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Jim Boeheim’s radio show is on Thursdays from 7-9PM on ESPN Radio in Syracuse, which is AM1200 or FM 97.7 on the dial. The show originates from Delmonico’s Italian Steakhouse on Erie Boulevard in Syracuse. The first hour, hosted by Matt Park, the Voice of the Orange, is on their general network. The second hour, which begins with the conference season, is hosted by Gomez, a local radio personality.
You can call into the show locally at 315-424-8599 or nationally at 1-888-746-2873. For Gomez’s portion, use 315-424-8599. Or you can submit questions from this page:
http://cuse.com/sb_output.aspx?form=4
Or on Twitter at mattpark1 or “askBoeheim”.
The show can be heard in Syracuse on FM 99.5. It’s sometime simulcast on AM 1200 or FM 97.7. You can also get it on: http://tunein.com/radio/WGVA-1240-s29191/
I will be posting my rough transcript the night of the broadcast focusing on my questions, the team and their last and next games and then a second post the next day on other things that were discussed.
MY QUESTIONS/COMMENTS
First hour:
“Coach, we’ve now played everyone in the conference. In your view, who are the top players in the conference and where would our two 5th year seniors rank in that group? “
Second hour:
“Coach, who in your judgement are the top freshmen in the conference and where would our freshmen rank in that group?”
COACH BOEHEIM
(I have, in some instances, put together statements from different parts of the broadcast on the same subject. They are now doing two hour shows. I will do two posts: one on the night of the broadcast on the issues directly relating to the team on the other the next days on other things that were talked about.) – For this last show, I decided to write it up all at once. It was a bad decision. But here goes…
Jim wasn’t much interesting in talking about anything beyond the Florida State game: “They had a bad game against us but are much better now. They just crushed Notre Dame. It will be a very difficult game.” Matt Park suggested that’s have a lot of ups and downs with all their freshmen and sophomores. JB: “It’s hard to tell. They’ve won 17 games with a lot of young players. When they play well they are very good. Some teams just don’t have the talent. They do. A couple of their guys will be first round picks….They are a better team than we saw, better on defense. We won’t shoot 62% this time. We won’t get so many lay-ups and open looks. They shot poorly against us in that first game.”
Matt wanted to discuss the possibilities with various game results. JB: “It’s foolish to speculate on the post season…. I like having the double bye (in the ACC tournament) because it means you’re better. “ Coach said that “neither Pittsburgh or Virginia Tech is going to win because they are playing each other”, then realized that that means one of them would win.
About the UNC game: We didn’t do anything well against North Carolina. Nothing we did was very good. But we battled really hard and fought them. We were much better on defense than in the first game. That loose ball we didn’t get with 40 seconds left really hurt us. We could have tied the game. You usually have to play well to stay in the game at Duke and North Carolina.”
Liam in Pompey congratulated Michael Gbinije on his outstanding senior day game and felt we played well enough to win at UNC but we needed to make more three pointers. As usual, he did like some of the calls- the warding off calls and the loose ball call on Cooney. Jim said “The 3’s would have helped. There were a couple of close calls. You have to overcome them. We had too many turnovers. Michael had a phenomenal offensive game against NC State.”
I called in my question about the best players in the league. JB: “Our guys are good. Mike has had as good a year as anybody. Sheldon McCellan and Tonye Jakiri of Miami, Malcolm Brogden and Anthony Gill of Virginia, Anthony Barber, who had a great year, Louisville’s two fifth year seniors, (Damion lee and Trey Lewis), Pitt’s Jamel Artis, although he had a bad game last night, Bryce Johnson of North Carolina, Grayson Allen and Brandon Ingram of Duke are all very good.” Does Mike have a shot at league MVP? “No, you have to come from one of the top two teams. Johnson or Brogden will get it. Miami has a lot of guys.”
They discussed BC’s latest loss, Matt saying that his heart sank as the lead they’d had the whole game slipped away. The Eagles have had a winless conference season in both football and basketball. “They missed a loose ball with 1.1 seconds left- all the guys has to do is fall on the ball and the game’s over. The clock would have run out. But he reached for it. Then they left a guy open for a lay-up. They used Barber as a decoy. Two BC guys collided. They also missed 9 free throws.” (Chuckles)
A caller named “Collie, (sp?) said he was a Georgetown fan for moved to Syracuse and is now an Orange fan. JB: “Well, good!” He thanked the coach and his team for “bringing it” to every game. Jim said he knew a professor at SU who had previously been at Georgetown and also changed his allegiance. Matt said “That’s two conversions form the dark side.” Jim: “They came to see the light.”
They talked about the Hoyas. “That senior guard they brought back who had a big game against us isn’t even playing anymore, so they’ve made a lot of changes. It’s been a real struggle for them.” I think he meant senior center Bradley Hayes, who had 21 points and 8 rebounds but hasn’t played any of their last 5 games, due to a broken hand.
In the league, “Virginia is playing at a high level with Miami and Louisville the next best. Virginia Tech had 6 of their first 8 on the road or they’d be higher in the standings. Miami has veteran guards and a big guy in the middle with four seniors. They are a very good team.
Steve in Liverpool wanted to know if the coach can tell in practice if his team is going to play well. JB: “I’ve had practices were players were running up and down the court and hitting all their shots and the next day we didn’t play well. Other times everyone seems to be slow and we play well the next day. Sometimes we’ll be great in the first half and don’t look like the same team in the second half. Sometimes we play poorly in the first half and well in the second half. There’s no indication we are going to play like that. Wake forest has played everyone tough but we went done there and blew them out. It was our best game, along with Notre Dame and Florida State. We did it with great shooting. We aren’t really a great shooting team. We’re pretty good. You just don’t see those things coming.” Don’t coaches always say that how you practice is how you play? I guess not.
Marcus Posley of St. Bonaventure scored 47 points in a victory over St. Joseph’s. JB: “I thought we played pretty well against them on defense.” (He was 3 for 16 against us and scored 9 points.) The Bonnies are 21-7 and are helping our resume. We now are 2-5 against the Top 25, 2-3 against then next 25 and 3-0 against the next 50. Florida State is 1-5 against the top 25 and 2-2 against the second 25, (Matt didn’t say what they were against the next 50.)We won at Duke and beat Texas A&M and Connecticut on neutral courts. Those are good wins. It’s not just about a tough schedule. Everybody has bad losses….If we’d just split with Pitt. They don’t have any good non-conference wins There are a lot of teams like that. It’s about how good a team is at its best. Just look at the whole year: are they good enough?”
Pat called to ask how the team has compared to the coach’s expectations. Pat’s own view is that we’ve been stronger on defense than he expected but He thinks the offense has underperformed. Coach agreed with him. “Yes…we lead the league in three point percentage defense and steals. If we had a shot blocker we could be even better. It’s hard to shoot a high percentage with no inside scorer. We are second in the league in three point shots and our percentage is high. The offense is a little less than I’d hoped. Our rebounding has been OK overall, despite being horrendous in a couple of games. We’ve turned the ball over more than I’ve liked. We’re a solid middle of the road in this league. We aren’t at the top but we aren’t near the bottom, either. We’ve pulled put most of the close games. Given everything we’ve gone through, you have to be happy.” Matt looked it up and we are at 29% vs. three points shots. The next best in the league is Virginia Tech at 32%, so it’s not close.
The theme continued when Gomez took over for the last hour. “There are twists and turns each season. Each team has its own identification, its highs and lows. Sometimes you are disappointed at the end of the year. Each team has their own memories and patterns about what they did and how they did it….We’ve played hard fin every game, especially the conference games. You expect to get knocked down by 20 a couple of times but ti didn’t happen. Look at the guys who left early and the disappointment of a guy we thought fully qualified in every way who is having a great year in junior college.” (He’s averaging 10.5 points and 8 rebounds in 20 minutes a game: http://www.njcaa.org/sports/mbkb/2015-16/div1/players/moustaphadiagne3wjo )
"We had a good recruiting year and you young players and gotten great experience. We’ve had an even better recruiting year and a have a 7-2 guy. We’ll have more balance next year. Tyler Lydon will go back to playing forward and Malachi Richardson to guard, their natural positons.” Hmm… and even better recruiting year? So Battle and Moyer will be even better than Lydon and Richardson? Then add in the 7-2 guy? Sign me up for that!
Coach agreed that Michael Gbinije had the greatest senior day game he’d seen- and that we needed him to do so to win that game. Does he talk to his seniors at the end of the season? “We sit down and talk about what’s ahead. Michael will play in the summer leagues. Trevor will play overseas. There are several different levels and there’s always somebody who needs someone who can shoot. Meanwhile they’ve put in quite a few hours in grad school.” I thought Michael was going to be in the Olympics with the Nigerian team. And what will they do with those hours of grad school? Are they going to get master’s degrees?
Gomez found an article where college basketball players gave suggestions for rules they’d like to see:
- A 24 second shot clock. “That’s a great rule but we won’t see it for several years.
- There should be a transfer rule, (sitting out for a year) for coach, just as there is for players. Coach laughed at that one. “Adults can do things children cannot.” Right now we have about 600-700 transfers . If we didn’t have the transfer rule we’d have 2,000. It would be chaos. We’d be recruiting all the time. Coaches leaving doesn’t happen all the time. When Damien lee left Drexel he hurt the school that trained him, taught him. It doesn’t seem right.“
- Get rid of the “one and done” rule. If a player wants to go right to the NBA, he should be able to. But if a kid wants to go to college, then eh should have to stay one year. JB liked the idea but “It’s up to the NBA and they don’t want high school kids.
- Players should foul out after 6 fouls, not 5. “We tried that in the big East years ago and the players played more aggressively and committed more fouls. I don’t think ti will come back.
- There should be a standard ball used by all schools. “It’s a good idea. Every school has a contract. We’re a Nike school so we use a Nike ball. Leagues have contracts.” Matt looked it up and Wilson is used for the NCAA tournament. JB: “They bought that. It’s all money, bought and paid for.”
- Coaches should be allowed to call time outs. JB: “Players have no idea when to call time outs. And we should go back to 5 time outs but each should be 30 seconds. And players shouldn’t be able to consult with the coaches when they are checking the monitor- it’s a free time out.”
I called in my second question about the best freshmen in the conference. “Our guys are right there. Then there’s Ingram of Duke and the two Florida State guys, (Dwayne Bacon and Malik Beasley) . Those are the top 5. Ingram will probably be the freshman of the Year. Donovan Mitchell of Louisville is very good.” I said that it’s been a long time since we had two freshmen as good as Lydon and Richardson and they bode well for the future. Coach started to suggest Jerami Grant and Tyler Ennis but then remembered they weren’t in the same class. “Yeah, those two guys are pretty good. And the incoming players are going to be good players, too.”
Gomez brought up the Sporting News Article listing the “most hated players in college basketball history”, which listed two SU guys: Derrick Coleman and Eric Devendorf. JB didn’t think much of it. “What does it mean? Who says that? The only people that hated Derrick were the media. The players loved him. Eric is another case.” Gomez suggested it was ‘tongue in cheek’. JB: “I don’t think so.” Christian Laettner topped the list because “He was good and won. He was brash and talked a lot… I just don’t like that whole line of thinking.”
Gomez said the AP top 25 “has a losing record on the road for the first time since 1945.” That seems strange. They play a lot of conference road games. “The top ten teams have 73 losses- the most since 1948-49.” Actually that was the year of the first poll, so there was no AP Top 25. JB: “The top teams usually have 2-3 losses. They might be 7-3 on the road at worst….We’ve won three road games and three more at a neutral site.“
This is the anniversary of the breaking of the record 27 game losing streak in 1962, with a win over Boston College. “That was before I got here. I was a senior in high school. They were bad. I figured I could play there. We turned it around pretty quickly. When I was a sophomore we won 17 games and went to the NIT when there were 16 teams in the NCAA tournament and another 16 in the NIT.” Gomex noted that the streak began with a game against Canisius in the War Memorial in 1961 that had an attendance of 939 people. JB: “This year we averaged 21,500 and people were complaining.”
Bill Self won his 12th straight Big 12 title. “He’s done an amazing job there. Jim Larranaga at Miami ahs done a great job. So has the Oregon coach, (Dana Altman).” Brian Forbes of Michigan State hit 11 three pointers against Rutgers, breaking the record set by Chris Hill against us in a 2003 game. “But we won.”
On other SU teams. “Coach Q’s done a great job. The women are exciting to watch. They press and shoot the whole game. It’s not boring. . Our lacrosse team has a “great face off guy. We’re going to be in it all the way. I hate to miss a lacrosse game.”
The Connecticut women are 29-0. “Shocking. Next year they will lose the best player in the country and probably drop all the way to 2-3 losses.” Breanna Stewart is “a really nice person. Every time I see her she talks to my kids. She’s humble but competitive…. I watch the SU and Connecticut girls every chance I get. “
The ACC tournament will be in “a good place a good venue”, (the Verizon center in Washington). Will the president show up? “Maybe, if we get to the finals. The President and his wife talked to our Olympic team. They are very nice people. Joe Biden has been to our games as well.” Gomez told two stories about his last visit to the Verizon Center. He looked for a seat that had been sued by a reporter from a team that had been eliminated. He thought he had one and sat in what turned out to be John Feinstein’s seat. “He was very nice about it when he threw him out.” The other story was when president Obama came by, surrounded by about 40 secret service agents. Gomez reached into his pocket for his phone to take a picture. That was a no-no. “
Each week there seem to be more amazing things to talk about with Steph Curry. “If he’s playing you’re going to have to watch it. He does things that are crazy.” One of the records Curry has set is the first player to score 50 points with one free throw attempt. He’s scored 40 points 7 times without playing in the fourth quarter. JB: He’s averaging 30 points a game and doesn’t play the fourth quarter much of the time.” He and Jordan Spieth have contracts with Under-Armour, who made $1 billion dollars last year. They are doing for them what Jordan did for Nike.”
Gomez said that Jerry West said that Curry, like Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan before him, is changing the game. Jim: “I’ve known Jerry for years. We dined with him at a resort. He’s the best analyst of players. He knows the game better than anybody. He’s got a small percentage of the Warriors and advises them. He was teaching my boys how to post up- right in the restaurant. I told them “That’s Jerry West…one of the five best players ever. “
Charles Barkley represented “old school” players in complaining that modern players are too friendly: they don’t hate the other team like in the old days. JB wasn’t buying it. “That’s nothing. These guys play with and against each other through high school and AAU ball. They’re not going to hate each other just because they are playing against each other.” What about Carmelo telling a heckler to go to the owner to get his money back? “he shouldn’t have to apologize for that. You are going to take heat when you’re not good enough. They need a free agent. The Lakers want Durrant and Westbrook while the Knicks want the Memphis Gasol, (Marc) and need a guard. There’s not many of those guys around. Kyle Lowery, who they tried to get last year, is now one of the best in the league. They’ve got to find the guy who’s almost there.” I think the Knick’s problem is that they’ve got too many guys who are ‘almost’ there.
Will Jim Harbaugh’s “spring break” football catch on? “They’ll make a rule against it next year.”
Gomez said that the year has “kinda zipped by”. JB: “Has it? I think I’ve aged two week tonight.”
And with that, Thursday is once again just another night of the week….
You can call into the show locally at 315-424-8599 or nationally at 1-888-746-2873. For Gomez’s portion, use 315-424-8599. Or you can submit questions from this page:
http://cuse.com/sb_output.aspx?form=4
Or on Twitter at mattpark1 or “askBoeheim”.
The show can be heard in Syracuse on FM 99.5. It’s sometime simulcast on AM 1200 or FM 97.7. You can also get it on: http://tunein.com/radio/WGVA-1240-s29191/
I will be posting my rough transcript the night of the broadcast focusing on my questions, the team and their last and next games and then a second post the next day on other things that were discussed.
MY QUESTIONS/COMMENTS
First hour:
“Coach, we’ve now played everyone in the conference. In your view, who are the top players in the conference and where would our two 5th year seniors rank in that group? “
Second hour:
“Coach, who in your judgement are the top freshmen in the conference and where would our freshmen rank in that group?”
COACH BOEHEIM
(I have, in some instances, put together statements from different parts of the broadcast on the same subject. They are now doing two hour shows. I will do two posts: one on the night of the broadcast on the issues directly relating to the team on the other the next days on other things that were talked about.) – For this last show, I decided to write it up all at once. It was a bad decision. But here goes…
Jim wasn’t much interesting in talking about anything beyond the Florida State game: “They had a bad game against us but are much better now. They just crushed Notre Dame. It will be a very difficult game.” Matt Park suggested that’s have a lot of ups and downs with all their freshmen and sophomores. JB: “It’s hard to tell. They’ve won 17 games with a lot of young players. When they play well they are very good. Some teams just don’t have the talent. They do. A couple of their guys will be first round picks….They are a better team than we saw, better on defense. We won’t shoot 62% this time. We won’t get so many lay-ups and open looks. They shot poorly against us in that first game.”
Matt wanted to discuss the possibilities with various game results. JB: “It’s foolish to speculate on the post season…. I like having the double bye (in the ACC tournament) because it means you’re better. “ Coach said that “neither Pittsburgh or Virginia Tech is going to win because they are playing each other”, then realized that that means one of them would win.
About the UNC game: We didn’t do anything well against North Carolina. Nothing we did was very good. But we battled really hard and fought them. We were much better on defense than in the first game. That loose ball we didn’t get with 40 seconds left really hurt us. We could have tied the game. You usually have to play well to stay in the game at Duke and North Carolina.”
Liam in Pompey congratulated Michael Gbinije on his outstanding senior day game and felt we played well enough to win at UNC but we needed to make more three pointers. As usual, he did like some of the calls- the warding off calls and the loose ball call on Cooney. Jim said “The 3’s would have helped. There were a couple of close calls. You have to overcome them. We had too many turnovers. Michael had a phenomenal offensive game against NC State.”
I called in my question about the best players in the league. JB: “Our guys are good. Mike has had as good a year as anybody. Sheldon McCellan and Tonye Jakiri of Miami, Malcolm Brogden and Anthony Gill of Virginia, Anthony Barber, who had a great year, Louisville’s two fifth year seniors, (Damion lee and Trey Lewis), Pitt’s Jamel Artis, although he had a bad game last night, Bryce Johnson of North Carolina, Grayson Allen and Brandon Ingram of Duke are all very good.” Does Mike have a shot at league MVP? “No, you have to come from one of the top two teams. Johnson or Brogden will get it. Miami has a lot of guys.”
They discussed BC’s latest loss, Matt saying that his heart sank as the lead they’d had the whole game slipped away. The Eagles have had a winless conference season in both football and basketball. “They missed a loose ball with 1.1 seconds left- all the guys has to do is fall on the ball and the game’s over. The clock would have run out. But he reached for it. Then they left a guy open for a lay-up. They used Barber as a decoy. Two BC guys collided. They also missed 9 free throws.” (Chuckles)
A caller named “Collie, (sp?) said he was a Georgetown fan for moved to Syracuse and is now an Orange fan. JB: “Well, good!” He thanked the coach and his team for “bringing it” to every game. Jim said he knew a professor at SU who had previously been at Georgetown and also changed his allegiance. Matt said “That’s two conversions form the dark side.” Jim: “They came to see the light.”
They talked about the Hoyas. “That senior guard they brought back who had a big game against us isn’t even playing anymore, so they’ve made a lot of changes. It’s been a real struggle for them.” I think he meant senior center Bradley Hayes, who had 21 points and 8 rebounds but hasn’t played any of their last 5 games, due to a broken hand.
In the league, “Virginia is playing at a high level with Miami and Louisville the next best. Virginia Tech had 6 of their first 8 on the road or they’d be higher in the standings. Miami has veteran guards and a big guy in the middle with four seniors. They are a very good team.
Steve in Liverpool wanted to know if the coach can tell in practice if his team is going to play well. JB: “I’ve had practices were players were running up and down the court and hitting all their shots and the next day we didn’t play well. Other times everyone seems to be slow and we play well the next day. Sometimes we’ll be great in the first half and don’t look like the same team in the second half. Sometimes we play poorly in the first half and well in the second half. There’s no indication we are going to play like that. Wake forest has played everyone tough but we went done there and blew them out. It was our best game, along with Notre Dame and Florida State. We did it with great shooting. We aren’t really a great shooting team. We’re pretty good. You just don’t see those things coming.” Don’t coaches always say that how you practice is how you play? I guess not.
Marcus Posley of St. Bonaventure scored 47 points in a victory over St. Joseph’s. JB: “I thought we played pretty well against them on defense.” (He was 3 for 16 against us and scored 9 points.) The Bonnies are 21-7 and are helping our resume. We now are 2-5 against the Top 25, 2-3 against then next 25 and 3-0 against the next 50. Florida State is 1-5 against the top 25 and 2-2 against the second 25, (Matt didn’t say what they were against the next 50.)We won at Duke and beat Texas A&M and Connecticut on neutral courts. Those are good wins. It’s not just about a tough schedule. Everybody has bad losses….If we’d just split with Pitt. They don’t have any good non-conference wins There are a lot of teams like that. It’s about how good a team is at its best. Just look at the whole year: are they good enough?”
Pat called to ask how the team has compared to the coach’s expectations. Pat’s own view is that we’ve been stronger on defense than he expected but He thinks the offense has underperformed. Coach agreed with him. “Yes…we lead the league in three point percentage defense and steals. If we had a shot blocker we could be even better. It’s hard to shoot a high percentage with no inside scorer. We are second in the league in three point shots and our percentage is high. The offense is a little less than I’d hoped. Our rebounding has been OK overall, despite being horrendous in a couple of games. We’ve turned the ball over more than I’ve liked. We’re a solid middle of the road in this league. We aren’t at the top but we aren’t near the bottom, either. We’ve pulled put most of the close games. Given everything we’ve gone through, you have to be happy.” Matt looked it up and we are at 29% vs. three points shots. The next best in the league is Virginia Tech at 32%, so it’s not close.
The theme continued when Gomez took over for the last hour. “There are twists and turns each season. Each team has its own identification, its highs and lows. Sometimes you are disappointed at the end of the year. Each team has their own memories and patterns about what they did and how they did it….We’ve played hard fin every game, especially the conference games. You expect to get knocked down by 20 a couple of times but ti didn’t happen. Look at the guys who left early and the disappointment of a guy we thought fully qualified in every way who is having a great year in junior college.” (He’s averaging 10.5 points and 8 rebounds in 20 minutes a game: http://www.njcaa.org/sports/mbkb/2015-16/div1/players/moustaphadiagne3wjo )
"We had a good recruiting year and you young players and gotten great experience. We’ve had an even better recruiting year and a have a 7-2 guy. We’ll have more balance next year. Tyler Lydon will go back to playing forward and Malachi Richardson to guard, their natural positons.” Hmm… and even better recruiting year? So Battle and Moyer will be even better than Lydon and Richardson? Then add in the 7-2 guy? Sign me up for that!
Coach agreed that Michael Gbinije had the greatest senior day game he’d seen- and that we needed him to do so to win that game. Does he talk to his seniors at the end of the season? “We sit down and talk about what’s ahead. Michael will play in the summer leagues. Trevor will play overseas. There are several different levels and there’s always somebody who needs someone who can shoot. Meanwhile they’ve put in quite a few hours in grad school.” I thought Michael was going to be in the Olympics with the Nigerian team. And what will they do with those hours of grad school? Are they going to get master’s degrees?
Gomez found an article where college basketball players gave suggestions for rules they’d like to see:
- A 24 second shot clock. “That’s a great rule but we won’t see it for several years.
- There should be a transfer rule, (sitting out for a year) for coach, just as there is for players. Coach laughed at that one. “Adults can do things children cannot.” Right now we have about 600-700 transfers . If we didn’t have the transfer rule we’d have 2,000. It would be chaos. We’d be recruiting all the time. Coaches leaving doesn’t happen all the time. When Damien lee left Drexel he hurt the school that trained him, taught him. It doesn’t seem right.“
- Get rid of the “one and done” rule. If a player wants to go right to the NBA, he should be able to. But if a kid wants to go to college, then eh should have to stay one year. JB liked the idea but “It’s up to the NBA and they don’t want high school kids.
- Players should foul out after 6 fouls, not 5. “We tried that in the big East years ago and the players played more aggressively and committed more fouls. I don’t think ti will come back.
- There should be a standard ball used by all schools. “It’s a good idea. Every school has a contract. We’re a Nike school so we use a Nike ball. Leagues have contracts.” Matt looked it up and Wilson is used for the NCAA tournament. JB: “They bought that. It’s all money, bought and paid for.”
- Coaches should be allowed to call time outs. JB: “Players have no idea when to call time outs. And we should go back to 5 time outs but each should be 30 seconds. And players shouldn’t be able to consult with the coaches when they are checking the monitor- it’s a free time out.”
I called in my second question about the best freshmen in the conference. “Our guys are right there. Then there’s Ingram of Duke and the two Florida State guys, (Dwayne Bacon and Malik Beasley) . Those are the top 5. Ingram will probably be the freshman of the Year. Donovan Mitchell of Louisville is very good.” I said that it’s been a long time since we had two freshmen as good as Lydon and Richardson and they bode well for the future. Coach started to suggest Jerami Grant and Tyler Ennis but then remembered they weren’t in the same class. “Yeah, those two guys are pretty good. And the incoming players are going to be good players, too.”
Gomez brought up the Sporting News Article listing the “most hated players in college basketball history”, which listed two SU guys: Derrick Coleman and Eric Devendorf. JB didn’t think much of it. “What does it mean? Who says that? The only people that hated Derrick were the media. The players loved him. Eric is another case.” Gomez suggested it was ‘tongue in cheek’. JB: “I don’t think so.” Christian Laettner topped the list because “He was good and won. He was brash and talked a lot… I just don’t like that whole line of thinking.”
Gomez said the AP top 25 “has a losing record on the road for the first time since 1945.” That seems strange. They play a lot of conference road games. “The top ten teams have 73 losses- the most since 1948-49.” Actually that was the year of the first poll, so there was no AP Top 25. JB: “The top teams usually have 2-3 losses. They might be 7-3 on the road at worst….We’ve won three road games and three more at a neutral site.“
This is the anniversary of the breaking of the record 27 game losing streak in 1962, with a win over Boston College. “That was before I got here. I was a senior in high school. They were bad. I figured I could play there. We turned it around pretty quickly. When I was a sophomore we won 17 games and went to the NIT when there were 16 teams in the NCAA tournament and another 16 in the NIT.” Gomex noted that the streak began with a game against Canisius in the War Memorial in 1961 that had an attendance of 939 people. JB: “This year we averaged 21,500 and people were complaining.”
Bill Self won his 12th straight Big 12 title. “He’s done an amazing job there. Jim Larranaga at Miami ahs done a great job. So has the Oregon coach, (Dana Altman).” Brian Forbes of Michigan State hit 11 three pointers against Rutgers, breaking the record set by Chris Hill against us in a 2003 game. “But we won.”
On other SU teams. “Coach Q’s done a great job. The women are exciting to watch. They press and shoot the whole game. It’s not boring. . Our lacrosse team has a “great face off guy. We’re going to be in it all the way. I hate to miss a lacrosse game.”
The Connecticut women are 29-0. “Shocking. Next year they will lose the best player in the country and probably drop all the way to 2-3 losses.” Breanna Stewart is “a really nice person. Every time I see her she talks to my kids. She’s humble but competitive…. I watch the SU and Connecticut girls every chance I get. “
The ACC tournament will be in “a good place a good venue”, (the Verizon center in Washington). Will the president show up? “Maybe, if we get to the finals. The President and his wife talked to our Olympic team. They are very nice people. Joe Biden has been to our games as well.” Gomez told two stories about his last visit to the Verizon Center. He looked for a seat that had been sued by a reporter from a team that had been eliminated. He thought he had one and sat in what turned out to be John Feinstein’s seat. “He was very nice about it when he threw him out.” The other story was when president Obama came by, surrounded by about 40 secret service agents. Gomez reached into his pocket for his phone to take a picture. That was a no-no. “
Each week there seem to be more amazing things to talk about with Steph Curry. “If he’s playing you’re going to have to watch it. He does things that are crazy.” One of the records Curry has set is the first player to score 50 points with one free throw attempt. He’s scored 40 points 7 times without playing in the fourth quarter. JB: He’s averaging 30 points a game and doesn’t play the fourth quarter much of the time.” He and Jordan Spieth have contracts with Under-Armour, who made $1 billion dollars last year. They are doing for them what Jordan did for Nike.”
Gomez said that Jerry West said that Curry, like Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan before him, is changing the game. Jim: “I’ve known Jerry for years. We dined with him at a resort. He’s the best analyst of players. He knows the game better than anybody. He’s got a small percentage of the Warriors and advises them. He was teaching my boys how to post up- right in the restaurant. I told them “That’s Jerry West…one of the five best players ever. “
Charles Barkley represented “old school” players in complaining that modern players are too friendly: they don’t hate the other team like in the old days. JB wasn’t buying it. “That’s nothing. These guys play with and against each other through high school and AAU ball. They’re not going to hate each other just because they are playing against each other.” What about Carmelo telling a heckler to go to the owner to get his money back? “he shouldn’t have to apologize for that. You are going to take heat when you’re not good enough. They need a free agent. The Lakers want Durrant and Westbrook while the Knicks want the Memphis Gasol, (Marc) and need a guard. There’s not many of those guys around. Kyle Lowery, who they tried to get last year, is now one of the best in the league. They’ve got to find the guy who’s almost there.” I think the Knick’s problem is that they’ve got too many guys who are ‘almost’ there.
Will Jim Harbaugh’s “spring break” football catch on? “They’ll make a rule against it next year.”
Gomez said that the year has “kinda zipped by”. JB: “Has it? I think I’ve aged two week tonight.”
And with that, Thursday is once again just another night of the week….
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