2009-10 UCLA Basketball Update

Just a little post on UCLA basketball:

The season has started! 3 'official' games so far (2-1). We lost 4 starters from last year (and the remaining starter has already been suspended for 2 games for legal reasons) so a lot of new faces are getting playing time. The starting lineup last night against Pepperdine (Victory!) looked like this:

PG Jerime Anderson (So.)
SG Malcolm Lee (So.)
SF Michael Roll (Sr.)
PF James Keefe (Sr.)
C Drew Gordon (So.)

Coming off the bench senior walk-on Mustafa Abdul-Hamid got a lot of minutes (25ish) at guard. True freshman Reeves Nelson, Mike Moser, and Brendan Lane each got 8/9 minutes. Notable in their absence were Tyler Honeycutt (injury), Bobo Morgon (is not very good), and Anthony Stover (true freshman who might redshirt).

I have watched most of the games and my first impression is that we are VERY raw. Coach Ben Howland likes to ride his starters and usually rotates about 3 bench players, especially during Pac-10 play, so most of these guys played very little last year. Dragovic's suspension will actually help Nelson and Lane a lot as they will get a lot more playing time than they would have otherwise. If Dragovic comes back I expect their minutes to decrease significantly. Howland should really think about redshirting two or three of his bigs (Morgan/Stover/Lane).

We have very little depth in the back court, and Honeycutt's return from injury will be key. Moser has been getting a little playing time but our ball handlers need to get a lot better at facing pressure (Anderson and Hamid both looked pretty bad when they had defenders in their respective faces).

Overall we should actually be okay - middle of the road in the Pac-10 assuming our guys make improvements between now and January. No-one looks like they will make enough of a leap to jump ship early to the Pros but someone (like Lee or Honeycutt) could pull a Westbrook and make significant in-season improvement. We can only hope.

Anyway, you can read a lot more about this season at BruinsNation, Bruin Basketball Report Online, Jon Gold's blog , or Scout.

March Madness!

March means several things: my birthday, the coming of Spring, Persian New Year, and not insignificantly the NCAA Basketball Tournament. The great thing about the tournament is that 65 of the 300 some-odd teams are eligible to vie for the National Championship. The field of 65 consists of well known schools with rich basketball tradition (UCLA!) but also a host of schools which most people have never heard of.

Well, the good people at the Google LatLong Blog have done us the service of mapping out not only all the schools but also the sites where games are being played. Pretty cool.


View Larger Map

Oh yeah, Go Bruins!

Boooooooruins

So UCLA lost in the Final Four last Saturday. Their third trip in three years. 1-2 in FF games, 0-1 in championship games. Very humbling one hand but hard to complain about our overall success on the other. Some Kansas fan actually developed an interesting algorithm to determine how safe a lead was. For "fun" I put in UCLA's two biggest leads (4 points at 10-6, 16:13 and 5 points at 5-0, 18:00) as well as their last lead (12-11 at 15:27). Not surprisingly their leads were 0% safe. I hate basketball.

In other UCLA BBall news, the LA Times reports that Kevin Love is definitely going pro while Darren Collison is undecided. It even mentions the possibility of Shipp going (unlikely), Mbah a Moute declaring but not hiring an agent and likely coming back, Aboya staying in school but not playing (in order to get a masters degree), and Dragovic to go back to Serbia and play professionally (what?!?!?!?!). In another article, ESPN says they're both leaving as well as Russell Westbrook even though Love's mom is denying he made a decision.

One thing I was pondering in my semi-drunk stupor during the second half of UCLA's loss was how I (and so many other people) are so wrapped up in all this sporting hullabaloo. My rationalization is three-fold; I've played a LOT of basketball in my life, I went to school at UCLA, and watching the games is a chance to build community.

I played in youth leagues, Jr. High, High School, Intramurals, and adult leagues. I currently play with a bunch of guys on Tuesdays at a gym off of Venice. I probably pay more in gym fees for those 3 hours (or so) a week than I would if I were a member of Bally's. I truly enjoy playing and is one of the few ways I can be induced to run around and get some exercise.

I also graduated from UCLA in 2001. As I said, I played Intramurals there, saw a bunch of games while I was in school (although it was during the dark Lavin years and I stopped really going during my 2nd year and only attended sporadically until I got season tickets a couple years ago). My friends and I would see the players on campus, knew who they were, and had random encounters with them over the years (I got to help Ray Young with a pager problem once while my buddy almost got into an altercation with J.R. Henderson). We joked about drafting Jelani McCoy onto our IM team after he quit the real team for smoking pot.

But do those reasons adequately explain how caught up people get in the games? Does the joy of winning outweigh the negativity of loss? Is it just a reason to act like we did in college and remember our revisionist histories of when everything was great and we had no responsibilities (I say revisionist because while college was great I still somewhat remember drinking too much, eating too much, not having enough fun with the opposite sex, having no money, and stressing over school). Or is it a way we build community and shared experiences? I've been to the SF Salooon so much the past three Marches that I know who the owner is, his daughters, and even his wife. We know that he got new TVs this year and changed some of the booths but kept some of the tables that are a couple inches too short.

I guess that the overall experience is still gratifying since I'm still going to buy tickets for next year and will probably watch most games on TV. However, instead of going to every game it looks like a couple friends and I will band together so that we aren't obligated to go to all of them. I'm not sure if this means we're emotionally drained or just apprehensive about the prospects for next year's team. So I pay my money, hope the kids all make the best decisions for themselves (get your degree if you aren't a first round pick!), and wait to see if I catch the fever again next season.

Great Video for UCLA BBall Fans

Unfortunately I don't have a real post but I DO have a really funny video (at least for those of you who are UCLA fans and watched last weekend's Texas A&M game).

Also, I'm glad we won last night and everything, but do they have to give me a heart attack?

Several Odds and a Couple Ends

The LA Times' Joel Stein had a really interesting take on the latest actions by the Federal Reserve: infusing the market with $200 billion and JP Morgan Chase rescuing Bear Stearns with another $30 billion. It was really toned down in this article and his points came across more concisely. I read Stein's stuff occasioanlly but more often than not I find his humor heavy handed. As far as Times' columnists, he and Jonah Goldberg are usually orthogonal to each other, but I am usually orthogonal to the both of them. Basically, it's like a 3 dimensional space and we're the X,Y, and Z axes. Linear algebra references aside, Stein's piece was actually written really well - he seems to know what he's talking about without confusing people with too much technical detail.

The LA Land blogger, Peter Viles, did an interesting analysis on the real estate market declines in Los Angeles. He did a simple zip code breakdown to see which classes of houses were declining the most. His results show that the low end (Palmdale/Lancaster) is declining more than the high end (Palos Verdes, Mar Vista). As the houses increase in value, the percentage decline decreases, until there's actually an increase for houses over $800k. What this means is that the market is really starting to sort itself out and to echo Stein, the faster we get to the bottom, the better.

In sports news, UCLA won it's first round game against Mississippi Valley State in the NCAA tournament while USC got smoked by Kansas State. KSU was robbed by selection committe, only getting an 11 seed (3rd Place in the 2nd toughest conference only gets an 11 seed? Come on....). Ken Pomeroy could have told you that the Trojans drew a really tough first round game. Great news for the Mighty Bruins as they should be getting Luc back for Saturday's game against Texas A&M, which starts at 6:15 at the Honda Center in Anaheim.