The start of another basketball season, and the coach is asked to assess his team: “We have good outside shooters. Unfortunately, we play our games indoors.”
Stony Brook, New York State taxpayer-funded college, Saturday scheduled an opening-game mismatch against the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy. The design was for Division I Stony Brook to start with an easy win, by 35, 40, maybe even 50. The idea — and ostensibly the ideal — was to win big, not to humiliate a Division III team and a Long Island-neighbor school.
Stony Brook instead won by 71, 103-32. And it wasn’t one of those “nothing-we-could-do-to-prevent-it” humiliations. Stony Brook took 29 3-point shots, making 12, which accounted for more points than the MMA scored.
That Stony Brook coach Steve Pikiell would instruct his team to kill some clock and not attempt a 3-point shot with a 50-plus point lead — to not further stomp a beaten opponent as, heaven forbid, perhaps a lasting lesson to his student-athletes in humanity and winning with class — was abrogated.
In fact, at 76-18, Stony Brook attempted seven more 3-pointers.
But extra-ugly, downside-only behavior has become a sports standard. It’s the bag we’re in.
Consider our top four pro sports’ commissioners, having their sports buy into “fantasy” gambling operations, have declared this form of gambling isn’t gambling.
OK, so then from where do the payouts come? The DraftKings Welfare Fund? They come from gambling losses — after the house rakes its take!
But there’s little condemnation for such shameless “guardianship” of sports. Our commissioners are now in the business of encouraging their sports’ fans to bet a lot on their leagues’ players, lose a lot — anything to service their anything-for-a-buck mandates — and they’re issued passes.
Saturday, during ESPN’s Florida-South Carolina, analyst Ed Cunningham casually noted, “Eighty teams will play in bowl games this season.” Then, as if to emphasize the craziness of what he’d just said, he repeated, and with emphasis, “Eighty.”
Although it might have escaped Cunningham’s sense of the issue, he was working on and for ESPN, which will televise 37 of the 40 bowl games. It’s for ESPN that many of them will be played.
Guaranteed, a competitive game played between 7-6 and/or 6-7 teams will bring, “Don’t tell these kids they don’t belong in a bowl game!”
Many of us, until Thursday night’s Bills-Jets CBS/NFLN telecast, had no idea we’d tuned in for America Honors Rex Ryan Night. CBS/NFLN presented dozens of close-ups of him, perhaps in the belief he’d be doing something other than watching the game from the sideline.
But the most absurd outside shooting from indoors came from NFLN’s postgame studio, where analyst and former NFL running back Heath Evans hollered — and with full, authoritative confidence — that had the Jets kicked a field goal earlier in the game, they wouldn’t have had to go for a late TD from the Buffalo 7, the Jets down, 22-17.
“Then,” said Evans, “if they had kicked for three, here, guess what? They would have won!”
And so an expert NFL Network analyst told a national audience that had the Jets chosen to kick a field goal earlier, nothing would have changed — even if every ensuing play, starting with the kickoff following that non-attempted field goal (had it been good) would have changed. Yup, the Jets would still be in the exact place — fourth-and-goal from the Buffalo 7, kicking for the win.
Again, we’re used to this. None of us are surprised. And remember: if you own part of the house, it’s not gambling.
In Kareem doc, not everything adds up
HBO’s Kareem Abdul-Jabbar documentary, while well-produced and loaded with neat pictures and video, clearly traded on Abdul-Jabbar’s presence and cooperation to create a portrayal that met with his full approval rather than include unsightly truths.
Presented as a man of unyielding dignity and principles, his frequent sellouts of both went missing.
Although he wrote in his autobiography that he credits his 20-year NBA longevity to wearing low-cut sneakers — high-tops, he claimed, transferred shock to the knees, “the great nemesis of the basketball player,” boasting that he was “Galileo out there on this.”
Galileo, my foot. He came to do TV commercial endorsements for fashionable, expensive, Third World-made Reebok high-tops.
He also wrote in his autobiography that he rejected all alcoholic beverages, not just as a Muslim, but in his recognition of booze as an enemy of civilized societies.
And then he appeared in TV commercials for Coors beer.
The NYC Dept. of Consumer Affairs cited Abdul-Jabbar for false advertising, specifically for endorsing a product — beer — that he not only doesn’t use but personally and publicly, as per his sold book, condemns.
He also sold his name, fame and dignity to the scam-infested 1990s rage that pitched newly produced, unregulated sports trading cards as get-rich-quick rare collectibles. From the set of a home shopping network, Abdul-Jabbar congratulated children for the “entrepreneurial spirit” he witnessed at card and autograph shows. It was nauseating, but a payday.
There’s more where those came from, but with none of it lending rhyme to the overall theme of the HBO documentary on Abdul-Jabbar, none of it was included.
An infomercial would have been better
FOX on Sunday senselessly stuck us with a Saints-Skins blowout until its 47-14 end rather than switching to Cowboys-Bucs or Lions-Packers. Come on! Erin Andrews was in Green Bay!
Professionals: After making a late second-quarter tackle, Saints LB Obum Gwacham waggled his finger toward the Skins as if he were Dikembe Mutombo. Really? The Saints already had allowed 24 points, and, in the end, 554 yards, waggle, waggle.
First FOX, then CBS during Pats-Giants. Anyone who performed an all-about-me TD celebration Sunday received repetitive, slow-motion reward. Got it, kids? Immodesty is good! Why do this to sports? Why? What’s the upside?
If there were ever a game during which FOX’s Moose Johnston didn’t deliver a needless speech after every play, Sunday’s Saints-Skins wasn’t it.
As locally seen during Saints-Skins on a Sunday afternoon, SNY has another vulgar — now regularly confused with clever — promo. Pathetic, of coarse.
With Willis Reed at the Garden for Friday’s Cavs-Knicks, Walt Frazier recalled his rookie year, 1967-68, with the Knicks, and how Reed, who Frazier did not yet know as an outdoorsman, talked about deer hunting. “I thought he meant D-E-A-R.”
Concise plain-talk is still losing to long-form, TV-slick nonsense. Where a player’s quick cut to the left or right was for decades called a “cut,” it’s now a matter of “sticking your foot in the ground.”