by John Gasaway
I think it’s pretty obvious at this point that the most sublime and savory use of Twitter imaginable relates to college hoops, specifically the ability to get quotes from sideline huddles in real time. For instance the other day at the 76 Classic in Anaheim, Bob Huggins was yelling at his West Virginia team (it’s true!) for free-lancing on D: “We don’t switch! We never talked about switching!” Thanks to the ever vigilant Gary Parrish we had that knowledge before the ball had even been whistled back into play.
So I can only assume that the relative lack of working press in Charlottesville last night accounts for the fact that I didn’t get a tweet spelling out what Ed DeChellis must have told his Penn State team last night late in the Nittany Lions’ victory over Virginia. I just know in my bones it went down like this:
Alright, men. Here’s the thing. I know we’re up by 12 and there’s only three minutes left, but I want you to make this close down the stretch, OK? You see there’s this guy at Basketball Prospectus who’s convinced I’m some sort of wiz in close games because we always win them. But he won’t write about any of this if we don’t let Virginia back in the game. Let’s see if we can get this final margin down to about three, got it?
Sure enough, Penn State beat the Cavaliers 69-66 in Charlottesville last night to give the Nittany Lions’ league a precious and rare 1-0 lead in this year’s installment of the ACC-Big Ten Challenge. Talor Battle came very close to outscoring eight other PSU players combined, recording 32 points by making 5-of-9 threes and getting to the line 13 times. It turned out his team needed every one of those five threes.
I realize the name “DeChellis” rarely pops up in conversations centered on coaches who give their teams a decided schematic advantage in the closing minutes, but that may have to change pretty quickly here….
Read it all: Basketball Prospectus | Big Ten thankful for “degree of DeChellis”.