"One of one"

 OK, class, stick that wad of gum to the underside of your desk where you found it, and answer this question: What did Nikola Jokic do last night?

Yes, Johnny.

"Invent some kinda electricity junk?"

No, that was Nikola Tesla. Susie?

"Win Wimbledon eleventy-hundred times?"

Nope. That's Novak Djokovic. Anyone else?

Twenty kids staring back at me, blankly. One -- yeah, it's Johnny -- trying to hide the fact he did not, as requested, stick his Juicy Fruit back where he found it.

But back to Nikola Jokic.

Who plays basketball for the Denver Nuggets, and whose name you know because he's a two-time league MVP who led the Nuggets to the NBA championship a couple of years ago. The Nuggets are still pretty good these days -- they're 41-22 right now, tied for second in the Western Conference -- but they're not the team this season, so maybe you thought Jokic had slipped a bit, too.

Uh, no.

Because what did Nikola Jokic do last night?

He scored 31 points.

Took 21 rebounds.

Dished 22 assists.

In one game.

In so doing, he became the first man in NBA history ever to post a 30-20-20 stat line. It was his 29th triple-double of the season, tying his own team record. And it was the seventh time this season he's put up at least 15 points, 15 rebounds and 15 assists in a game, tying Oscar Robertson's NBA record.

In other words: Nikola Jokic is still around, and he's better than ever. And even if people are tired of voting him the league MVP, he's the league MVP, at least in some people's opinion.

"Nikola Jokic is one of one," said one of those people, Nuggets coach Michael Malone, after last night.

And, yes, Malone and everyone else knows he's not the MVP frontrunner; the odds-on favorite is Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, the electric guard who's averaging 32.8 points, 5.1 rebounds and 6.2 assists for the  Oklahoma City Thunder. In the last seven weeks, he's gone over 50 points four times, and without him the Thunder would not have 52 wins -- 11 more than any other team in the West, and just one fewer than the league-leading Cleveland Cavaliers, who are 53-10.

So, yeah, if SGA wins the MVP, no one's going to be outraged about it like they were when "Shakespeare In Love" beat out "Saving Private Ryan" for best picture.

And yet.

And yet, there is Jokic.

Who is nothing less than Larry Bird 2.0, a 7-footer who can shoot the three and clean the glass and find the open man as inventively and instinctively as Bird himself did. He's simply a beautiful basketball player for devotees of such things, and right now he's having a better season than in his MVP years. You're just not hearing as much about it because either you've decided the NBA is trash, or because SGA and the Thunder have been so brilliant themselves.

If it's the former, all I can say is, sucks for you. Because Michael Malone hit the nail square on Nikola Jokic.

He's one of one. And you're missing the show.

A modest proposal

 All around Candy Stripe Nation these days, the parlor game of renown and fame -- the runaway fun-for-the-whole-family hit -- is "Name That Coach," which of course involves trying to guess whom Indiana will choose as its next men's basketball coach. Why, it's got "Hungry Hungry Hippos" beat all hollow, and it's coming up fast on "Mystery Date."

It goes like this: Find a person in full IU Basketball Combat Gear (cap; jacket; Kent Benson/Steve Alford/Yogi Ferrell throwback jersey; button with a picture of Bob Knight yelling), and say, "Who do you like for IU's next coach?"

Let the fun begin! 

"Brad Stevens!" the guy will say (Even though Brad Stevens is as Boston as Dunkin' Donuts now, and has already, once again, said he ain't goin' nowhere)

"Bruce Pearl!" (Even though Bruce Pearl is as ethically sketchy as Kelvin Sampson was, and we all know how that worked out)

"Mick Cronin!" (Even though Cronin's not likely to leave Los Angeles for Bloomington, notwithstanding the travel would be easier)

"Jay Wright! Tony Bennett!" (Even though both got out of college coaching because they were fed up with what the gig entails now)

"Matt Painter!" (Ha, ha, very funny)

"Steve Alford!" (Ha, ha, even funnier)

What makes this a great game is no one really knows anything about who athletic director Scott Dolson and his crew are looking at, only that they've hired a search committee to facilitate the process. So IU Fan can pretty much throw out any old name that pops into his or her head and it's more or less got as much validity as any other any other name, provided said name is still on the right side of the dirt.

Well. If that's the case, I've got a name for you: Maria Marchesano.

She's currently the women's coach at Purdue-Fort Wayne -- and, listen, before you start ("Now you're just being silly!"), my tongue is only half in my cheek when I mention her. That's because her Mastodons are 24-7 and, after Masto-dunking Wright State lastr night, are headed to the Horizon League tournament semifinals. They finished second in the league to Green Bay --  losing a piece of the title in the last game of the regular season at Green Bay -- after winning their first 15 conference games and 16 straight in all.

For all of that, Marchesano was named the Horizon League women's coach of the year.

That's not the most amazing thing, though. The most amazing thing is where the PFW program was four years ago when she was hired.

In 2020-21, see, the year before Marchesano arrived, the Dons won one basketball game. One. In 23 tries. They were so far down a well they couldn't see daylight. Thought it was just a wild rumor someone made up.

So what happened after that?

Well, in Marchesano's first year, the Mastodons went 7-21. Then they jumped to 14-19. Then, last year, they went 21-12, finished third in the Horizon and reached the third round of the WNIT.

 The woman can coach a bit, in other words. So, you know, as long as we're just throwin' names out there ...

Call it a modest proposal. Or a kinda-sorta modest proposal. Or just me giving a shout-out to someone who well deserves it.

And whose name you should know, and now do.

Devalued

 (Your standard disclaimer/apology for today: Once again, for this one day, the Blob is fleeing Sportsball World.  I am, once again, going off the rails ... straying from my lane .. kicking in doors to strange and alien rooms.  So here's the requisite hall pass, and act accordingly.)

(And, yes, before you start, I know my latest flight is a howl into a hurricane. But ... dammit ... I just. Can't. Help myself.)

Look, I don't know this Alina Habba. Let me say that right off.

Oh, I know of her, of course. I know she's one of Donald John "Legbreaker" Trump's approximately 6,000 attorneys. I know she regularly gets her ass kicked in court. I know, or at least all available evidence suggests, that she got her law degree with either S&H Green Stamps or two boxtops from General Mills.

Here's what I also know, after the other day: I know she doesn't have a damn clue about working people. Or even who they are.

That's because a reporter asked her if she had sympathy for he thousands of people the Felon-in-Chief and his creepy hitman Elon Musk have thrown out of work, and she basically said they all had it coming.

"I really don't feel sorry for them," Habba said. "They should get back to work for the American people, like President Trump and his administration."

Then she was asked about the military veterans Trump and Apartheid Clyde have thrown out of work.

"We are going to care for them in the right way (insert 'blah-blah-blah' here), but perhaps they're not fit to have a job at the moment, or not willing to come to work," she said.

In other words: They're a bunch of lazy bums sitting around at home with their feet up drawing paychecks from YOUR TAX DOLLARS. Eatin' cheese curls and watchin' Netflix all day on YOUR DIME.

OK. Deep breath here.

WHAT IN THE BLOODY HELL IS THIS WOMAN TALKING ABOUT??

Whoa. Guess I should have taken two deep breaths.

Guess I should take Alina and her scrambled brain out to Pennsylvania, where a friend of mine lost her job as park ranger in the current bloodletting before, thankfully, someone with a working synapse restored it.  Or maybe I take Alina up to Massachusetts, where another friend working for another federal agency has so far escaped the axe.

Let me tell Alina, the Felon and all his like-minded minions to observe their cheese-dust fingertips and raging "Bridgerton" addictions. And then let me add this: "You might have to wait awhile."

This is because my friends, and thousands upon thousands like them, are not just sitting around Hoover-ing up your tax dollars. This is a fantasy designed to keep "hard-working Americans" angry at the wrong people, the same resentment-bait misdirection play cynical politicians have been employing since the beginning of time. Not only is it as phony as Monopoly money, it's a vile smear aimed at people who -- hello-hello -- are hard-working Americans themselves.

Or were, until the Felon and Apartheid Clyde decided they were worthless and their work was worthless.

That won't play with me, though. See, I know, because of my aforementioned friends, that the vast majority of the folks Alina and her ilk are so consciously devaluing are working their asses off -- for you, the tax-paying public. And in some cases, they've been working their asses off for decades.

It's why our national parks are the greatest monument to America we have. It's why you know when a hurricane's coming if you live on the East Coast, and why your Social Security checks arrive on time (at least for now). 

It's why, at least for now, you can afford to take your sick baby to the doctor if you're literally living on cheese curls.

And what did Alina Habba say of them the other day, the mask slipping momentarily on the extremist right's usually well-disguised disdain for working folks?

They should get back to work for the American people ...

Which leaves me with one question for her.

When do you guys start doing that?

Unfinished

 Of course they're not gonna go easy on themselves. Who really thought they would, in this weird pratfall of a season? 

Here were your Indiana Hoosiers last night, up a point with 90 seconds to play out in Eugene, Ore., and, listen, you win this one and your late-season transformation into a Real Basketball Team is ... OK, so not complete, but right next door to it. A W here, against a 21-8 Oregon bunch that had won its previous five games, and it's four in a row yourselves and five wins in your last six. A W here, and you're at the top of the NCAA Tournament bubble, if not completely free and clear of it.

Instead ...

Well, you know. It's Indiana, right? 

It's Indiana, so the Hoosiers get outscored 10-0 across those last 90 seconds, the Ducks sealing it with a 3-pointer, a couple of steals and 7-of-8 at the stripe as Indiana was forced to foul. The final was 73-64, another unfinished finish for a team that has turned unfinished finishes into a miniseries this season. And now they're 18-12 instead of 19-11, and they have to beat Ohio State at home in their regular season finale Saturday if they want to stay atop that bubble.

They're not gonna go easy on themselves. Which in an odd way -- and what other way has there been this season? -- is hewing to form for a team whose signature characteristic across this long winter is not being able to find a form?

The Hoosiers started the season with Mike Woodson having won the transfer portal and assembled an on-paper powerhouse, and they will end it with Woodson having already resigned and playing out a string his guys will try to stretch as long as they can for his sake. And yet here at the end, after all that, they seem to have found a lineup rotation that works, and with it an identity.

Buncha scrappy street fighters, that seems to be it. Punch it inside to the one-two punch of Oumar Bello and Malik Reneau and hit the spot-up threes at one end; turn loose Trey Galloway and the engine of chaos that is Anthony Leal at the other. 

Sometimes the magic works, to quote Old Lodgeskins from "Little Big Man." Sometimes it doesn't.

Last night it didn't.

Last night Indiana ran into a team that likes the scrappy stuff as well as it does, and that did it a little better. The Ducks outboarded Bello, Reneau 'n' them 43-36. The Hoosiers forced just nine turnovers and turned it over 10 times themselves. And, yeah, they got home-cooked a bit, going just 3-of-7 at the line while Oregon shot 21 free throws and made 19 of them.

That sent Woodson into an f-bombing rage in the postgame, although that 7-of-8 for the Ducks in the last minute made the totals look more biased than they were. 

No matter. It was what it was. And now Saturday is what it is: An absolute must win instead of a kinda-sorta must win.

They're not gonna go easy on themselves.

Surprise, surprise.

Rest stop

 Saw a headline on ESPN's site this morning that made me chuckle a bit, because it was as inadvertently comic as it was inadvertently unaware. 

The headline said this: "Duke's Cooper Flagg Stars In Likely Last Game At Cameron."

"Cameron" being "Cameron Indoor Arena," Duke's notorious home court.

Cooper Flagg went for 28 points, eight rebounds, seven assists, three blocks and two steals there last night, as the Blue Devils euthanized Wake Forest 93-60. 

It was Flagg's 19th game in Cameron Indoor, counting exhibitions. It was his 30th game, total, as a Dukie.

This does not exactly make him a time-honored institution there, needless to say. Although he's now only 120 games behind Amilie Jefferson and 118 behind Christian Laettner and Kyle Singer, who played 150, 148 and 148 games in their time in Durham.

That's why the headline this morning made me chuckle, because it implied a degree of Duke-ly permanence that simply doesn't exist. This not Cooper Flagg's fault, understand. He's the product of his one-and-done culture, blessed by a phenomenal level of talent that ensured Duke would be a mere rest stop for him.

He is, after all, just 18 years old; when he played his first game for Duke back in November, he was still only 17. And yet he's the best player in the college game, and everyone knew before he stepped foot on campus he'd be the best player in the college game. He's that good.

It's why when Duke's season ends in a month or so, Cooper Flagg's association with Duke will end, too. 

As the consensus pick to go No. 1 in the NBA draft in June, off he'll go after his momentary ships-in-the-night brush with Joe College. The times being what they are, he might actually take a pay cut to (officially) turn pro.

What I want to know is this: Did the kid's "likely last game in Cameron" carry the poignancy implied by those words? Or any poignancy at all?

I'm sure it did, some, or at least Flagg had the manners to pretend it did. But every time a one-and-done is done with the one -- or, in this Wild West era, turns pro after playing for three or four schools -- I wonder what he really got from his college "experience."

If you're only there, for, what, six or seven months, are you really (in Flagg's case) a true blue Blue Devil? Have you been at your school long enough to learn the alma mater?  Long enough to discover the best pizza joint, or which hangout has a laissez faire approach to checking IDs?

Long enough that, if a visitor asks you where the library is, you can actually give him or her directions?

Me, I've always been intrigued by what sort of classes one-and-dones sign up for. Do you actually dip a toe in your school's academic rigor? Or is it more like this:

One-and-done: Hey, what classes are you taking this semester?

Actual student: Oh, the usual. The Dynamics Of Muslim/Christian Interaction In The Balkans Between 1345 And 1450 ... Murder, Guilt And The Social Isolation Of Edgar Allen Poe ... that sort of thing. You?

One-and-done: I'm takin' this class where we watch movies and then talk about 'em. We're already up to "Rocky III."

After which Actual Student asks if One-and-Done is taking any serious classes. The kind that count toward, say, a degree in business or law or internal medicine.

One-and-Done has a ready answer for that, I figure.

"I dunno," he says. "They got any degrees in Damn Glad To Meetcha?"

Still the Man

New Zealander Scott Dixon is 44 years old now, in his dotage as the cartoon speed of his profession goes, but the man can still hotfoot it. And the reason he can still hotfoot it is because he still thinks like ... well, like Ricky Bobby.

"Talladega Nights"? If you're not first you're last? All that?

That was Dixie to a fare-thee-well Sunday at St. Pete, minus the Will Ferrell buffoonery. He started sixth and finished second to Alex Palou, and he was NOT. HAPPY. He was kinda pissed, if you want the truth of it. And he was kinda pissed because he thought his teammate Palou got away with one he shouldna gotten away with.

Oh, not because of anything the Spaniard did, mind you. Because of something Dixon couldn't do.

He couldn't communicate with his crew. 

His comm crapped out as soon as the green dropped, and it was mostly radio silence between Dixon and the guys on his pit box the rest of the way. That meant they couldn't properly coordinate pit strategy, which is why Dixon pitted one lap late on the last cycle and therefore was unable to catch Palou for the win.

And yet ...

And yet he still finished second.

Without a radio.

Beat Josef Newgarden, polesitter Scott McLaughlin, Kyle Kirkwood, Felix Rosenqvist, a bunch of other guys.

Without a radio.

I don't know about you, but I find that amazing. I think it's more proof that Scott Dixon is the best IndyCar racer of his generation, and one of the two or three best of all time. I think Sunday was yet another reason only A.J. Foyt has more career IndyCar wins than Dixie's 58, and only A.J. has more IndyCar titles than the Kiwi's six.

Because he finished second without a radio. And was all grumbly that it wasn't first.

Hats off to the man. Or, rather, the Man.

The day approacheth

 Big news out of D.C. this weekend, at least in some precincts: It seems our Felon-in-Chief, Donald John "Legbreaker" Trump, has decided to pardon the late Pete Rose for his crimes against baseball and basic decency.

Now, I'm not smart enough to understand exactly how the Felon can do this, but then I don't understand how he can do a third of what he does. Or why, for that matter.

All I know is birds of a feather flock together, which means the Felon seems tofeel an odd kinship with fellow lawbreakers and the like. Having always had a threadbare understanding of right and wrong himself, he's comfortable palling around with, and carrying water for, like-minded individuals.

That's why it shocked no one when he stayed in character in announcing he was going to pardon Charlie Hustle.

Yeah, he said, Pete bet on baseball, and that was bad. But he never bet against his own team, only for it. So no big deal, right?

Were it possible, I would summon that crotchety old racist Kenesaw Mountain Landis from his grave to explain why that is in fact a big deal. I would also concede Judge Landis would sound impossibly out of touch if he could be summoned from the grave, because the Felon's sketchy ethics seem to be more in line with the current American zeitgeist than some of us would like to admit.

Cheatin', lyin' and out-and-out gangsterin' is A-OK if it Gets Things Done. That seems to be the gist of things these days.

Which is why I can't say if it was synergy, or just a coincidence. that the Felon's announcement came almost simultaneously with another bit of news out of Major League Baseball.

To wit: MLB commish Rob Manfred, it seems, if considering a petition filed by Pete Rose's family to take his name off baseball's ineligible list.

If Manfred does it, and he well could, that would mean Pete would be eligible for the Hall of Fame again. And it would likely mean he'd be voted in, considering his banishment for gambling on baseball is close to 40 years old now, and the guy himself is dead.

Also, Manfred and MLB no longer have a working leg to stand on. This will happen when you climb in bed with the very people you spent more than a century holding at arm's length.

I'm speaking, of course, about MLB's deals with various online betting sites, which makes their traditionally stern anti-gambling stance a veritable laff riot. Heavens to Shoeless Joe, there's even going to be an MLB franchise in Vegas before long, if everything goes according to plan. So how can Manfred and Co. keep Pete Rose consigned to outer darkness and expect the rest of us to keep a straight face?

I've always maintained that's where Pete belonged until he 'fessed up and quit lying about everything. He finally did that, even if, in true Charlie Hustle fashion, it was just another Hustle. But the book sold, and he did confess, so it was all good.

Or in other words, the time is finally right.

Put the man in Cooperstown -- if only because a baseball Hall of Fame without baseball's career hits leader is a Hall with a yawning hole in it. Same, by the way, with Barry Bonds  and Roger Clemens, who are tainted by the Steroids Era but were already gold-card HOFers before they allegedly began juicing.

At any rate, one thing seems clear now: Pete Rose's day approacheth. Best get used to it.

Afternoon in a small town

 Norwell High School won its first Indiana girls basketball title last night in Indianapolis, and when I heard that the years spun away like October leaves. Oh, not because it was Norwell, mind you, although the title came 48 years after a fierce little guard named Teri Rosinski took the Knights to the state finals for the first time. 

It was another milestone that did it for me.

Norwell's victory, see, happened on the day the IHSAA celebrated the girls tournament's 50th year. They brought out a bunch of former Miss Basketballs -- the 2012 winner, Norwell's own Jessica Rupright, was among them -- and everyone turned the clock back half a century to the first girls tourney, when little Judi Warren and the Warsaw Tigers beat Bloomfield in the title game to win it all.

Took me right back, all of that did. Took me back not to Norwell and its dateline of Ossian, but to another small town and another late-winter day.

The town was Lapel, In., 85 or so miles south of Norwell High School, a bedroom community for Indy now but a quiet little farm burg then. The year was 1977, and I'd been a sportswriter for the late, great Anderson Daily Bulletin for about two months at the time. And one particular afternoon I made the short jaunt to Lapel High's gym to cover a girls sectional game.

We were three weeks away from Teri Rosinski and the Knights' big day, and two years into the girls joining Hoosier Hysteria. You couldn't see what was coming, way back then. You couldn't see the steady tramp of years that would give us Pat Summitt and her mighty Tennessee Volunteers, or Geno Auriemma and his even mightier UConn Huskies, or Caitlin Clark playing to sellout crowds wherever she went in a women's professional league everyone seemed to want to watch.

None of it was even a whisper in the wind, that afternoon in Lapel.

Instead it was a bunch of girls dribbling up the floor with their eyes glued to a boys' ball too big for their hands, as if it were a boisterous puppy that might jump its leash at any moment. It was a thousand jump balls and ten thousand fouls. It was Indiana's game, but only if you squinted hard and tilted your head just so.

Fifty years along I tell people about that afternoon in a small town, and say they can't conceive how far the girls have come, and how high has been their ascent. This morning I read about Norwell's ferociously disciplined 1-3-1 halfcourt trap that squeezed the life out of unbeaten Greensburg, yielding 19 turnovers and a 19-4 advantage in points off turnovers, and I try to see it happening that day in Lapel. I literally cannot.

Those days are as alien to these as a Victrola is to an MP3.  And that is  the best tribute I can imagine to the persistence and drive of all the girls and all the coaches between then and now, girls and coaches who loved the game as much as any boy and who saw, even if we couldn't, how skillfully they could learn to play it.

This afternoon, as usual, there will be a bunch of women's college games on the tube. I suggest you watch one, and think about the road that led to it. Or just think about those Norwell Knights, who are most assuredly not their mothers' Norwell Knights.

"The way our girls have learned to play this 1-3-1, this is the best we've ever played it with this group," Norwell coach Eric Thornton told Dylan Sinn of the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette when it was done last night. "It's not just that we play a 1-3-1, it's the way we play it. That's these girls ..."

These girls. These girls, who have come so very, very far.

Imagine this ...

 First day of March now, and in the softening air the coming spring suddenly seems more than the ghost of a ghost. The sun really does feel warmer on the neck these days. It really does linger longer in the evenings. Here in Indiana, the high school girls basketball season -- our winter game -- ends today; the boys begin closing the book on their winter at the top of next week.

It's a time of imagining, because the imagining is thisclose to coming true. And so today let's play Imagine This, boys and girls, because the calendar's right for it ...

Imagine a world that is all Florida and Arizona, where the pop of a glove and the crack of a bat are being heard again.

Imagine a world where a Bucknell upsets Kansas, or a Mercer whips Duke, or a Fairleigh Dickinson topples Purdue, because those days are coming again in a little over two weeks.

Imagine a world where Indiana, in a little over two weeks, playing in the NCAA Tournament for their lame-duck head coach, if you can dig that.

Imagine a world where it is spring for certain gearheads among us, because down in St. Petersburg, Fla., the IndyCar boys go racing again tomorrow, and that means the heat and light of Memorial Day weekend under an endless Indiana sky is only a handful of weeks away. 

Imagine a world where Josef Newgarden becomes, on that weekend beneath that sky, the first man in 109 runnings, to win the Indianapolis 500 three times in a row. Don't tell me it couldn't happen.

Imagine, if you can, a world where the Indianapolis Colts get their, um, stuff together, finally.  A world where the Chicago Bears do the same. A world where the Indiana Pacers win an NBA title, and a Canadian team hoists Lord Stanley again, and the Chicago White Sox become a real boy again instead of whatever the hell they are now.

Dump site. Crime scene. Double-A team. Take your pick.

And last but not least ...

Imagine a world where, instead of backing England with no strings attached, the United States of America goes behind John Bull's back to strike a deal with Hitler that will give the U.S. the rights to half Great Britain's mineral deposits. After which FDR summons Winston Churchill to the White House to lecture him, in front of the media and the public, for not being properly grateful for the shakedown.

Imagine a world where that actually happened this week. Only the names were changed.

I'd rather not, frankly. I'd rather imagine the What Sox winning the AL Central this year.

One seems as unbelievable to me as the other at this point. But that's just me, I suppose.