Author: Kevin

The march toward this weekend’s Washington state basketball regionals continues with a third installment of the most comprehensive preview guide you’ll find on the internet. Today, it’s Class 2A’s turn, where the defending champion Clarkston boys and Mark Morris girls are both back to defend their crowns — although one of the pair has a much better chance at repeating than the other.

The Bantams and Monarchs are two of the eight schools whose boys and girls teams will both be in action. The others: Lynden, Liberty (Issaquah), Ellensburg, Shorecrest, North Kitsap, and River Ridge. Of that rather large group, Lynden would seem to have the best chance of pulling off a sweep in Yakima. The Lions boys are ranked No. 2 and the girls are No. 3; in a strange twist, both will face Liberty this weekend. An under-the-radar pick who could make noise in both genders: Shorecrest. And that’s not just because Shoreline is an exemplary suburb.

We kicked the week off by previewing Class 2B and 1B here, continued with Class 1A here, and will finish things off with the big schools in the coming days. But first things first.

Continue reading “High School Basketball Regionals Preview, Part III”

Our weeklong preview of the state basketball round of sixteen continues today with Class 1A, where the King’s boys and girls are coming off a sweep of the state titles last spring. They’re one of six schools this year to advance both genders into the regional round, along with Cashmere, Kalama, Lynden Christian, Seattle Academy, and Zillah.

The 1A ranks also bring us some of the wonkiest matchups the WIAA can dish out, including a meeting between the boys teams who were ranked first and second in the most-recent AP poll and a matchup of two more top-five teams on the girls side. In both instances, it’s a case of one district being particularly stacked with high-quality teams, something the seeding process does not take into account. That leads to a team like the Lynden Christian boys — the defending runners-up and a team that spent most of the year ranked No. 1 — entering regionals as the No. 3 seed out of their district tournament, behind King’s and Seattle Academy. Which doesn’t make a lot of sense, but I digress. On the bright side of this whole hullabaloo, I suppose we can appreciate that there will be some seriously high-level games contested this weekend.

You can click here to check out Part I of our series, which covers Class 2B and Class 1B. We’ll cover the rest of the classifications in the coming days, so come check out the site later this week if that sort of thing tickles your fancy.

Continue reading “High School Basketball Regionals Preview, Part II”

With regionals due up this Friday and Saturday and state basketball tournaments the following weekend, this is probably the most enjoyable two-week stretch on Washington’s prep sporting calendar. In honor, during the next five days I’m going to briefly analyze and make a pick for every single one of the 96 regional games across all six classifications.

I obviously haven’t ever seen the vast majority of these teams play, so some of these opinions may be (definitely are) extremely wrong. Please forgive me, parents and/or fans. This is supposed to be fun.

We’ll start things off tonight with a bonanza of info, going through the boys and girls matchups in both Class 2B and Class 1B. Tomorrow we’ll do the boys and girls in Class 1A, on Tuesday we’ll tackle Class 2A, on Wednesday it’ll be Class 3A, and on Thursday the big guys in Class 4A. So check back later in the week if you’re so inclined.

Continue reading “High School Basketball Regionals Preview, Part I”

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”