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Florida Flattens the Final Four

Ironically, there isn’t much I can say about the Gators’ performance this weekend. George Mason was billed as this year’s Cinderella, but Florida didn’t seem to share the same respect for Mason’s mystique as the rest of the country. They simply outmatched George Mason at every position and coasted to a convincing win. Next up: UCLA. It was entertaining to see all of the sports analyists flip-flopping on their predictions after Saturday’s games. UCLA handled LSU, but it was pretty obvious that LSU just had a terrible game while UCLA played very well and capitalized on LSU’s many mistakes. Before Saturday, Florida was the consensus favorite to cut down the nets on Monday, but after UCLA’s game against LSU, the consensus became a coin-flip. UCLA’s vaunted defense became the big story and everyone forgot that Florida handled Villanova, a No. 1 seed, less than a week earlier.

Fortunately, the Gators have refused to acknowledge the hype–positive or negative–all year, and the media’s sudden distrust in their ability to hang with a tough defensive team didn’t affect them in the least. It only took a couple minutes on Monday for the Gators to announce their superiority, and then they continued to remind everyone just how good they are by frequently adding exclamation points to the story they’ve written all season long. Noah with a block, Horford with a dunk, Moss takes a charge, Humphrey buries a transition three, Brewer with a steal, Green with an assist, Green with an assist, Green with an assist, Richard changes a shot. And every time UCLA tried to answer, the Gators took it up a notch to keep them at bay.

This has been such a fantastic season for the Gators. It’s too bad Coach of the Year honors have already been given because I think it’s obvious to everyone that Billy Donovan deserves that title. Out of nowehere came a team with more chemistry than I’ve seen on any team in years, and suddenly they’re breaking records and setting new ones: Best start in school history, first triple-double in school history, most made freethrows in a game, most consecutive freethrows, and the list goes on and on, culminating with our first National Championship.

I’m tempted to speculate about next season, but it just doesn’t seem appropriate right now. October is so far away and there’s no telling what will happen between now and then. For now, I’m just looking forward to reading the deluge of articles that will be written over the next several weeks. In a way, the best part of winning the Natinal Championship is that we’re going to be the topic of conversation for the next several months. It’s great to be a Florida Gator!

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Basketball team up to 10-0, in the Finals

This could get confusing because there are two basketball teams in the Finals right now–the Gators and my league team. Right now, I’m talking about the league, but I’ll get to the Gators later. We won last week, but it wasn’t pretty. We played a team that we beat pretty badly the first time around, and we were down 14-2 at one point. In the second half, we got our act together, ran a little hot and slowly closed the gap before permanently taking the lead. Most of us were shooting poorly (though we took good shots), and our defense was confused quite a bit. We were fortunate to pull out the win. This week, we’ll be playing a very good, deep basketball team and we’ll need to bring our best game to win. Unfortunately, we’re playing with only six guys because our best perimeter defender is away on business. That will hurt because the other team will have at least 8 guys and maybe 9, so we’re going to be playing fatigued throughout the game. I think we can win. but we’ll have to play good basketball.

Gators in the finals for first time since 2000

We’re there and we look great. All the detractors are back-tracking and we’re looking better by the game. Earlier this season, a common criticism of this team was that we didn’t have a “go to” guy. My initial reaction was that having a go to guy can often be detrimental if a team isn’t able to play through that guy’s bad nights. Our team is fully capable of compensating for a guy having an off night, and we have a different star every time we take the floor. I think our Final Four game was one of our best, and yet our leading scorer was the least publicized player on our team, Lee Humphrey. Our next game is against UCLA tomorrow, and I think we have a great chance of winning it all. UCLA is solid, but I think we have an advantage in most of the match-ups, and we play similar styles of basketball.

Celebrity sighting

Well, it wasn’t so much a celebrity sighting as a “me” sighting. I was looking for some dental floss at Target last weekend when a lady came up and asked if I was an actor. I figured this was a funny coincidence and that she must have me confused with someone else. I told her I had acted in a short film last year, but nothing more than that. She said, “The Might Stride?” So she did actually recognize me. Somehow, she’d seen the short and we talked about it for a couple minutes. She said she really enjoyed it and that she thought I did good work. It was really encouraging.

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9-0 in the league

Well, we finished the regular season undefeated and we’ve entered the post season as the favorite to win it all. We won our first playoff game easily and we expect to win our second game this week. There’s really only one team that we think can beat us, and we beat them earlier this season. I’ve been playing very well and I’m pleased with my progress this season. I’ve been alternating between point guard and shooting guard and I’m comfortable at both positions. I’ve always been more of a shooting guard because I’m good at moving without the ball and getting myself open looks, but I’m getting more confident at point. The biggest improvement has been in my 3-point shot, and I think my team has really started trusting me to knock down shots. I sense that my teammates are trying to get me open behind the line and I generally don’t let them down. I’ve been hitting open shots and, more importantly, making big shots at critical times. I’ve also been working on playing around the rim and I’ve seen improvement there. Most of my success near the basket has been thanks to my teammates seeing me when I get open.

Florida basketball in the Final Four!

After five straight years of early exits, we’re heading to the Final Four in the NCAA tourney. All year, I’ve been consistently impressed with our team, but they’ve really surprised me in the tournament. There’s just no quit in this team and they’re not intimidated by anyone. I really think we have a very legitimate chance at winning it all this year. The best part is that it’s a complete surprise. We weren’t even ranked pre-season, and I don’t think anyone really expected much of Billy D. and the Gators. Next thing we know, they’ve got 17 straight wins to open the season. There were a few bumps in the road near the end of the regular season, but I think those were just growing pains. We’ve adjusted and we’re looking our best right now, at the best possible time.

Also, this was supposed to be a “down year” for the SEC. For a down year, we’re doing pretty well considering we have a decent shot at having SEC teams battling it out in the Championship game.

Playing a little cards

Not much to report with the poker. I’ve been running a little bad lately, but that’s gonna’ happen from time to time. I feel like I’ve been playing well and making good reads, so I just have to stick it out. I’ve become very good at controlling the table when I play live. I make good moves and use my table image to my advantage. I’ve become particularly good at getting my opponents to show me their cards when I want to see them (usually when I want to know if I made a good laydown). I wish the cash flow was following the information flow, but I guess I just have to give it time.

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Finished basketball league 8-0 for the regular season

Last night, we capped our perfect season with a 5-point win. It was a tough game because we were playing without our best offensive player and without our best perimeter defender. We compensated by playing good, solid team basketball and playing well in the 2-3 Zone defense. Offensively, we moved the ball very well and constantly found ourselves with good, open looks. All season, we’ve been talking about how we need to move the ball better around the perimeter so that we break down our opponents’ defense before we score. Last night, we did exactly that and it made scoring very easy. Of course, we didn’t score a lot of points (passing the ball 6 and 7 times makes a possession last longer, so we got fewer chances to score), but the other team didn’t score many either.

The other team was definitely more athletic than us, but they didn’t take advantage of their strengths and our defense took them out of their normal gameplan. We bottled up the point guard at the top of the key, so he never had open looks and he had to pass the ball to the wing as soon as he got down the floor. We forced tough looks, even inside where they had a huge height advantage, and got a lot of defensive rebounds.

Personally, I had a very solid game. I scored something like nine points on seven or eight shots. I made a couple three-pointers, a layup and a freethrow (1/4 from the line, though). I missed a couple easy buckets–a runner/teardrop in the lane that was in and out, and a turnaround jumper that I shorted because I didn’t realize I was so far from the basket–but I thought my shot selection and execution were very good. I had a few assists and generally caused the defense a lot of trouble because I moved around so much.

Playoffs start in a few weeks and we’ll be the one-seed. I think we can win it all, but we’ll just have to wait and see.

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Florida basketball fumbling around

Well, after a 17-0 start, we’ve dropped 5 of our last 10 games. Three of those were on the road to then unranked teams. There’s good news and bad news. First, the bad news: we’re young and we seem to have hit “the wall” that players and coaches talk about. It usually happens in mid-to-late Febuary and the symptoms are very similar to the traits of a bad basketball team: there are unforced turnovers, missed layups, poor clock management and bad decision making in crucial situations.

Obviously, this is a terrible time to hit the wall since so much is on the line from here on out. We have to play the SEC tournament and then we’ll get our seeding for the NCAA tournament. Seeding is crucial and we don’t want to fall too low. Florida has been the perennial 5-seed that meets the problematic 12-seed. We don’t want that to happen again.

But there’s also some good news: our biggest loss is by 6 points. We’re not getting run out of the gym, but we’re not finishing games either. In four of our five losses, we were tied or leading with about a minute left. In each case, we found a way to blow it, but we just as easily could’ve won it if fortune was smiling on us. These errors that we’re making late in the game are very small ones and can be corrected with good coaching and experience. If anything, it’s good that we’re experiencing this now so that we’ve experienced these situations before we’re playing down to the wire against an unknown opponent in the NCAA tournament.

I’m hoping we really turn it on again in the SEC tournament. We are the reigning SEC Champs, afterall.

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7-0 in the basketball league

Last night’s game was well in hand until the other team scored 15 points in about 80 seconds. We were up by 16 or 17 at the time and we just got lazy and sloppy. All of a sudden, the other team can’t miss and we had a ball game. Fortunately, one of our guards knocked down a crucial 3-pointer near the end of their run. Once he did that, the other team realized they had to start fouling us because they just didn’t have enough possessions left to close the now-shrinking gap.

Earlier in the second half, I was talking to the score keeper and she said she meant to tell us before the game that she thought these refs were calling the games very tight (we were the last game of the night). I said, “Yeah, it seems like they’re calling a lot of fouls, but I think that will benefit us down the stretch.” Sure enough, the other team went had 10 fouls with a couple minutes left, so we got to shoot two freethrows for each of their desperation fouls near the end. Fortunately, our team is pretty solid from the freethrow line.

I finished with 7 points on three pretty good shots. The first was a driving lay-in made possible because they were in a 2-3 zone and the top two defenders were up too high and far apart. The lane was wide open, so I took it right down the middle. One was a contested 3-pointer from the top of the key. The other was a layup on a little play I like to run against man defense. Basically, I start on the wing out past the 3-point line. If I have the ball, I center it to another guard or forward, so he has the ball at the top of the key. I expect he’ll probably continue swinging it to the other wing because that’s how we typically run our offense. As soon as I make my pass, I run toward the baseline, but I’m ultimately crossing through the paint, just in front of the rim. After the guard/forward at the top of the key swings it to the other wing, I’ve usually beat my man and have position for an easy layup. If the wing sees me open, he can fire it in to me for an easy layup. If I don’t have a good look when I catch the ball, I can usually just kick the ball back out to either the wing (who just passed it to me), or back up to the top of the key.

I also had two very good looks from the 3-point line that I simply missed. One was off a nice little pseudo-give-and-go I ran with one of our forwards. I was at the top of the key and he was over on the wing (about 10 or 12 feet away). I passed the ball to him and took off as though I was heading around him on the wing and over to the corner on the perimeter. He held the ball, facing away from the basket and I used him as a pick. His defender was behind him (between him and the rim), as he was basically positioned to back him down. Because I used my forward as a screen, my defender went underneath to try and catch me on the other side. As soon as I saw him go underneath, I hit the brakes, back-tracked to my original spot at the top of the key and had a wide open 3-point shot because my defender was still caught somewhere on the other side of the pick. Of course, I missed it, but it was a really nice play, mostly made possible by the smart play and good position of the forward.

Enough about all that. We’re 7-0 and that means we’re guaranteed a 1-seed in the playoffs. We have one more regular season game, then a bye and then the playoffs start. We have a very good shot at winning it all.

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6-0 in the basketball league

Well, last week we played pretty sloppily, but we got a win. I think I had 7 points or so. We started the game very slowly, but turned it on in the second half. This week, we faced the only other undefeated team in the league… and we whooped ’em. We blew it open early as we held them scoreless for almost 10 minutes. Their first points actually came on freethrows after a bad call by the refs. I was guarding a guy on the baseline and he tried to turn the corner on me and pull up for a little 7-foot leaner. I blocked the ball low and the ref blew the whistle for a blocking foul. The problem was that the ref on the baseline wasn’t the one who blew the whistle, even though he had a perfect view of the play from about 5 feet away. Instead, the ref at mid-court blew the whistle and called me for a foul. He was about 45 feet away.

Anyway, they were pulling it to single digits when I finally scored. I had only taken a few shots, but none of them were pretty–my first 3-point attempt was blocked by a giant. I finally knocked one down to stretch our lead back to double digits, then I had another two on the next play after we stole the ball at mid-court. I scored 5 points in about 30 seconds and that was it for me this week. I was just pleased that we won and played so well. I forgot to mention that we played with only six guys last week and this week. That makes these wins that much better.

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Still undefeated in the basketball league

We’ve had two games since I last updated. In our third game of the season, I scored 7 points (two fastbreak layups and a 3-pointer). In our fourth game of the season, I scored at least 10 points (two 12-foot jumpers and two 3-pointers) and possibly 13 points (an additional 3-pointer). I’m playing pretty well, but our team is improving weekly. We’re moving the ball well, playing solid defense and working well in the transition game. We’re up to 4-0 and leading the league so far. We also have at least one very quality win.

Gator basketball on the rebound, but playing hurt

Well, we’ve lost two games, but neither of them is all that bad. Losing on the road at Tennessee was a big possibility even before Corey Brewer’s injury. I was surprised we kept it close as poorly as we played. The loss at South Caroline was a little surprising, but they matched up with us well and, again, Brewer hardly contributed. I think our win at Mississippi was a quality win. They’re a good, big team and we hung with them in spite of Lee Humphrey’s injury and Corey Brewer’s limited production. We started two freshman and they didn’t miss a beat. Also, it was nice to actually get to watch a game for once.

We play Kentucky at home on Saturday. It should be a good game, especially since our starters are a little hampered by injuries right now. I hope we get the win.

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Basketball game is picking up

Last Wednesday, we had our second game of the season. I played better, but our team played better also. We beat a pretty solid team and we did it with good play from everybody. We were a lot more aggressive, confident and accurate and it showed as the game wore on. Personally, I had a better game with two fastbreak layups and a 3-pointer. Next week, we have a game that we should easily win, but we’ll see.

I also played today after work and I had a pretty good day. I’m still getting pretty winded sometimes, but I’m hoping it’s just that I’m out of shape. I’m a tiny bit concerned that I may have some kind of asthma or something, but I’m going to give it more time. Today, I did most of my work from inside, making nice passes and playing very aggressively near the hoop. I also got some tough boards and had some nice defensive plays.

Unfortunately, I picked up a nice little injury, too. A big (very big) guy on the other team was dribbling about 15 feet from the hoop. I snuck up on him and when he spun towards me, I stole the ball. I tapped the ball towards my basket and took off after it. But as I stepped by him, he cut me off with his leg. His knee went directly into my thigh and gave me a pretty nasty charlie-horse. I can barely straighten my leg, and standing up and walking are both very painful. I’m a little concerned that I may not be able to play on Wednesday, but I’ll have to wait and see.

It’s good to be playing again and I’m pretty excited about my team in the league this year. We’re pretty good and it’s really fun to play with these guys.

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Another basketball league season begins

Well, the winter league has begun and our team started off with a win this year. But really, when I say “our team”, I’m referring to one dude who scored 30 of our 40 points. I’m pretty sure dude played ball at Texas A&M and he still plays a few days a week around Dallas.

The rest of our team was pretty mediocre on offense. I think we played very solid defense, holding the other team to only 27 points. I think our defense will be the thing that carries us for the first few games and I’m glad we have it to fall back on. I think our team is solid, we just need to get in shape. We’re going to be pretty good.

I personally have a lot of work to do. I didn’t score tonight and I had a few wide open shots. I did have a couple steals and I picked up some ticky-tack (read: bogus) fouls. I had 4 with about 9 minutes left. I really felt the refs just had my number, but I made a couple silly plays too. But I typically start seasons off slow and pick it up after a couple games. I hope that holds this year.