan State, it's Duke, and it's West Virginia.

On the Duke and West Virginia side of the bracket, you're looking at coaching legend Coach K in his incredible 11th Final Four appearance in his 25-year career at Duke, going against Bob Huggins, the former Cincinnati coach who has led his alma mater back to the Final Four for the first time in some 60 years. Huggins has always been known as a guy who gets the absolute most out of his players, and now with bona fide star Da'Sean Butler leading the way, Huggins once again has one of the hardest-working teams in the country, with three players averaging around 7 rebounds and 3 more players averaging around 3 assists per game. Huggins went an amazing 379-113 in 16 years at Cincinnati, 46-24 in two years at Kansas State, and has now put up an 80-27 record in his first three years at West Virginia, for a combined head coaching record of 670 wins to just 240 losses, all of which were not at the top programs in the country with the ability to hand pick every recruit in the country like the Coach K's and the John Calipari's of the world. Huggins is the reason this team is where it's at right now, and the matchup with Coach K -- who himself is probably coaching the least talented of all his Final Four squads over the years -- should be an intersting one.

On the other side, first there is Butler head coach Brad Stevens. Although Stevens is in just his third year as an NCAA head coach, what an illustrious beginning that career has had so far. In his first year as Butler head coach, Stevens led Butler to a school and Horizon league record 30 wins, becoming the third-youngest head coach in NCAA Division I history to lead a team to 30 wins in a season, and the fourth winningest first year coach in NCAA history. Still as a rookie coach, his team won the Horizon League regular season and tournament championships, and went on to win one game in the NCAA tournament. During the year Butler was nationally ranked for a school and league record 19 consecutive weeks. Despite losing four seniors after the 2007–08 season, Stevens once again surprised the world by winning the regular season Horizon championship and taking Butler to the NCAA tournament as an at large selection. Stevens' 56-10 first-two-years NCAA record places him second only to Bill Guthridge (58) in total wins during one's first two years as head coach in the history of the league. Also during the 2008–09 season, Stevens became the sixth head coach in NCAA history to reach 50 wins in 56 games or fewer, earning Stevens the Hugh Durham Mid-Major Coach of the Year Award as well as the Horizon League Coach of the Year for his efforts. And now there is this year, which has seen Butler go 30-4 once again under Brad Stevens, including a perfect 18-0 in the Horizon League which they once again dominated, before beating UTEP, Murray State, #1-seeded Syracuse and then #2-seeded Kansas State to earn the Bulldogs the first Final Four appearance in school and Horizon League history. So while this guy's coaching career has definitely been short, it's started off about as good as anyone's out there. Literally.

But even after all that gushing about Butler head coach Brad Stevens, Michigan State's Tom Izzo simply has to lead the pack. 2010 is now Izzo's amazing sixth final four since 1999 -- six Final Fours in just twelve years. And the truly amazing thing about it is, he has done all of that with exactly one NBA lottery pick in that entire run -- Jason Richardson back in the 2001 NBA draft. During that same span, Duke has made four Final Fours, and has done so with 11 NBA lottery picks coming through its halls along the way. UNC has made five Final Fours in that time and had six players drafted in the NBA Lottery. But think about it -- can you even name anyone good who's played for Michigan State basketball in the past 12 years? Me either. And yet somehow, here we are again heading to Indianapolis, heading to another Final Four, and Tom Izzo is once again there. Six Final Fours in 12 years, with basically no talent to speak of. Tom Izzo is the new best coach in NCAA basketball, hands down.

So in my mind, with all the great, most-talented teams having gone down now in the 2010 NCAA Tournament, the Final Four is truly about the head coaches and not the players. And the other realization I came to this weekend, unfortunately, is that I don't think a Final Four about the head coaches and not the players makes for very interesting viewing. I mean, if Butler beats MSU and plays for the national championship, that in and of itself will have some excitement to it for me. Butler winning the national title would be in my mind about as big of a championship story as we've ever seen in the NCAAs. But if Butler goes on to lose to the ongoing wizardry of Tom Izzo, I really feel like the tournament was so good this time around, that by now it's kind of burned out and can only fizzle away from here. Once Syracuse lost late last week, and then the moment it become obvious with about 8 minutes to go in the second half that Kentucky simply was not going to come back against West Virginia this past weekend, the last burning embers of 2010 March Madness went out for me. And don't get me wrong, it's not like I'm saying I'm a Cuse fan at all (I am more of a genocide fan than a Syracuse fan believe you me), but rather just that those seemed to me to be the biggest, most captivating teams of this year's tournament. Kansas losing early was ok and I think the true craziness of the tournament could still have been preserved if we had some of these other strongly-talented teams still in the mix. But my guess is that, despite how truly great this year's NCAA Tournament has undeniably been so far, ratings for the Final Four are going to be down and down noticeably from the past few years. I guess only time will tell if I'm right about that one, but here's hoping that the Big Dance finds one or two more crazy miracles in 2010 and turns this coming weekend into one more for the ages.