Lots of schools held their madness events last Friday evening, the first official day of practice. Indiana held their Hoosier Hysteria.....a couple of odd promotions, plus a 3-pt shooting contest, a dunk contest, and a scrimmage.
The thing that caught my eye about the event was that Matt Roth should have been awarded the CHAMPIONSHIP of the 3-pt shooting contest, but head coach Tom Crean stepped in, then changed the rules, then allowed one of his new freshman recruits to shoot over again, then declared the event a tie between Roth and freshman Jordan Hulls, essentially robbing Matt Roth of his due share of glory as the actual winner!
Is this evidence of Crean showing unfair favoritism to his own recruits over the players who were brought in by Kelvin Sampson?
This blog has the story...
"In the finals were Hulls and Roth. Roth made
it an absolute bloodbath, hitting about 70% of
his 3 pointers. This kid has the sweetest stroke
we’ve seen at IU since….Steve Alford. Crean
obviously loves Hulls, because despite Roth
mopping the floor with Hulls, he allowed a
’second round’ for the final, in which Hulls went
absolute crazy and hit about 80% of his 3’s,
and Crean called it a tie. Roth then quit the team.
Actually he’s still on the team, but I can’t help
thinking he must’ve been angry at this. The 3 pt
contest lasted so long I actually grew a beard
and shaved twice during the competition."
http://cbbtruth.wordpress.com/2009/10/17/snc-shocks-iu-and-a-man-named-wes-hh-report/
Then the dunk contest was awful...sorry there's no other way to describe it...
the link above kinda describes it but almost every player entered missed most of their dunks, and the best dunkers dropped out early, leaving only Christian Watford (not the pre-contest favorite who was Maurice Creek) and a walk-on player named Steven Gambles.
Well, the virtual unknown, Gambles, won the dunk contest with a dunk that, at MOST, was described as "OK".
Then came the scrimmage, which was also quite a disappointment. Very few people who have described the scrimmage have said much at all, as apparently it was a display of bad plays, bad shooting, and slow offense.
Remember, most of these kinds of scrimmages don't bother to play any defense, so the scores should be high.
This 20 minute scrimmage with a lot of walk ons playing, finished 22-21...so barely more than a 40-point pace over an actual 40-minute game.
Everyone missed a lot of shots and nobody actually stood out.
I guess that's probably somewhat expected as it's still very early in the season.
In front of 13,000 fans, the best way Crean seemed to be able to describe the scrimmage was "scrappy play".
Dumes had 9 pts, Christian Watford and Verdell Jones had seven each and nobody else had more than a bucket.
7-footers Bawa Muniru (still not cleared to play) and Tijan Jobe were both described as projects...who will not ever be scorers.
http://www.idsnews.com/news/story.aspx?id=71106
In one of the bizarre events of the night, Tom Crean stepped to the microphone and proclaimed he was calling for "a sub"...then onto the court walks the advertising star of Subway restaurants, Jared Fogle, the guy who lost like 125 lbs supposedly eating their grub, and he does a promo for Subway restaurants.
Indiana must have gotten a payoff for turning the Hysteria event into one GIANT Subway commercial!
http://www.insidethehall.com/2009/10/17/a-little-bit-of-everything-at-hoosier-hysteria/
Here's a nice article on Matt Roth
http://www.journalgazette.net/article/20091020/SPORTS0301/310209943/1008/SPORTS
Here's a pic of Matt Roth at the event
http://brosher.com/blogs/photo/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/12_spIUBB17.171485.jpg
and the IU cheerleaders
http://brosher.com/blogs/photo/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/10_spIUBB17.171485.jpg
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as I noted elsewhere, I am still convinced that the whole scenario with Ryan Hare at SIU was handled mostly for the betterment of the team and of their chances for winning..not for the benefit of Hare himself.
He was not reigned in and properly disciplined, then was given way too many second and third chances, and I think now we see that Chris Lowery's own words prove it...
A couple interesting CLo comments...although he says he loves Hare like a son, he quickly points out that Hare had a whole series of violations.....he says that Ryan's latest violations came while..
"he was already suspended anyway" and
"It was a series of things"
then he says why he delayed so long in actually issuing the penalties until finally Hare had crossed the line ..
"We didn't want him to leave"
"You never want to lose good players"
and that the other players didn't want Hare gone...
"they wanted him to play, because we would have been extremely deep with Ryan."
and
"it's always hard".."when you lose a guy who started most of the games as a true freshman and was a great contributor"
so Lowery makes it clear that had Hare not been a good player or "great contributor"...then he'd have likely been gone long ago...Lowery certainly seems to dwell heavily on how booting Hare was so hard because of the impact to the rest of the team...he suggests the main crux of the decision was based more on how hard it was to lose a key player than on what was actually the appropriate punishment.CLo says...the real reason he hung on through the entire "series of things" was because he was a "You never want to lose good players".
So the criteria went like this...
1- what's good for Chris Lowery's winning percentage
2-what's good for the team's chances of success
3-what's actually the best for Ryan Hare and what would have been good judgement and fairness
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I see an awful lot of early season articles hyping Illinois' Alex Legion again...(I won't give all the links, just do a google search) just like last year when he bombed out and scored only 3 pts a game and hit well under 30% of his outside shots.
I would take a cautious approach....give the kid some time this year...instead of throwing him in for 30 minutes a game and letting him airball and bomb away time and again and clank them off the backboard.
Michigan State's early season practices have been devastated by the flu.
http://www.freep.com/article/20091020/SPORTS07/910200342/1055/SPORTS07/As-the-flu-bug-exits--Izzo-pushes-team-harder
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