{"id":963,"date":"2008-03-31T05:57:55","date_gmt":"2008-03-31T10:57:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/?p=963"},"modified":"2022-01-02T07:37:35","modified_gmt":"2022-01-02T12:37:35","slug":"a-few-final-four-thoughts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/?p=963","title":{"rendered":"A Few Final Four Thoughts"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A few Final Four thoughts:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The Davidson bubble was bound to burst at some point, but wasn&#8217;t that some kind of run?<\/li>\n<li>There was something delightfully retro about watching Stephen Curry and his band of undersized, underappreciated major conference reject brothers taking it the big boys. It reminded me of the ACC and Southern Conference basketball of my 1960s-70s youth before everything got oh-so-complicated and fancy.<\/li>\n<li>I loved getting reacquainted with Dell Curry and his lovely wife Sonya this weekend. What a class act. And Christian to boot. It&#8217;s not hard to see why their sons are turning out so good.<\/li>\n<li>Davidson Coach Bob McKillop was brilliant, but I didn&#8217;t quite understand the logic of having Curry bring the ball up court on the final play. He didn&#8217;t push it up fast enough and it made him too easy to guard, IMHO. It seemed like it would have been better to have Curry wandering around and rolling off screens which had been an effective tactic all week.<\/li>\n<li>How about Memphis actually hitting free throws yesterday? If they can continue to hit like that, they&#8217;ll be tough to stop.<\/li>\n<li>Speaking of the Tigers, when they&#8217;re on, they&#8217;re <em>really<\/em> on (so much for being a &#8220;soft&#8221; #1 seed). It will be up to Calipari to keep their heads on straight, and they seem to be loose as a goose in a noose right now. A team with a chip on their shoulders and saddled with low expectations can be very dangerous.<\/li>\n<li>I had picked UCLA to win it all, but right now I think they&#8217;re ripe for the picking.<\/li>\n<li>KU has the depth to take it, but will they step up and get past their long tradition of tournament crashes? I have my doubts after watching them yesterday. But come Saturday, I will be yelling &#8220;Rock Chalk Jayhawk&#8221; for the first time in my life anyway.<\/li>\n<li>Note to Kansas player Brandon Rush: Dude, you just barely survived playing a 10 seed. Rather than puffing out your chest and holding out your jersey for all the world to see after Jason Richards missed that last shot, you should have probably dropped to your knees in a prayer of thanks&#8211;sorta like your coach.<\/li>\n<li>Does anybody else think the college 3-point stripe needs to be moved back? I think it&#8217;s way too easy to shoot a trey these days. Moving it back would bring back such delights as the 10-12 foot pull up jumper (practically an extinct species these days and one of the toughest shots to hit) and would make a special talent like Stephen Curry stand out that much more.<\/li>\n<li>As for all the hand slapping that goes on during free throws these days (whether they make it or not), please&#8211;just stop. It&#8217;s just a free throw. There are some that think all the inter-shot kudos may be contributing to the lower FT%s we&#8217;re seeing lately and I think they may have a point.<\/li>\n<li>As for the U** T******s, GTHC and ABC (ANYBODY But Carolina).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><!--1947720ebd2caf12dcf001c2ad11cb45-->\n<\/p>\n<p><!--1947720ebd2caf12dcf001c2ad11cb45-->\n<\/p>\n<p><!--1947720ebd2caf12dcf001c2ad11cb45--><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A few Final Four thoughts: The Davidson bubble was bound to burst at some point, but wasn&#8217;t that some kind of run? There was something delightfully retro about watching Stephen Curry and his band of undersized,&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,1,54,42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-college-basketball","category-general","category-nostalgia","category-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=963"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/963\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9436,"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/963\/revisions\/9436"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}