sutomcat
No recent Cali or Iggy awards; Mr Irrelevant
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Welcome to Earth Day!
The first Earth Day was held on April 22, 1970. Prior to this, there was virtually no environmental movement. Factories pumped toxins into the air, recycling was almost non-existent, and gas guzzling vehicles were the norm. The seeds of the modern movement had been planted, however, with the publishing of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962. This book raised the public's awareness of pollution and its effect on health. In 1969, water pollution and chemical waste disposal came to the attention of the public, after the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught fire.
Democratic Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin was deeply concerned about environmental issues. After witnessing the Santa Barbara oil spill in 1969, he began planning for the first Earth Day. This was during the time of Vietnam War protests and teach-ins, and Nelson thought he could bring the problems of pollution into the public consciousness by organizing similar types of teach-ins. He hoped that by shining a spotlight on environmental issues in this way, there may be a chance of bringing them into the realm of national priorities, where they had yet to be seen. He announced Earth Day at a conference in Seattle in September of 1969.
SU News
Syracuse Basketball: Ranking Orange’s premier line-up possibilities for 2019-20 (itlh.com; Adler)
The Syracuse basketball squad will feature a ton of depth, and inexperience, in the upcoming campaign, and its line-up options are plentiful.
The Syracuse basketball team possessed a bunch of lofty expectations heading into the 2018-19 term, and things didn’t pan out exactly as ‘Cuse Nation had expected. Still, this past stanza didn’t prove a total disaster, as the Orange claimed 20 total victories and secured a spot in the NCAA Tournament. During the regular season, it upset No. 1 Duke on the road and also defeated former Big East Conference nemesis Georgetown.
With senior point guard, Frank Howard gone and junior wing Tyus Battle electing to forgo his final stint on the Hill to pursue a professional career, SU’s 2019-20 roster is set to receive a significant make-over. Sophomore forward Oshae Brissett is testing the NBA Draft process, although I honestly anticipate that he will return to Central New York for another go-round.
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What will it take for Syracuse basketball to improve next season? - The Juice Online (the juice; Irvine)
The last three seasons, the Syracuse men’s basketball team has been stuck in mud of mediocrity.
Let’s put aside wins, losses and NCAA Tournament runs, and look at the team’s adjusted efficiency margin (AdjEM). This is a tempo-free metric of how many more points per 100 possessions the offense will score than the defense gives up, adjusted by the strength of opponents. For year-over-year comparisons of how ‘good’ a college basketball team is, this is one of the best measures.
From 2017 through 2019, Syracuse’s AdjEM has gone from 13.4 to 14.8 to 15.2 this past season. None of those are the worst in the last 20 years – not even in the bottom four. But it is the worst three-year run in the last two decades that KenPom has recorded data.
The problem is that Syracuse hasn’t improved. The team has stagnated.
The best year-over-year improvement in AdjEM came in 2002-2003, when Syracuse won the National Championship. The special sauce that season isn’t hard to figure out: Carmelo Anthony.
But the next two best one-season turnarounds are perhaps a bit more surprising. In 2008-2009, Jonny Flynn led a team with only one senior to an 8-point AdjEM improvement. To put that in perspective, had this past year’s team had an 8-point higher AdjEM it would have finished on the level of Virginia Tech or Florida State.
The next best single-season improvement was 5.8 AdjEM in 2015-2016. The year prior to that was Syracuse’s third worst in the last 20 years, so the team had little room to go but up. Nonetheless, the senior leadership of Mike Gbinije and Trevor Cooney combined with the precociousness of freshmen Malachi Richardson and Tyler Lydon led the team to heights no one saw coming.
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Mets’ Todd Frazier on meeting Syracuse’s Jim Boeheim: ‘I felt like I was 12 years old again’ (PS; Kramer)
New York Mets third baseman Todd Frazier grew up in New Jersey as a huge fan of Syracuse University basketball and head coach Jim Boeheim.
So when Frazier got a chance to meet Boeheim on Friday morning in the coach’s office at the Carmelo Anthony Center, Frazier easily slipped from his mode as pro athlete into young wannabe.
Frazier, 33, said he and Boeheim talked baseball (Boeheim is a fan of the Yankees, one of Frazier’s former teams), basketball, recruiting and the upcoming SU season. Boeheim took him on a tour of the facility.
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Other
A joy-rider’s dream: keys in an unlocked $650K Rolls Royce in parking lot in Syracuse (PS; Libonati)
As two teen boys checked car door handles Monday afternoon in a downtown parking lot, they found one -- not just with a few things to take, but with the keys inside.
A new-looking $650,000 Rolls Royce Phantom unlocked, sitting in a parking lot at 333 West Washington Street, with the keys inside. The two hopped in, police say.
The two 15-year-olds ran into a rarity. All together, Rolls Royce regularly only sells just more than 4,000 cars per year. For comparison, Mercedes-Benz regularly sells just more than 2 million cars per year.
In interviews with police, the teens admitted to joy-riding the Rolls around for nearly two hours, eventually parking it in a vacant lot on the 200 block of Leon Street Monday and leaving it there.
Leon Street, mostly secluded and tree-lined, seemed the perfect place to dump a stolen car. When officers arrived later, they found the Rolls was parked next to another stolen car, police said. The teens involved in stealing the Rolls Royce have not yet been linked to the other stolen car.
When the teens parked the car on Leon Street, they snapped photos with it, briefly unaware of a man who noticed them, police said.
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