Lefty's Legacy:
I awoke in a cold sweat last Monday night, not because I forgot to turn my heat down, or had just broken a fever, but because I realized that my current budget may not be capable of sustaining the barrage of expenses that March Davidson Basketball requires. My credit line needs to be able to pack enough punch to get me wherever I need to go, at an instant, should Davidson’s dance extend through multiple rounds of play.
Fearing the worst, I began packing lunches a week ago, forgoing my midday Baja Fresh burrito for a risky salmonella-tainted PB&J and a fruit-on-the-bottom yogurt (you can buy about 10 of these for $3 at the local Teet). Becoming increasingly desperate last weekend, I walked past my staple Sam Adams and Magic Hat in the beer aisle, and hastily grabbed a six-pack of vomit-flavored Rolling Rock, knowing that those $3 saved could be the difference between a fully-loaded sausage and a stale pretzel during halftime of Davidson’s Sweet Sixteen game.
I know that Davidson, and all dominant teams for that matter, maintains its success by adopting a game-by-game approach to the season, but with the Wildcats achieving win No. 20 last night against UNC Greensboro, I’d be foolish not to start prepping for the road that lies ahead.
After spending recklessly on a couple of draft brews after watching the Wildcats’ ugly romp in the Coliseum last night, I returned home determined to renew my focus, and forced myself to suffer through the recap of last season’s final loss to Kansas.
With the pain from that bitter defeat recalled, and my March fervor for Davidson reawakened, I e-mailed my long-lost partner Base Rich, asking:
man.
can we do it again?
seriously.
Expecting little in return to appease my now rabid obsession with avenging last year’s disappointment in Detroit, I arrived at work with a six-paragraph reply in my inbox. I’ll save the nitty gritty details for Base Rich’s next post, but his conclusion was apt: We can definitely do it again. We won’t if we shoot like we did last night.
Last night. The ugly: 38 percent from the field, 6-27 from three, 15-27 from the line, 13 turnovers. Can’t get much worse. Still won by 21 points. Last season, the Socon regular season yielded a total of eight 20+ point wins for Davidson. This season, six of our last seven Socon games have resulted in 20+ point victories. Still seven games to go. I like where this is headed.
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Lefty's Legacy:
I remember Knicks-playoffs loud. I grew up a Knicks fan, and relished the team’s physical and sometimes violent style of play (multiple TV remote controls met their fate during my childhood after especially stressful Knicks playoff games). For me, Madison Square Garden has always been the greatest arena on earth, and I didn’t think twice in making my pilgrimage to this hallowed venue to see Davidson play West Virginia on Tuesday. Considering the mediocrity on display in the garden over the last decade or so, Stephen Curry’s brilliance made Tuesday night one of the most exciting nights that the MSG crowd has seen in quite awhile. Having arrived in New York City after a busy morning of work in DC and a frantic afternoon Amtrak and subway dash north, I met my colleague Base Rich, himself just completing a bus ride from Boston, and we made our way to our 10th row seats, directly behind the basket, hardly able to contain our excitement. Near the end of warmups, Lupe Fiasco’s “Superstar” came on over the speakers, and BR exclaimed, “they’re playing our song!” I didn’t get it at first. By the end of the night, though, the city that never sleeps would witness the greatness of Stephen Curry, and it would be obvious that, as Gus Johnson would say, “folks, we got a star!”
Everyone always talks about how Curry is a better person than basketball player (one of the most annoying cliches in sports), but I had yet to see this first-hand. Standing outside of the Davidson bar after the game Tuesday night, BR and I found ourselves suddenly amongst the entire team as they prepared to board their bus back to Davidson. At first, I didn’t even realize that the kid next to me in a gray hoodie chatting with some friends was the man himself, and after a nervous pause, I quickly shook Steph’s hand, congratulated him, and he returned the praise with a sincere “ohh, thanks a lot man!” that immediately made me realize that all the hype still had not gone to his head. Despite carrying the hopes of Davidson nation on his small frame game after game, Steph was still just a regular kid, enjoying college, but seemingly thinking little of being one of the greatest college basketball players of our generation.
Steph struggled mightily at first under the burning MSG spotlights, but in crunch time, as we have seen so often, he drilled the shots that mattered. With our invincible Curry weapon armed at the end of every game, Davidson is a hard team for anyone to beat. Oklahoma, with a 21-point lead on their home floor, barely salvaged a 4-point win after a late-game Curry onslaught. NC State was buried by a long-distance Curry bomb, and now West Virginia is the latest victim of Curry’s magical skills in the clutch. Moreover, Will Archambault’s 20-point outburst and Andrew Lovedale’s 18 rebound effort last night suggest that this team has an array of budding stars capable of complimenting Curry’s ridiculousness in tight games.
John Starks has always been my favorite Knicks player as he represented a time in Knicks history, and the NBA in general, when players wore their hearts on their sleeves and battled against playoff rivals as though their lives depended on the outcome. It might sound a bit dramatic, but I see Stephen Curry as a transformational player. I think his creative and unique game on the court, his uncanny ability to always rise to the occasion, and the inspiring story of his arrival from obscurity to superstar status could make the NBA fun again.
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Lefty's Legacy:When I watch King James watch Steph Curry, I can't help but think he's thinking:
Man, I should've gone to college. Forget the fact that I was ready for the League at age 15. This would've been fun.
Sure, he's been spotted at precisely two Davidson games -- hardly meaningful on its face -- but he appears enraptured. He's not pecking out emails on his Blackberry, he's standing up, arms aloft, mouth agape in disbelief, just like a normal, or non-King, human might be expected to behave in response to Curry's wizardry.
It's easily to live vicariously through Steph Curry. I do it about twice a week when I don my Eric Blancett jersey and begin scrolling feverishly through the DirectTV guide in search of whatever oddball backyard southern sports network is broadcasting the game. It's easy to do because it's almost believable. We're about the same size as Steph Curry. Our egos are similarly proportional. And, for those of us fortunate enough to have gone to Davidson, we have a pretty good sense of what he eats everyday and where he takes those meals.
What is, of course, completely unbelievable (and makes this whole vicariousness thing fun) is Steph's performance on the court. The purity of his game, of his joy, is what this whole college thing is supposed to be about. Over the past ten or fifteen years, we haven't seen enough of that. Perhaps then it's understandable why LeBron would forego college. It all seemed rather perfunctory. I just have a feeling though, that if James were but a junior in high school today, he might be a hair more inclined to defer his entrance into the NBA.
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On Lefty's Legacy:
Davidson head coach Bob McKillop is a compelling figure. He’s the New Yorker who, for the past twenty years, has strolled down the sleepy streets of a southern college town to pick up his mail. He’s an enigmatic speaker with a penchant for metaphor whose delivery is as impeccable as his dress, yet he’s eminently humble. As a coach, he’s a brilliant tactician. His keen eye for detail and tireless commitment to the unsloppy way make him the envy of his peers. If there is a truly beautiful strategist in the modern game, he lives twenty feet from campus and once dreamt of the day that his college’s apparel would be sold in the local airport. But even more, McKillop has a way of inspiring his squads to play beyond themselves that is nonpareil.
It’s easy to credit McKillop for all of the successes of the past few seasons (with a healthy nod to the Lohengrin-like Steph Curry for the past two), but a story published today by Charlotte-based radio station WFAE gives us new reason to acknowledge the contributions of his players. Shortly after the heart-in-mouth ending of last season, the players issued a four-page memo to their coach. Said McKillop in the interview: “They met as a team and put together this four page manifesto, and it covered a variety of topics from the standpoint of basketball technique, training methods, practice sessions, schedule, involvement in the community, the way we would travel, diet.”
That’s a beautiful thing. I quickly began to miss the point though, wondering who the chief architect might’ve been. Lovedale did have a way with words in that elite eight post-game interview. But Rossiter has the heart of a lion. Max is tenacious on the ball, but with a pen? Could Curry’s glorious flurry on the court translate into the sort of striking rhetorical flourishes surely contained in what McKillop dubbed a manifesto? Civi? No.
The beauty of this gesture is that it reflects a group of intensely focused young men whose collective zeal for self-improvement has transcended the student-teacher paradigm. Better put, these players have taken the initiative. They have risen to all the calls and now, they have effectively raised their own bar. Perhaps the bit of the report that struck me most was the sound bite of freshman walk-on Will Reigel. Reigel has tallied a total of eight minutes on the floor in his collegiate career, yet his words evince the same drive and focus as those of his teammates. And that makes sense, because the vision is a synergistic one, where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
“Our team unity sets us apart from other schools and other teams. We’ve got a motto, trust commitment care, and we live by it, by the code. And treat each other with all three of those things all the time, and it’s really big for us.”
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Base Rich on Lefty's Legacy:
More than potential, close losses reveal a lot about a team’s character. This team never gave up. They pushed and pushed and will continue to push until the final buzzer sounds. This is the great spirit that Coach McKillop funnels into his system, a system imbued with huge ideas. Let us raise our heads and take in the big picture.
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