Point Blank – March 1
On those NCAA Senior Moments…A lost season ahead for the Padres (Dick Enberg will bow out by saying “Oh My” for mostly the wrong reasons)…Are the Rockets merely counting down the days left on the schedule…
It would sound like Senior Day/Night would be a natural opportunity to make some money on the college hardwoods – both the players and the fans bring a special emotion to the setting, and it lifts up a team’s performance, right? Not necessarily; and as the years go by the value of the concept may even be shrinking a bit. So as that motivation comes front and center for many games over the next six days, it is time to take a deeper exploration.
First, of course, is the fact that there are fewer and fewer players sticking around through their senior seasons across the landscape these days, which limits the number of opportunities. Tonight in Iowa City brings us a rare one, which I will get to in a moment, but for many teams the final home game this week it is not all that big of a deal. But now the difficult part – even for those teams that would seemingly benefit from this motivation, it can often be counter-productive.
One of the particular examples focused on in the Monday column was North Carolina, where Roy Williams may run the best Senior Night of all in terms of intercollegiate athletics, though not one that enhances his team’s scoreboard in that game. Williams stuck to his practice of starting his senior walk-ons vs. Syracuse on Monday, although an early dead-ball did not have Justin Coleman and Spenser Dalton on the floor all that long, and because the Tar Heels could not build a big working margin, they were not on the court for the final possessions, which is often the case. It was the fourth straight Senior Night ATS failure for Williams, which he could naturally care less about (and kudos to him for that), but note that the markets have missed their read badly on those games, overestimating the Tar Heels by 44 points.
What happens at North Carolina is not traditional, but even at what appear to be the classic settings for a team to play well it sometimes will not happen, the emotion of the evening turning out to detract from performance, rather than enhance it. I suffered through one of those examples with an “In the Sights…” ticket on Iowa State First Half vs. Oklahoma State on Monday, believing the motivation for long-term Cyclone stalwarts Georges Niang, Jameel McKay and Abdel Nader might be enough to get them energized vs. a short-handed Oklahoma State team that might otherwise leave them uninspired, but instead it was the motion of the evening that led ISU to a flat performance. It was a case of the event outweighing the actual game, and you could take the comments from Niang in the aftermath and make a plaque, as a constant reminder of the potential pratfalls of this week –
“I got a ride over here (to the game). Don’t they say in driver’s ed don’t drive when you’re emotional? So I got a ride over here. … I don’t know if I’ll ever experience something as great as I experienced here. I was afraid for that to happen one last time.”
Get the picture? These are not hardened professionals that have been through the grinds, but athletes that are being put into one of the more emotional settings of their young lives. The assumption for most of the handicapping world is that these games are a plus for the home teams, yet it is anything but an automatic. And it is across the state of Iowa where a unique setting on the Tuesday board takes place, the Iowa Hawkeyes bringing one of the most experienced casts of players of any team in the nation this season -
Iowa Seniors Games Starts
Adam Woodbury 133 132
Mike Gesell 129 125
Anthony Clemmons 132 53
Jarrod Uthoff 95 62
There will indeed be a lot of emotion in Carver-Hawkeye Arena, but Fran McCaffery went on record yesterday as wishing it were otherwise – “I don’t get into the emotional side of it, to be honest with you. I’ve been on record as saying I wish we could do away with Senior Day and celebrate those guys at the (post-season) banquet they way they need to be celebrated.”
It isn’t that McCaffrey is being a downer, but the tradition at Iowa is to celebrate the Seniors with a ceremony before tipoff, that being set for 15 minutes before they take on Indiana in a key Big 10 game tonight. Is having that ceremony take place when it does really the best way to have a team get out of the gate well on the court? Does the emotion sometimes take away an edge, instead of building one?
It will be interesting to watch this one play out because the Hawkeyes have not played like a veteran team down the stretch – they were in control of the Big 10 before losing at Bloomington earlier, a game that began a 1-4 SU and 0-5 ATS slide in which they have come up 54 points short of the market expectations. With that lack of momentum, might they be a fragile bunch in terms of handling tonight’s pressure, rather than a team that will build off of it?
There is a lot to see along this particular front as the week unfolds. As is almost always the case the proper handicap comes down to a one game at a time, evaluating each individual situation as it unfolds, but this is one particular notion that you do not want to take for granted – the assumption that the home teams get a boost from these games can be a dangerous one to make.
Now let’s go from teams in high pressure settings to one that is likely to not feel any pressure at all by around the time of the All Star break…
Item: Time for some more Palmtree Baseball
We have the pleasure of being joined by Eric Strasser, author of Betting Baseball for Profit, and all-around good guy, as a part of the 2016 MLB season. Eric is better known as “Palmtree” around these parts, and it is time for the third ticket from his current portfolio, veteran broadcaster Dick Enberg’s last season bringing most of the “Oh My” moments in San Diego for the wrong reasons…
San Diego Padres under 73.5-110
Last winter the Padres took a shot, acquiring all manners of big-league talent, but virtually nothing worked out for them in the 2015 season. So this winter they did a complete 180. They traded Craig Kimbrell, Joaquin Benoit and Yonder Alonso for young players with potential, and they let Ian Kennedy and Dale Thayer leave as free agents without even making an effort to sign them. They were able to acquire a significant amount of talent that will help the organization going forward, but 2016 is going to be a rough year.
There’s nothing to like about this club. They play in a division with two of the top five teams in baseball, the Giants and Dodgers and the Diamondbacks are certainly on the rise as well, so the schedule is brutal. I could easily see them going 17 – 40 in the 57 games against the top three teams in the NL West. Even if they were to go 23 – 34 that would mean they would need to win 51 of the other 105 games to beat this number. There’s just no enough on the field to do that.
Tyson Ross gets the opening-day start and fills the role of #1 starter. Most of the advanced stat geeks love Ross, but in his career he is 32 – 52 with a WHIP over 1.3 while pitching in a pitcher’s ballpark, and even Malinsky with his aging wheels could steal second against him (Ross has allowed 68 steals the last two seasons, leading the Majors). James Shields was a huge disappointment after signing as a free agent last winter, while Andrew Cashner is answering his free-agent walk year and is much more focused on his free agency than the Padres season. If either of those two get off to good starts, they become in-season trade bait. The bullpen, which has usually been a plus for the Padres, has been decimated for the present by the trades for the future. Fernando Rodney is now the closer with Carlos Villanueva, Kevin Quackenbush and Nick Vincent the setup men. Drew Pomerantz was also signed for the bullpen but I believe he ends up in the rotation.
The lineup is not major-league quality with Yangervis Solarte projected to hit 3rd, and Melvin Upton Jr. actually projected as a starter in centerfield. The heart of the order is Solarte, Matt Kemp and Derek Norris. There’s nowhere near enough talent here to get to 74 wins, and in my opinion this might turn out to be a 95 – 100 loss team.
Already in play:
MARLINS Over 78.5
RAYS Over 81
About Last Night…
There is an item that has been a part of some discussion threads recently that deserves to be isolated here because it can be a major handicapping factor going forward – do the Houston Rockets care at all about making the playoffs? And perhaps an even better way to look at it is would they rather pack up their uniforms when the regular season is over, instead of having to face Golden State in a first round playoff series that could be an embarrassment?
As bad as the current 4-9 slide has been, note that half of those wins were against Phoenix, a team that it is difficult to lose to these days. Yes, there was that stunning fourth quarter at Portland on Thursday, which gave an indication there was still some fuel in the tanks, but might that turn out to have only been an aberration? Was it a case of them playing with fire because the TNT cameras were turned on?
Last night at Milwaukee the Houston defense put up almost no resistance. The Bucks were down to eight players in their rotation, yet rolled for 128 points, shooting 59.3 percent from the field, and registering 30 assists. They had not scored more than 112 points in regulation in calendar 2016, and in five games since the All Star break had averaged 99 (again in regulation, there was one overtime).
Houston has some selfish players that will still post some box score numbers. James Harden had 26 points and nine assists, and Dwight Howard had a seemingly big night with 30 points and 13 rebounds. Be careful with that. Howard did not have a single blocked shot, and Milwaukee sliced through the Rockets interior defense to make 40-66 on two-point attempts. The Houston veterans may only be playing for their personal numbers the rest of the way, which can open the door for some situations in which they can be exploited.
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