My blog is a poor imitation of Yoni Cohen (but I’m too wordy), John Gasaway (but I’m too lazy to crunch the numbers that heavily), and Bill Simmons (but I’m not that good a writer). 22 months in, and I still don’t know what I’m doing.
But watching John Gasaway move to national coverage, I wanted to make sure I had a forum to comment on all games, not just my teams. Because of this, I had a long-time ban on team-specific blog links. Basketball Prospectus was fine because it was a national website. But Villanova by the Numbers and all the great player-of-the-year stat charts - sorry folks - you get no link because of your devotion to one team.
Thankfully, Mike Rutherford broke this habit when he wrote this post about drawing the CUSA conference tournament bracket on scrap paper at school (along with other random squiggles.) It no longer mattered that Card Chronicle was a team-specific blog. This silly observation was the pulse of college basketball obsession.
Since then I’ve added some clearly great team blogs to the blog-roll at left, but I still haven’t found time for a full-scale link project. And I’ve always been hesitant to add links to blogs for my teams. I figure if you care about Georgetown, you already know where to look. But that’s really not fair, and Cracked Sidewalks called me on it. There is no excuse for me not to have a link up for Hoya Prospectus. Consider the following great posts from this year:
Which Hoyas suck at rebounding
Why the Hoyas aren’t rebounding
Why did Tennessee have to make 10 of 15 threes against Georgetown? - sigh
These types of posts are exactly what I think a stats blog should do. They not only provide the stats, they discuss the visual evidence and strategy that coincides with the numbers. This is perfect.
And I’m absolutely embarrassed that I never linked to this post where Hoya Prospectus claims to read me and makes a tempo-free aerial for the Big East teams. I am such a jerk for not seeing this earlier. Well, consider this an apology and a permanent link. So on those days when I decide not to give you Yet Another Georgetown Recap, (or even if I do), give HP a visit.
Hey - you can’t expect me to be insightful about every Georgetown game, can you? OK, if I had written about Syracuse vs Georgetown I would have written the following:
Nikita Mescheriakov should retire now; he’ll never have a better 2 minutes. Jay Bilas said recently that JT3 doesn’t enter a game with a set rotation, he puts players out on the court depending on the feel of the game. And Jay Bilas said this is a brilliant explanation because then there is no way to criticize any of JT3’s moves. How can you criticize an instinct? On Wednesday night, JT3 was feeling Nikita Mescheriakov… for 2 minutes. And all Mescheriakov did was knock down a pair of threes and roll up the back of Andy Rautins leg while diving for a lose ball. Then Mescheriakov went back to the bench for the rest of the game. Wow, that’s some instinct.