Its with a heavy heart that I sit down to write this tonight. The Jays lost a game on Wednesday night, but Omaha lost something much more important. Eight families lost loved ones, and countless others were injured either physically or mentally, when a dude walked into a mall and started shooting people. Think about that, a guy -- a kid, really, he was just 19 -- walks into a mall with a SKS assault rifle and starts picking people off left and right. Does that even make any sense? If you live to be 150 years old will that ever make any freaking sense? I'm at a loss to describe how I feel, honestly, because I was at Westroads over my lunch hour today, and left about 45 minutes before this all happened. What if I'd taken a late lunch, as I often do? Sheesh, I scarcely dare give it utterance.
I offer my sincerest condolences to everyone who suffered a loss today, and I want you to know you're all in my prayers.
Now then, I don't know about you, but I could use a distraction from all this heavy real-world stuff. Shall we talk some hoops?
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Wednesday morning, I got an email from a co-worker of mine who recently moved here from Cincinnati. He's a University of Cincinnati alum and can't stand Xavier. I mean, he can't STAND 'em. But now that he lives here in Omaha, he feels like he has to keep it real for his hometown, I guess, hence the smack talk. He was convinced they would beat Creighton, and he wanted to tell me all about it.
"You'd better hope your boys don't try run their press. Prince will run right through 'em, and they'll beat you by 20, guaranteed!"
He always calls Drew Lavender "Prince". Thinks he's being clever. See, now if you hate a team whose best player's surname is synonymous with a light shade of purple, and you were tempted to use a 23-year old movie reference to give him a nickname, wouldn't you at least pick the antagonistic villain from said movie? I would. But then again, calling Drew Lavender "Morris Day" and the rest of the Musketeers "The Time" just isn't as cool as calling him "Prince" and the rest of the team "The Revolution". Oh wait...never mind.
When I got home, my plan was to flip on the big screen, fire up the fireplace, and watch the action. But with good reason, KMTV decided to stick with live coverage of a reporter in a parking lot running through the same regurgitated information they'd discussed for hours. There were no breaking developments that couldn't have been handled with a crawler at the bottom of the screen, but I digress. I'm not going to argue with their decision, because I have a pretty good idea of what the newsroom discussion was: there's no breaking developments, and we could switch to the game, but how would that look? Being the first local channel to sign off from live coverage of a mall shooting to cover...a basketball game? It would look pretty callous, so like I said, no complaints from me.
Although, as a buddy of mine IM'd me late Wednesday night to say, if they had been broadcasting a Husker game, the odds of them pre-empting it for a news story that had already basically been wrapped up are about eleventy-billion to zero. "No friggin' way they do that if it was the 'Skers", he said. Mmm, perhaps, but I'm not gonna touch that one with a ten foot pole.
Still, I did want to watch the game, so I fired up the webcast, ran a cable from my MacBook to the TV, and settled in to watch some pixellated shapes move around. I love webcasted basketball when its blown up on a big screen, because it reminds me of my Atari 2600 when I was about six years old. Minus the one-button joystick and the bad sound effects, of course.
Since Creighton's webcast has to be the absolute biggest ripoff in the world (seriously, has ANYONE been able to successfully make it through a game with both audio and video, or even one or the other?), I went with Xavier's. And it was fine, except as you would expect, it includes the Xavier radio broadcast. Barry Larkin's brother Byron does the color commentary, and for most of the game, he had me convinced that the Jays had brought some heavy weaponry with them -- every foul was described as "vicious", "rough", and on one occasion, "dirty". Needless to say, I hit MUTE pretty quickly and synched up the Jays broadcast as best I could.
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The game was supposed to tip at around 7:05, but there was one problem: Xavier turned the lights off for a glitzy Hollywood spotlight show during their starting lineups...and then the lights wouldn't come back on. The game was delayed over 20 minutes while they fixed the problem, and in the meantime, the players tried to stretch and stay loose in a half-lit arena, the fans sat down and waited it out, and all of the energy was sucked out of the building. Hey, I'm not blaming Xavier; these things happen.
All I'm saying is, every year I've been involved with the CU Video Team, multiple people vehemently suggest to us that the house lights need to come down during lineups. Remember this night, fellas, because this is Exhibits A-Z on why it will never happen. Did you see Coach Altman during this? Just about as livid as I've seen him. Not Miami-NIT-livid, but still...
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From the outset, the game was fairly even, although Xavier led for most of the first 10 minutes. In fact, it was exactly the recipe I'd hoped for: the press was slowing Xavier down enough, the Jays were hitting enough shots to keep pace, and provided those two things continued, their superior depth might be able to wear XU down.
No such luck.
With the game tied at 25-25 after a Nick Bahe three-ball at the nine-minute mark, Drew Lavender took over. A 10-0 Xavier run over the next 3-1/2 minutes broke the game open, and the 12-4 run that followed put the game out of reach. From the 9:04 mark when Bahe's three swished through until the end of the half, the Jays went stone cold, scoring just four more points.
If the defense had played any kind of game at all, the game might have been within a salvageable margin. But, the Jays played some of the worst defense I've ever seen them play. I mean, it was atrocious. Embarrassing, really. Regardless of who was in the game, the Jays defenders stood straight up-and-down, didn't move their feet with the ball handler, and time after time gave up open looks. This was the kind of defense my high school coach used to call "Rollin' Out The Red Carpet". If I had a nickel for every time he yelled at me, "Double Zero, Way to roll out the red carpet for him! Did you take his picture as he strolled past you? Grab some bench."
Pretty pathetic. During that 22-4 run, Xavier shot 9-13 from the field. Prince, er, Morris Day, er, Drew Lavender scored 9 points in the run, part of his 17 first half points, and his 28 point, 10 assist, 3 steal night.
At the half, it was 47-32. The Jays weren't competing, they weren't playing defense, they weren't doing much of anything well. Xavier was able to do pretty much anything they wanted to, most of the time without being contested. When Coach Altman described it in the postgame as "Embarrassing", he was telling the truth. What a horrible half of basketball.
In the second half, the score didn't change much, but the tone of the game did. The
Jays played much better defense, forced Xavier into taking bad shots more often than not, got some turnovers, and actually cut the lead down to single-digits on two occasions. Unfortunately, both times they rushed shots at the other end, and in transition Xavier got a run going to get the lead back to double digits.
One glaring statistic from the second half: the Jays were 0-10 from behind the arc. When was the last time the Jays went an entire half without making a three pointer? More importantly, they shot 16-23 on shots that weren't three-pointers, or 70%. Ouch.
Double-ouch: the Jays haven't beaten a ranked team on the road in my lifetime. They're 2-61 all-time, but the last time was two months before I was born, against Larry Bird's Indiana State team in 1978. You bet.
Looking on the bright side, Prince and The Revolution (I'm giving into the temptation, sorry) are a damn good team that were motivated to win this game after three straight CU wins in the series. There is nothing to be ashamed of with the result. And I'm fully convinced that the nine minutes of the first half where the Jays simply decided they didn't need to play defense anymore, or score points for that matter, is just a side effect of a young team in their first hostile road game. It likely wouldn't have mattered against The Revolution, but it would have been nice to see them give it a try.
I said before the Drexel game that coming home from this two-game swing at 5-1 would be quite alright. Guess what folks, the Jays are 5-1. Lets Get Crazy for St. Joe's on Sunday, find out what it sounds like When Doves (or Hawks) Cry, and move to 6-1. You bet.
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