Re: Sour Grapes Dept.

[Kim Malo <kmalo19@idt.net>]

At 04:58 PM 1/3/98 -0500, Dorine Pratt wrote:
>Sounds like sour grapes to me!  Most of the other teams couldn't play
>that way, they don't have all young, athletic legs.
>Dorine

Actually it's a lot more than just the legs -you could load a roster with
young CBAers if that was all it took. A good chunk of it, as Pitino himself
pointed out at the beginning, is attitude. You have to be willing to work,
and work wom more... and then some more, without necessarily getting some
flashy stats as a reward. Increasingly rare with today's athletic egos to
have enough guys willing to do this (as opposed to one or two on the team)
to make it work. Especially because it means submerging your own ego to a
degree, because it HAS to be a co-operative and co-ordinated effort.
Otherwise all the press does is create holes to be exploited by the offense.
It also takes a certain talent level, especially in quickness to make it
work. Not pure speed so much as reaction time and hand/eye co-ordination.

But yeah, there's a certain amount of sour grapes in this sort of response
to Pitino and his merry men around the league. And it's happened with almost
every team we've played. Surprised that it was the coach saying it this
time, most coaches have been smart enough to leave this sort of comment to
the players that just got burned. Sanders comment about how it took the
Wolves out of what they wanted to do with their stars answers the point
about how great a defense it is. That's what defense is supposed to do
-prevent the offense from doing what they prefer. And since there's nothing
that all 29 teams do alike because it workds for one team, whether it's a
triangle offense or a pressing defense, that last comment is just foolish.

-Kim

>Mike Dynon wrote:
>
>> It's become clear that teams not only don't like to play against
>> Boston's press, they also don't like to acknowledge that they were
>> beaten by it.  From today's Minnesota Star Tribune:
>>
>> "We had to use Stephon and Kevin so much to break their press, they
>> weren't in scoring positions," Wolves coach Flip Saunders said.
>>
>> Suffocating or not, it seemed to annoy the Wolves that they succumbed
>> to it. "If that was a great defense, you'd have 29 teams playing it,"
>> Saunders said.
>>
>> --
>> Mike Dynon
>> North Kingstown, RI
>>
>> ********************************************************
>> Are you connected with women's college volleyball? Visit
>> this site for a look at a talented potential recruit:
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Kim Malo
kmalo19@idt.net