Good Morning Hoops Nation: December 23NATCHITOCHES, La. -- And so it's come to this. Folks are out there on the roads living like it's 2004, cramming their SUV's into parking lots and buying Christmas gifts from "brick and mortar" establishments. The third crazy night of Hanukkah is set to begin. A chain e-mail with blinking green text is floating around about how Obama is going to abolish Christmas and replace it with mandatory Kwanzaa. It's the peak of the holiday season, and we're counting down the days until we don't have to hear "Santa Baby" again for another 11 months. This is the last transmission from Mobile TMM HQ until December 29, when the site will re-emerge way out west. We do have a post queued up in the interim, but we hope we don't have to use it... life is complicated, and we're sitting by the electronic chatterbox waiting for pre-warned news that may or may not come. Whether current reality holds or not, however, this will be our final chance in 2008 to wish you the happy holiday of your choice. We also have important business to attend to. After the jump, the much-anticipated conclusion of the Stephen Curry triple superhero contest. Quite by accident, a TMM trope emerged two weeks ago which established that the only way to adequately describe Davidson's star guard was to pick three superheroes and roll them into one man. That could explain why he wears the digits "30" -- "three parts, contained in a round gestalt whole." As soon as the first mention hit the Internet, the feedback box buzzed with trio suggestions. It became a "meme" that was even spotted on ESPN(.com)... the idea rolled over to my Friday chat. There was only one response to all of this -- ask the TMM artistic community to bring Super Stephen to life. Last week, you sent in your visions. This was, of course, before young Mr. Curry's shoulders collapsed on Satuday on national television against Purdue, proving that even heroes have the right to bleed (and that one Five For Fighting reference can bring down five years of work in an instant). The submissions were -- and I don't use this word very often due to a federal copyright by one of my colleagues -- awesome. There were Photoshops, drawings, concept-art MacPaint 1.0 pieces, everything. The field was so even that winners were chosen by description, which included song lyrics, poetry, comic book narration, everything. So as promised last week, this will be the first time that we have given away more than one Bally. It's also the first time we're using full names, so folks can get full Googleable credit for their work. Our first winner is Anthony Slosser, who works for a AAA "base-ball" team called the Columbus Clippers.
My proposal for Stephen Curry is that he is the Fantastic Four's Johnny Storm, Capital G of the Justice Friends and Cyclops of X-Men rolled into one. Like Storm, he has the ability to catch fire whenever he feels the urge, as his "Flame on!" performance in the closing minutes at the Garden versus Huggy Bear and WVU shows. He also has the ability to dwarf others on the court, even 6'10", 251 pound superstars from above the red line like Blake Griffin (as in the attached picture of Curry easily driving around the big man for a reverse layup). He gets that ability from Capital G, a character from the Justice Friends spinoff of Cartoon Network's Dexter's Laboratory that is a much cooler knock off of Marvel's Giant Man (note the gold "G" necklace). Finally, with his transition to the point, he has shown unbelievable vision, as evidenced by his 1.9 assist to turnover ratio and his three little man dub-dubs through nine games. He channels his inner Cyclops to optic blast his opponents off the court, leaving himself free to take his man one on one or dish to an open teammate (or as in the case of Loyola, he can draw two defenders to himself). Our second winner is Stephen Whiting. We'd like this one in landscape mode for desktop purposes. And this one easily won the Oscar® for best screenplay.
The three superheroes I believe Stephen Curry best embodies are...Captain America, Peepers, and Scramble. Finally, we are giving away a third Bally to Alan Hyder from Ohio, because he submitted the best drawing and used a fantastic musical cue -- longtime readers know that we love us some Queen.
Captain America Free lifetime Basketball State subscription to anybody who puts together a Curry YouTube highlight reel to that song. Seriously. Okay, the three of you, if you didn't send your address already (that showed some Curry confidence right there), please do so with the form. There will be a slight delay in getting your Bally to you -- holidays, etc. -- but it should get there by the end of the first week of January, promise. Red Line Upsets They call them "trap games," those tilts where players are stuck between finals and holidays, their heads not really in it. They're a great opportunity for mid-majors to make some hay, and last night there were new fewer than seven RLU's to report. We're now up to 88 total incidents of the lower 22-and-a-half beating the eight top conferences, and inching back up into 13 percent category. (Last year, we saw 11.) Northeastern used ball control to roll Indiana 55-42, and easily has the Colonial's strongest non-conference showing (wins over IU and Providence) after VCU's missed opportunity against Oklahoma. It was definitely the league's night, though, with two other ugly but effective performances. James Madison beat Seton Hall by six, taking advantage of the Pirates' foul play by making 24 free throws. George Mason, tragically undervalued despite being 8-2, beat Tulane 60-52. Utah State beat Utah at home by a bucket, showing why the Aggies are clear Western Athletic favorites. Another WAC team, La Tech, outhooped TCU... it's always extra-sweet when the WAC beats teams from its splinter conference, the Mountain West. On a night when many Southland teams came close, Texas A&M-Corpus Christi sealed the deal with an 80-79 overtime win over Georgia. And Oral Roberts gave the Big East's South Florida its second RLU loss in as many days down in Puerto Rico. To reiterate: South Florida and Seton Hall aren't "mid-majors," they just suck at basketball. There's a difference. There's a difference. U'useless Stat of the Day We'll finish off this celebration of Curry with a few numbers that perhaps you didn't know. No. 30 in red scores exactly 36 percent of his team's points, the highest percentage in the country. He's on the floor a lot, playing 87.5 percent of Davidson's available minutes... Pat Forde had his stopwatch on one of Curry's breaks last Saturday, and came up with 44 seconds. (Flash! Ah-ahhhh...) So it makes sense that his points per 40 minutes would be exceptionally high -- he'd be averaging 34.3 ppg if he didn't get those breaks. Only one player in America is more efficient (slightly so -- 34.4 p40) with his time that way, and he's craaaazy. But his superhero dynamism really comes from his ability to do other things. Keep in mind Curry is tied for 10th on the steals chart (2.9 spg) and tied for ninth in assists (6.7 apg). In the context of his team, he gets 43.23 percent of Davidson's dishes and 35.37 percent of the team's steals. Both numbers are in the top 20 nationally. Coach McKillop, we don't know how he does it either. |
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109 |  |
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119/887 (13.4%) |
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