A Warning to Well Intentioned Pacer Fans

First appeared on April 24th, 2013
in The Lebanon Reporter

Standing 6 feet 9 inches tall and weighing 225 pounds, Josh Smith is a big man. As someone who boasts career highs of 38 points, 22 rebounds, 11 assists and 10 blocks, Josh Smith can be scary good. And you probably don’t need me telling you anyone with the nickname “J Smoove” is clearly capable of world domination in anything, anytime, anywhere.

The AP’s recount of his performance in the opening round of the Playoffs so accurately summarized the life-giving bolt of invigoration Smith’s game can be, “He scored 15 points and grabbed 8 rebounds in Atlanta’s 107-90 defeat”. Talk about world domination indeed.

So it begs the question, after Smith was so lackluster in Sunday’s loss, why would anyone in the non-Atlanta media be quick to call him out? Mike Wells of the Indy Star said “The more jumpers Smith takes…the less likely the Hawks will win” and Pacer Blogger Conrad Brunner bluntly declared “Josh Smith is the worst good player I’ve ever seen”.
If Smith wants to go through the motions defensively and fire up long jump shots early in the shot clock, who are we to tell him no?

What do we care? We’re not Hawks fans or “Smoovers and Shakers” (Affectionate nickname given to card carrying members of the “J-Smoove” fan club; only a guess here). What do these people want? Are they hoping Smith drops 40 on the Blue and Gold? Do they want the Pacers’ first round match up to be more than a tune up? Clearly they’ve never dealt with anyone younger than ten years old.
The Hawks are a shell of a playoff team and Smith is the only person capable of making them as un-shell like as possible.

As Pacer fans, rather than tearing Smith down, now is the time we should be building him up. Telling him he’s the best 30% Three Point shooter we’ve ever seen and asking him to sign the ball we caught after another one of his errant passes has rocketed over a teammates hands before landing in our laps.

We should let him know the fact he led the Hawks in turnovers for a second straight season simply means his teammates need their vision checked or may have to actually click on a link and read something when he’s told them to Google “How to catch a basketball” for the twentieth time. He needs to hear that his 50% shooting from the foul line this season is more than enough justification to stand 30 feet from the basket and hoist jumpers until his shoulder goes numb or the rest of his teammates have lost interest, walked off the court and tweeted #neverplayingbasketballagain from the locker room.

In short Smith is a sleeping giant, let him rest. He’s the only person capable of making this series longer than it needs to be. If Pacers fans are lucky, Smith will continue pretending to play hard and Hawks fans will continue to pretend to care when their team loses. He’s a Five Tool player, the only problem for Atlanta right now is that Smith’s five tools are scoring, rebounding, defending, ball handling and only performing on the third Tuesday of every other month.

Perhaps most amazing of all is the fact Smith is finishing a contract year. But there’s no time for second guessing. Let’s all quietly bear witness now, for the day is coming when we’ll sit our children down to tell them how we watched J Smoove doin’ work. Of course that will require a complete transformation of the word ‘work’, but you’ll figure something out.

© 2013 Eric Walker Williams

Michigan's season was bigger than one loss

First appeared on April 11th, 2013
in The Lebanon Reporter

When Jordan Morgan’s shot rolled off the rim at the buzzer giving Tom Crean and the Indiana Hoosiers their first outright Big Ten title in 20 years, all hope seemed lost for the Wolverines. In that moment Beilein’s crew went from talented upstarts, far too young to realize brazen doesn’t wear well in the Midwest, to a group of Thriller-like zombies shocked into a state of disbelief.

They were the closest thing Ann Arbor has seen to the Fab Five since those fashionistas first set foot on campus 20 years ago. Good news for Michigan fans is, while this current batch may have the baggy shorts and above the rim game, they lack the ugly baggage and propensity for calling time outs when they have none. But that moment, on the last day of the season in their own building, should have been the crushing blow in what was already becoming a frustrating end to a promise filled season. A Tyson-style haymaker delivered from Cody Zeller and his national darling Indiana Hoosiers.

On the surface it appeared a turning point for Indiana who, after making NCAA history the week before in becoming the first team to cut the nets down following a loss, finally claimed their trophy. Tom Crean and future All-American Victor Oladipo shared a moment in what they surely believed was a stepping stone to hanging another banner as the Wolverines stumbled off the court like stunned cattle.

Someone more famous than me once quipped “these are the times that try men’s souls” and while it might be difficult to prove, I’m fairly certain they were talking about the 2013 Michigan Wolverines. For as they retired to their locker room to sweep what was left of their hopes and dreams into a Maize and Blue Rubbermaid dustpan every media member in the nation, part-time pretend or not, believed Blue had flat lined then and there. But from the ashes left smoldering on the Crisler Center court came a resurgent group of Wolverines who were, in the infamous words of Frank Costanza, “like a Phoenix, rising from Arizona”.

Michigan’s impressive surge to the Final Four wouldn’t have been possible without two things; the surprising play of Superfrosh Mitch McGary and a near forty foot jumper from Trey Burke that eventually buried then flavor of the month Kansas. For those wanting hard hitting analysis, look no further than an enormous charge from Jordan Morgan, role players like Spike Albrecht and Caris LeVert quietly doing their jobs and Head Coach John Beilein’s innate ability for developing system-specific skill sets in his players.

But in prevailing 82-76 Monday night, Louisville proved to have more experience and were quite simply tougher. There’s something to be said for toughness in this modern world of empty threats and helicopter parents. It takes real guts to reach down inside and find the strength necessary to fight harder at that precise moment when so many before have quit. To fight that which has been conditioned in you.

So we’re left to hope history will remember Michigan not as a team that wasn’t good enough on one night, rather as an exciting team that showed guts in overcoming a disastrous finish to their season. And while another installment of March Madness has came and went bringing an end to the greatest three weeks in sports, we move forward knowing every day puts us one day closer to its return. CBS will put Greg Gumbel back on the shelf for another year, but soon enough the Road to the Final Four will point the way west to Dallas.


© 2013 Eric Walker Williams