Bricklayer
Don't Make Me Use The Bat
1) Please please PLEASE hurry back Boogie and Rudy. The first game without you was amusing. They have grown progressively worse. this one was borderline unwatchable.
2) When we lost Isaiah to "stomach problems" (and indeed he was barely there anyway) we were down all 3 of the big three, and I never want to have to see that out there again. What are the odds I wonder? Yes, we've been nearly injury free, except for the scarily incompetent looking ghost of Landry, but now we finally suffer some losses and boom, boom, boom, they target exactly the only three guys on our team that really matter?
3) going to have a poll on this. After an ugly ugly boring game, Coach Malone resorted to trying to cheap out a game here. I didn't like it. I'll tear your liver out to win something, but once I got past my immature start a fight everytime I lost phase, I try to lose with class. We didn't, and turned the late game into a mockery while also denying both sides' kids the chance to actually play a little basketball.
So anyway, thank you JT for showing up. Most of the rest of the positives, such as they wee were in deep garbagetime, stretching endlessly as we chased rookies from the game with intentional fouls. No fun.
By all rights this should be Girls. As it was I don't want to sully any lovely ladies with association with this mess. For no reason but whim VF21 suggested a mythology theme in another thread. Why not. I know that off the cuff, and I'll aim for perverse. So...Vile Myths. Perverse Myths? Colorful Myths let's say. In the modern world we protect our dear little children against any signs of real life, and worry Disney Cartoons might bruise their helpless little psyches. Well, the old civilizations laugh at our wimpiness. Their stories were fun.
Your Consoritum Graders tonight:
Bricklayer
Uncia03
Henkel
Rainmaker
sdballer
Boxscore
Stats: 24min 10pts (3-9, 2-3, 2-2) 2reb 0ast 1stl 0blk 0TO
Outlaw ( D ) -- Outlaw survives an even more abysmal grade by first being Travis Outlaw -- I don't expect much. And second by virtue of hitting back to back threes late in the third quarter that briefly gave us the illusion the game wasn't entirely over yet. But the rest of the game was, how shall we say: not good. Got the start at SF, but from the beginning of the game most of what he was doing was just dumb 1 on 1 type of stuff that maybe MAYBE Travis Outlaw could casually do while horsing around in an YMCA game. 1 on 1 turnaround fallaways etc. Come on. And they were roughly as successful as you might have guessed. He did get a pair of FTs after he catapulted a wild drive off the glass so hard he got his own rebound and got fouled. Combined his offensive struggles (a good chunk of his struggles being he was being thrown the ball on the wing like he was Rudy Gay and just going to create his own shot) with that same terrible tendency to just drift off three point shooters in the corner and never recover in time. So many of our guys do that it just has to be scheme related, but for the life of me I can't imagine what is so important in a defensive scheme that you routinely give up wide open short corner threes in order to accomplish it. --Brick
Volsunga Saga -- see if you can follow this: In this Norse/Icelandic epic saga, a woman named Signy is married to an evil King named Siggeir (we'll just call him King S from here on out to avoid confusion). Well, King S decides that he has been insulted by his wife's brother, Sigmund. So he invites her entire family over to dinner, and has his men slaughter her father and capture all 9 of her brotehrs, including Sigmund. King S then proceeds to let his shapeshifting mother eat each one of the brothers until only Sigmund is left. Sigmund though survives by biting King S's mothers' tongue off and causing her to bleed to death. Got it so far? Cool. So then King S and Signy have 2 sons...both of whom Signy, great mom that she is, sends into the woods where Sigmund has been hiding every since escaping, so that he can test their courage. When they fail, she has him kill them as cowards. Oh, and then, to top matters off, she eventually goes into the woods, has an incestuous relationship with her brother, and their resulting son eventually grows up, and joins his father/Signy's brother in killing King S. I hear the Disney version of that lovely tale is coming soon.
Stats: 38min 17pts (5-13, 1-2, 6-8) 15reb 2ast 0stl 1blk 2TO
Williams ( B- ) -- well first of all note the big rebounding number here. that is a little deceptive as to impact, but it was really notable in this one how hard he was coming back to crash the defensive boards. He's often been kind of a weenie about that this year, but he was big on the night and 15rebs is one off his career high. Of course part of that may have been because tonight he got the start at PF, not SF (we shifted JT to center, started Outlaw a SF), but we've seen him often overwhelmed on the boards at the PF slot. Not tonight. And most of them were d-boards too, which despite the spectacular nature of offensive boards, are often the more important, certainly to your ability to stop the opponent. The problem was on the other end of the floor we could get nothing going, and that included DWill, who looked spectacular and out of control at the same time with big athletic slashes to the rim...into heavy traffic, losing the ball etc. he and Outlaw took turns trying high high difficulty Durant/LeBron type 1 on 1 moves. Turnaround fallaway jumpers and the like. it didn't go well. What he did do was always spectacular -- big dunks, a nice shovel pass to a cutting Thornton etc., but overall it looked like he was flailing. And on defense he was again another King who just kept on leaving the Jazz's forwards alone out at the three point line. Seems an odd strategy given that that's all they can do. Didn't hate this performance, but certainly nowhere near enough to carry us and not at all as strong as a 15reb game should be. --Brick
Kali -- look, Kali is the goddess of destruction in Hindu mythology. She is supposed to be a badass. She is supposedly the mate of Shiva, the supreme god of the pantheon, but she kills him a lot. He comes back of course because he's the top dog, but still, if my woman kept on killing me I think it would grow tiresome after awhile and I might look elsewhere. Especially if she was blue, had four arms, fangs, and a tendency to run around with her tongue hanging out. Anyway, Kali also has this nasty tendency to drink the blood of her enemies, and on one occasion got so drunk on blood after slaughtering a whole field full of enemies that Shiva was worried she was going to destroy the whole world and had to throw himself down in front of her to stop it. Talk about high maintenance.
Stats: 28min 19pts (7-10, 0-0, 5-6) 11reb 1ast 0stl 2blk 1TO
Thompson ( A- ) -- With all of the noise surrounding our big 2 injuries and our little third's role for the future, JT has slowly been putting together a more than solid stretch of games. Tonight was another step in the right direction as he clearly came to play in an otherwise crappy game. (Sorry, had to get at least one toilet joke in). At this point in his career, it's clear what JT is and isn't but showing up consistently like this would be a huge plus for the team. In the last 2 weeks, he's averaging 10pts, 9reb and 1 block a game with great efficiency and good d. Even with a lack of offensive options tonight, JT hit his shots (including tough ones that showed some skill), rebounded as the sole Kings big to get minutes, and played decent d on the Jazz young bigs. They put up decent stats but as the only big guy actually getting minutes, I think he did what he could to stop the bleeding. He had foul issues but that happens when you decide to prolong one of the most pathetically watchable games of all time. If he was a better weak side shot blocker, he'd be the perfect compliment to Cuz but at worst he's a very good 3rd big. --sdballer
Hercules -- well, there's another dumb looking sanitized Holywood movie about him out now, so why not. And cartoons, and that TV series and... Well, Hercules is certainly the sort of uber-hero where you can't easily tell how many stories originally surrounded him, and how many got added later. But one thing that we do know that you won't ever find out watching a Disney cartoon or Kevin Sorbo is that the Hercules of mythology was borderline insane. Sometimes more than borderline. No whitebread stereotyped save the world hero was he. This was a hero who in a fit of madness slew his own children (and in some versions wife). He acquired his second wife by murdering her father and brothers. In a fit of remorse he agreed to become a slave to his third wife, and dressed in women's clothes for a year doing women's work. When he wasn't killing things of course. Quite the whitebread hero.
Stats: 32min 11pts (5-15, 0-6, 1-3) 3reb 2ast 1stl 0blk 0TO
Thornton ( ) -- --Rain
Stats: 25min 10pts (4-13, 0-2, 2-2) 2reb 6ast 0stl 0blk 0TO
Thomas ( D ) -- After watching the game for a few minutes I thought that all the minutes and the back-to-back had caught up with IT. He was playing pretty lethargic basketball and seemed to lack the pep in his step that he normally brings to the court. It turned out that though he might have been a bit worn down due to the minutes/back-to-back he was also suffering from a stomach issue which ultimately had him leave in the 3rd quarter never to return. IT apparently gutted it out, but unfortunately his performance on the floor wasn’t that great, and he might have been better off if he’d just sat next to Rudy for the entirety of this one. IT basically did one thing right the entire game. And that was making some nice passes while not turning the ball over. In particular he played the PnR with JT to great effect. The Jazz PnR defense was awful and it allowed IT easy passing lanes to JT on the roll, where JT did a good job finishing. In fact, IT should have run that play more often than he did. He also made a great half-court pass to JT, as well as a few drive-and-kick outs. The problem was that he didn’t spend enough time creating for his teammates. From a shooting stand-point you could tell something was wrong because IT threw a lot of very high floaters at the rim tonight. Typically he drives straight into the teeth of the defense and draws a foul or takes a tough shot, but in this game he only really went to the rim once and was fouled. Most of his other drives ended with him making some extremely high floaters, some of which actually went in, but by and large almost all of his shots were short. Because he didn’t get to the free-throw line while being short on most of his shots, he ended with a very inefficient 10 points on 13 shots. Since he wasn’t feeling his shot, he should have played more of the facilitator role which as mentioned he had good success, especially on the PnR. On defense he wasn’t horrible, but he was pretty lucky that Trey missed his open 3pt shots, and there was the usual issue of him getting caught up on screens. One of the more frustrating moments of the game was at the 3:30 mark of the 1st quarter. IT over-helped and went for a steal which he didn’t get. The ball got kicked out to Burke who was open and hit the 3pt shot. IT immediately went down the court and tried to get those points back by taking a quick 3pt shot that he missed. He then tried to get the offensive rebound and fouled Hayward in the process, sending him to the line because they were over the limit. When the 3rd quarter started the game was tied, and IT was just out there, but not doing anything at all. He wasn’t shooting, he wasn’t creating. All he was doing was bringing it up the court then passing it off. I don’t have any notes on him at all till 6 minutes had passed in the 3rd. From there he missed a couple of shots, had an assist, and then 2 minutes later left the court for good. So for IT, it was basically what we’ve been seeing from him with Cousins and Rudy out. He had great success finding good shots for his teammates and he would have been much better served if he’d done that more often, rather than putting up his own shots at an extremely inefficient rate.--Uncia
The Myth of Tanatalus -- perhaps you are familiar with the fate of Tantalus. He is the guy fated to stand in a pool of water in hell, with a fruit tree dangling fruit over his head. But whenever he stoops to drink, the water recedes, and whenever he reaches for the fruit, the branches pull upward out of his reach. Thus he's cursed with eternal thirst and hunger and frustration. Hence the source of our word "tanatalize". But how'd he get like that? What was he punished for? Well, turns out Tantalus was a King, and he was having the gods over to dinner. So of course he wanted to impress them with numerous sacrifices...including as it turns out his own son Pelops, who he first sacrificed, and then boiled up and had served to the gods as the main course. The gods weren't amused.
placeholder...
Last edited:
