Author: Kevin

The final night of the SeaKing District basketball tournament was little more than a coronation. It began with the Garfield boys outscoring Bellevue 25-8 during the second quarter to open up a 45-23 lead at halftime, a margin far too steep for the overmatched Wolverines to overcome. The final was 87-57. And it continued in the nightcap with the Bellevue girls, who started the third quarter of their title contest against Bishop Blanchet with an 18-0 run that turned a three-point game at the intermission into a relative rout. The No. 1 Bellevue girls improved to 22-0 with their 67-53 win on Saturday, and the top-ranked Bulldog boys are now 22-2.

Garfield found itself with a far easier championship game matchup than coach Ed Haskins would have anticipated a week ago. This was supposed to be round three in the annual series between the Bulldogs and Rainier Beach, currently the state’s best rivalry in any sport, but the Vikings let down their end of the bargain with a stunning loss to O’Dea in the district quarterfinals. So instead, Bellevue — a fine team, but not the sort that was ever going to make the Bulldogs nervous. The Wolverines’ pick-and-roll tandem of Sharif Khan and Mikey Henn created sporadic offense in defeat, combining for 39 points by my count, but it wasn’t nearly enough to keep pace with a team featuring at least six future Division I players.

Continue reading “Garfield Boys Romp, Bellevue Girls Roll At SeaKing Districts”

I’ve been watching a lot of old Washington basketball games the past couple weeks, late at night when I can’t sleep. On the Pac-12 Network, on the UW channel, they’ll be showing some random game from late in Bob Bender’s tenure, or the 2004 team’s win over No. 1 Stanford, or the night Klay Thompson scored 43 points against the Huskies in the Pac-12 tournament, and I always end up tuning in for at least a while. I was eleven during the 2003-04 season that really kickstarted this whole Lorenzo Romar era, so I remember every team since then — the best dozen years in program history by just about any measure, certainly the stretch in which the UW has sent the most guys to the NBA — pretty darn well. I covered the program for three years.

And it is with complete confidence that I say the Huskies have never had a player like Marquese Chriss. Robert Upshaw was probably the closest thing, but he’s a couple inches taller than Chriss, didn’t have the offensive versatility, and seemed like a lunatic. Otherwise it’s maybe Bobby Jones, except not really? Quincy Pondexter, except a whole lot taller and bouncier? Darnell Gant, except don’t make me laugh? I don’t mean Chriss is better than Pondexter, but certainly more physically gifted. Chriss is an 18-year-old walking pogo stick who can make 3s, dunk on people’s heads, and blocks shots like a volleyball player. He is unique and amazing.

Continue reading “Dunks In The Wind: Will The UW Hoops Revival End Before It Begins?”

 

This is a ranking of the things we call men who dress up in costumes, a subject for which I have something of an affinity.

Prompted by an off-hand comment by a good friend on Twitter, I combed through every mascot in the NFL, NHL, NBA, MLS, and MLB and picked out the ones with the cleverest names. The minutiae of sports can be highly enjoyable, and so can puns.

Dishonorable mention

When the Baltimore Ravens were born from the ashes of the Cleveland Browns in 1996, they made the fantastic decision to have three costumed raven mascots named Edgar, Allan, and Poe. (Edgar Allan Poe lived in Baltimore and once wrote a little ditty called “The Raven.”) In 2008, they made the deplorable decision to ditch Edgar and Allan in favor of two real, live ravens named Rise and Conquer. What? You had the English-majors-who-like-sports market completely cornered, and you threw it away. For shame.

Now, the fifteen teams who haven’t ruined a good thing:

Continue reading “The Fifteen Best Mascot Names In American Professional Sports”

They are the two hardwood goliaths of Class 1A, Lynden Christian and King’s. Boys and girls basketball combined, they are the winners of twenty-two state championships, including the boys-girls sweep King’s completed last March in Yakima. So far, this season has been a particularly good one for the two private Christian schools. The Lyncs entered the weekend as the No. 1 team in the state in both genders, according to the AP, and both teams from King’s were ranked No. 3.

They had not yet played each other, though, which made Saturday’s double-header — Lynden Christian vs. King’s girls at 5:30, the boys following a half-hour later — all the more appealing. The rainswept drive from Seattle to Mt. Vernon H.S. was not, but I made it anyway, and settled into my place in the bleachers of the big, old, wooden barn a few minutes before tip.

Continue reading “Holier Than Thou: King’s And Lynden Christian Battle For Private School Supremacy”

I’m a believer in writing-as-therapy, so consider this a self-prescribed session on the couch in hopes of getting over Washington’s heartrending home defeat on Saturday against the ‘Cats — a game that would have been very nice to have for a team that’s fighting for an NCAA tournament berth and will spend the rest of the season trying to make up for home losses to Oakland and UC Santa Barbara in December, which …  see, I’m getting upset again. Time for some optimism.

1. The audacity of youth

At one point in the first half, Marquese Chriss went up for an attempted dunk over Arizona center Kaleb Tarczewski that, if completed, would have perhaps been the greatest moment in the history of Hec Edmundson Pavilion, a building that has hosted presidents. (Fine, maybe second-best behind Nate Robinson’s alley-oop against Arizona in 2004). Later, DeJounte Murray had a clear path to the basket on a two-on-one break, but instead tried a behind-the-back dribble that resulted in a turnover and, shortly thereafter, two points for the Wildcats.

In retrospect, it would be easy to point to these two plays and think, man, those two missed opportunities could have been the six-point swing the UW needed to win. But to do so would be to miss the point.

Continue reading “The Ten Best Things From The UW’s 77-72 Loss To Arizona”

The period of time I spent waiting in line to get into the gym at Lynnwood High School on Friday night was longer than the period of time that the game between the Royals and visiting Glacier Peak was actually competitive. And I didn’t even have to wait that long.

All those hundreds of people were there to see what was on paper the last, best chance for AP No. 1 Lynnwood (19-0) to be challenged during the regular season. When the two teams played up in Snohomish on Jan. 13, the defending 3A state champs narrowly escaped with a 60-54 win — to date, the only time this season their margin of victory was fewer than 14 points.

But this time around, on senior night at Lynnwood, when perhaps the two greatest girls basketball players in school history were on their home floor for the penultimate time, the Grizzlies never had a chance. Lynnwood jumped out to a 24-10 lead after the first quarter, which swelled to 49-25 shortly after halftime and 63-29 with 2:11 left in the third period. The final margin was 79-49, according to those who stuck around to watch the fourth quarter. I was not one of them.

Continue reading “Royal Gains: Lynnwood Girls Thrash GP, Stake Claim As State’s Best”

Three years ago, the Lakeside boys basketball team was one measly point away from a state title. If star guard Tramaine Isabell had converted the front end of a one-and-one with one second left in regulation of the Class 3A championship game against Rainier Beach, the relatively small, extremely wealthy private school on the Seattle-Shoreline border would have won it all in Washington’s toughest division.

But Isabell missed the free throw, and the Vikings went on to a 62-59 victory in overtime to earn their second straight crown.

Seventeen months later, reporter Mike Baker of The Seattle Times published a lengthy investigation of the program’s surprising rise to prominence. The findings weren’t pretty. Lakeside, the Times alleged, had been a party to a series of WIAA rules violations and other unsavory activities, including illegal recruiting through the A PLUS Youth Program, a basketball nonprofit run by Lions head coach Tavio Hobson. The school had also relaxed its admissions and eligibility standards for basketball players and provided unusual benefits to some of its stars, including Isabell, whose driver’s license listed as his address the $6 million lakeside home of Rich Padden, a lawyer and prominent booster of Lions athletics. At the center of the Times story was former Microsoft CEO and future Los Angeles Clippers owner Steve Ballmer, whose three sons all attended Lakeside and who, it was alleged, had catalyzed the school’s newfound commitment to athletic excellence.

Continue reading “The Last Lion: Isiah Brown, Steve Ballmer, And Lakeside Basketball”

I think I’ve gone to watch four Metro basketball games in the past few weeks and all four games were decided by double figures. Which reminds me of two football seasons ago, when the first three games I covered for TDN were all shutouts. Not a lot of late-game thrills.

The most recent was the Roughriders of Roosevelt taking care of the Chief Sealth Seahawks on Friday night, which I wrote about here. Not the most exciting game in the world, but it did feature two of the more historically interesting girls basketball programs in Seattle.

Roosevelt is, I would venture a pretty strong guess guess, is the only girls basketball team in Metro to have a documentary made about them that was featured at the Toronto Film Festival. That would be “The Heart of the Game,” from 2005, the story of the school’s 2004 state title team led by basketball star/teenage mother Darnellia Russell and her coach, Bill Resler (who, fun fact, taught my mom in tax law at the UW). I’d give it a hearty recommendation, but I’d recommend just about any basketball documentary ever made, so maybe the endorsement’s not worth that much.

Then there’s Chief Sealth, which in 2005 and 2006 fielded one of the greatest collections of talent in state history. Regina Rogers and Charmaine Barlow went on to play at the UW, Nia Jackson starred at Oregon, and Christina Nzekwe was a UCLA Bruin. (It’s probably weird I can remember those names off the top of my head ten years later.) The only problem was that Seahawks coach Ray Willis had stacked his roster by misbegotten means, and Sealth’s two state titles were soon stripped by the WIAA for illegal recruiting. But man, those teams sure were good.

I covered the much-anticipated (by people who anticipate such things) girls basketball tilt between West Seattle and Bishop Blanchet on Wednesday for The Seattle Times. You can read the game story here.

Now, a few spare thoughts on the showdown between the city of Seattle’s two finest teams:

-The main attraction Wednesday night was the battle between Blanchet forward Jadyn Bush, the leading scorer in Metro, and West Seattle center Lydia Giomi, last year’s league MVP. So it was a shame to see Bush pick up three fouls in the game’s first four minutes and spend the rest of the first half on the bench. She then picked up a quick fourth early in the third quarter. Bush finally got going in the fourth, when she scored all six of her points and guided the Braves back to within single-digits, but the damage had been done. Continue reading “Metro Girls Basketball: West Seattle 44, Bishop Blanchet 30”

I love names, and professional football players tend to have extremely interesting ones. These are the best of the bunch, as decided by combing through every NFL roster in search of the lyrical, the alliterative, and the downright strange.

Two personal favorites: Cowboys receiver/return man Lucky Whitehead, who sounds like a gangster from 1920s Chicago, and Jaguars linebacker Thurston Armbrister, who almost certainly served in the House of Lords during the 19th century. But the beauty of this list really is in the eye of the beholder.

Away we go, from A to Z — or, rather, from Prince Amukamara to Frank Zombo.

FIRST-TEAM OFFENSE

QB Teddy Bridgewater, MIN

RB Charcandrick West, KC

FB Kyle Juszczyk, BAL

WR Lucky Whitehead, DAL

WR Jerricho Cotchery, CAR Continue reading “The NFL All-Name Team”