Grip on Sports: This year we tried to navigate the potholes of basketball awards season
A GRIP ON SPORTS • As we have said before, it’s awards season. Not to be confused with mud season and pothole season, which runs concurrently in this area. Though you have to navigate the latter and avoid getting splattered by the former to make your picks. Read on.
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• As a member in good standing with the U.S. Basketball Writers Association, I still am allowed to vote on the many all-star teams the group honors.
(As an aside, I could have moved into the retired category five years ago, but, thanks to this column and other things I do, I decided it wasn’t appropriate to take the discount. So I’m just considered one of the guys. Also, I’m also still a member of the Football Writers Association of America.)
To be honest, I haven’t voted for the awards every year. Back when I was covering the Cougars, I felt unqualified as my time was spent watching WSU play, so teams like Duke or Kentucky or Mississippi State were off my radar. But since I sort-of retired, there has been more time to watch college hoops.
And this season, in my role as media critic for the S-R as it relates to Gonzaga basketball, it seemed appropriate to make even more time. Which meant I felt somewhat qualified to make selections.
With the emphasis on “somewhat.” That’s one of the hardest aspects of such awards. Who sees everyone?
Oh, I’m sure there are folks out there who can say they have watched enough games to make educated choices, but that would be thousands of them. After all, if you want to rely on the “eye test,” you better have your vision focused for more than one game. Anyone can stink or shine during one viewing.
Statistics help, sure, but those can distort your view as well. After all, do gaudy statistics against inferior competition mean as much as just-better-than-average numbers against the best the nation offers? It’s a balancing act for sure.
Luckily, this season, there was time, and room on the DVR, to balance both. I watched more games from outside the West than ever before and spent a lot of time keeping up with national numbers.
That doesn’t mean I didn’t have a bit of a prejudice for the local guys, though. I’ve watched guys like Josh Hawkinson and Przemek Karnowski for years, which allowed me to use them for a benchmark when comparing other bigs around the nation. I watched every minute Nigel Williams-Goss played this season, so he was my comparison point for point guard play.
And then there was the overall success of the Gonzaga program, which made it easy for me to justify one vote I had been leaning toward even before reading this John Blanchette column late in the season.
John’s arguments for Mark Few’s selection as the national coach of the year persuaded me, even after the Zags lost to BYU. I’m not sure most people understand how hard it is to get a disparate group of alpha males to come together to succeed in a short period of time.
Few did that this season. Consider this. Of Gonzaga’s top eight players, only Josh Perkins was on the court for any appreciable time for last season’s Sweet Sixteen team. The other seven were either redshirting, injured or playing somewhere else. And yet this group won its first 29 games, including wins against schools – Arizona and Florida – that are among the best in two of the power conferences.
What Few was able to accomplish was award worthy, no matter what time of year it is.
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Gonzaga: Tonight the Zags will try to get past Jared Brownridge and the Santa Clara Broncos one more time. Not that the senior guard has ever made it easy. Jim Meehan’s game advance highlights the relationship. … Jim also looks at the upcoming NCAA seeding and tonight’s key matchups. … Whitney Ogden has a feature on a key member of the staff. … John’s column for today has a different, less sports-related bent. But it’s worth reading. … Whitney also has an advance of tonight’s women’s semifinal game against USF. … The baseball team is in warmer climes as well and split a doubleheader. … The Review-Journal has a feature on Nigel Williams-Goss, who played his high school basketball in Las Vegas. … There are other stories about tonight’s semifinal as well as Santa Clara is hoping for a shocking upset. … The other semifinal tonight pits BYU and Saint Mary’s. Joe Rahon and the Gaels won both regular season meetings against the Cougars. … On the women’s side, USF would love to recreate last season’s WCC tourney magic. … Saint Mary’s has a recruiting pipeline to Australia for the women as well. BYU will have to deal with it.
WSU: The All-Pac-12 teams will be announced today and it will be interesting to see where Hawkinson falls. … Four Cougars combined on a no-hitter yesterday. A 7-3 no-hitter. … The golf season rolls on in Arizona. … Shalom Luani is in Indianapolis trying to impress NFL general managers. … Back to basketball, who would you vote as the Pac-12’s most valuable player? … Arizona expects to meet Colorado again in the tournament, though the Buffs have to get by WSU first. … The Stanford women won another Pac-12 tournament title, upsetting Oregon State in the final. … On the football side of things, Washington’s Budda Baker is learning from the best. … Other Washington-connected players are at the combine. … One of the more interesting stories of the weekend is from the Seattle Times and it concerns UW rowing.
EWU: The Big Sky announced its women’s basketball awards yesterday and the Eagles and Vandals were represented. … Jake Wiley will lead Eastern into the men’s tournament later this week.
Idaho: The Vandal women will try to defend its tournament crown in Reno. Jim Allen has an advance.
Whitworth: The Pirates have yet to win a Northwest Conference baseball game.
NIC: The Cardinals split a softball doubleheader in Florida.
Mariners: The WBC exodus has begun, though Felix Hernandez stuck around yesterday to pitch against the A’s in a game the M’s lost, 5-4. It was a split-squad day and the other Mariner group lost too. … Kyle Seager is still not happy with his 22 errors last season. … Larry Stone has been at a lot of spring training camps. He has his thoughts on this one.
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• Before we sign off, I have to apologize. Not for anything that happened here, but for not being available tomorrow morning. See, when I made a doctor’s appointment a couple months ago for the procedure that shall not be named, I didn’t correlate my schedules. You know, check the date against the basketball schedule. Thus, I won’t have a column tomorrow. Instead, I will be lying on a gurney somewhere. Wish me luck. I will be available tonight for the TV Take from the Gonzaga game and, if the Zags play on Tuesday night, I’ll be upright for that as well. Hopefully. Until later …