Point Blank – March 22
NCAA Clean-up - on Upsets and Officiating…Now it is time to talk about the Spurs offense…
Tuesday begins first with some clean-up from those opening 52 games in this year’s NCAA tournament, and a more general point that may surprise many of you, but can become a key part of your handicapping outlook. On Wednesday, time to begin attacking the round of the Sweet 16.
Item: Anatomy of an upset
Sub-Item: In-Running means learning to do 'post-mortems' on live patients
There has been a focus throughout this NCAA season on the fact that the teams at the top of the polls were nowhere near as strong as in recent campaigns, and as the Sweet 16 approaches my own ratings make it pretty clear to me – there were three different teams in last year’s field, Duke, Kentucky and Wisconsin, that would rate at least a -6.5 over the best of this bunch. Tourney history does not get recorded that way, of course, with any game with a major gap between the seeds getting tagged as an “upset” into perpetuity, even if it was not an upset at all.
The first part is to have your mind geared towards ignoring accounts of upsets having taken place in Wichita State/Arizona and Gonzaga/Seton Hall in the opening rounds, despite the #11 vs. #6 tags going in, and perhaps #13 Hawaii over Cal does not deserve the branding either, after the Golden Bears lost Jabbari Bird and Tyrone Wallace within the span of 48 hour to injury. A Cal team without those two players is not in the tournament, much less a #4 seed, which history will not properly recognize.
A key in terms of the others that is important to grasp is that igniting Middle Tennessee State over Michigan State, Yale over Baylor, Stephen F. Austin over West Virginia or Northern Iowa over Texas, and keeping Arkansas-Little Rock mentally in the hunt vs. Purdue, was that as those games unfolded the underdogs were presented with something they may not have expected – favorites that were not all that dominating. It was intriguing to see the body language of the players as they came to this realization, and that is even more important to be focusing on now that In-Running is being made more available across the wagering landscape. There is still a tendency for folks to want to back the big favorite that has gotten off to a slow start (it was certainly the case with the live Michigan State pricing on Thursday), but if you learn to make watching the body language and game flow of the underdog a part of your processes, you will uncover some prime opportunities to exploit that.
Naturally something as vague as “body language” is not easy to explain, but there is a part of fundamental basketball that you can turn your focus to in the early part of games – is the underdog getting the shots that they want out of their offense (regardless of how many they are making), and is the underdog having a defensive impact, or merely allowing the favorite to take the ball wherever they want. Middle Tennessee State was a particularly positive example on the offense front – the Blue Raider front-court players were able to take their Spartan counter-parts off the dribble from the get-go, settling into a comfort level on offense they were never taken out of.
And yes, I know that many of you are watching closely enough to be looking for these things because of how many comments I read about the officiating. Which leads to another key point…
Item: The officials in college basketball are better than many (most?) seem to think
One of the annual rites of spring is to see more folks complaining about college basketball officiating in March because they begin to watch so many more games – a casual fan might have witnessed more court minutes I this past Thursday-Sunday cycle than over the previous four months. That leads to many criticisms of the officials as the scrutiny picks up, and that can be a negative if the various missed calls are made too much a part of the handicapping post-mortem process. In this instance it is not so much the grading of the teams, but the grading of one’s own handicap, which can be subject to an improper inflation if the blame for a lost wager is placed on the officials.
Here is what you probably don’t expect to read – the officiating in college basketball is actually pretty good, and arguably as good as it has ever been. It is a truly difficult sport to properly handle, and there is only a certain level of expectation that should be there. The perception issue is not in the calls and non-calls that get made, but rather in the modern technology that has so many cameras in play, and show replays in such intricate detail. The officials have not gotten worse; your close-up view of the game has gotten better.
Why do I give the officials some slack here? Because of the understanding of their challenges and processes. Just think of all those replays you saw over the weekend where a call was badly missed. But then think of how you are viewing those misses.
When you watch a game at home do you jog back and forth across your living room looking at the screen, sometimes picking up that pace to a light sprint, and then attempt to make snap judgments while moving? I didn’t think so. It is a simple point, but yet one that from my reading many still don’t grasp – what you see from the comfort of a sofa, sitting stationary, does not bear much resemblance to what you would see if you were on the move, and having to react to something much further away.
Do charge/block calls infuriate you? Of course they do. Yet it is not just the two players that are moving, but the official as well, and note that what television will properly and logically do – use the replay that has the best line of sight to the play – often creates a false impression that the official had that same line of sight. Are you bothered by the fact that several key games late this season were won via shots on which players clearly traveled? Try this – accept that you have to watch the shooter release the ball and the defense attempt to guard, looking for a possible foul, and also to have awareness of the background of the shot clock above the basket to gauge whether the release was in time. Can you do that and still see the feet of the shooter? With the proper camera angle, yes, but with the human eye from several feet away it is much more difficult, especially when that eye is having to focus while being on the move.
College basketball is a tough game to officiate, especially with the 30-second clock adding more possessions (no player in the nation went the full 40 minutes in every game; yet the officials do). I was asked during a pre-tourney media gig what could be done to make it better (part of what alerted me to how vociferous the complaints are), and I did offer that a fourth official would help, especially at tournament time. That would limit the movement – one official stays under each basket, never venturing further than the FT line when the ball is on the other end of the court, and the mid-court officials would only go from center court to the FT line, and no further, one on each side. That would help, but may not be part of the proceedings any time soon, and certainly not for the regular season because of the added cost.
For now make this your takeaway and it will smooth the path a bit - modern officiating isn’t bad; modern cameras simply happen to be damn good.
Item: CHARLOTTE 91 SAN ANTONIO 88
Sub-Item: SAN ANTONIO 30 CHARLOTTE 7, 11:10 2nd Quarter
Well, that happened. When you have been around this stuff long enough post-mortems do not just begin when a game is over, but rather as the scores come in. As such, how easy would it have been to come to the quick conclusion that Gregg Popovich and the Spurs had a special level of maturity, able to shake off the intensity of the Golden State win by coming out and playing superbly. Except that it did not last, some rather unexpected magic from Jeremy Lin, who came off the bench to knock down 11-18 shots, out-scoring the entire San Antonio reserve cast by himself.
While Lin indeed deserves a great deal of credit for the energy he brought, at a time in which the Hornets badly needed it, the focus should merely be on his offensive production, but on how the defense picked up off of that catalyst. Or on how the Spurs offense struggled, and determining how much weight to assign to each angle of that is a challenge. The issue before us is that the offensive struggle is not something new.
The San Antonio defense has been a major topic here several times this season, nearing a historical plateau on that end of the court. The recent offense has been another matter – there have been eight games since the All Star break against teams that would currently qualify for the playoffs, and it has only been an uninspiring 1.02 PP100 in those games. And no, that is not a case of them being shut down because of the quality of the competition – the Thunder, Bulls and Trail Blazers are all in the bottom 12 defensively since the All Star break, and the Clippers are a mess on that end of the court right now. But I chose playoff qualifiers so that the games would have an integrity built in.
Charlotte and Golden State are playing decent defense, and over the last two games against them the Spurs had 33 turnovers despite being in low-possession games. Since the All Star break Danny Green is shooting just 23.9 percent from 3-point range. Just a few days removed from that win over the Warriors that signaled that the San Antonio defense might be ready to play into June, there are building concerns that the offense may struggle to carry them that far.
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