Camouflage

I'm not going to Websters for this but to camouflage is to disguise the obvious. I went to the America East Quarter Finals in Hartford today. Only saw the 2nd session and watched BU beat UNH then Hartford beat Maine. After watching a pretty down league (28th out of 33, thanks Dad) something became obvious. I have spent a little bit of time on this blog criticizing announcers, reporters, etc...So now I'll use some personal examples. Here some quotes you might hear from me on a January night, "that dude can fly" "look at that guy jump" "he gets in the lane" "great vision" "he's fast" "i love the way he finds the open man" (caveat, any quote relating to passing is probably about Rondo) "great rebounder" "he's big"...etc, etc, etc...I say those things and so does everybody else. Now, go watch an American East game and it brings you back to the #1 goal in basketball. SCORE! It is so underrated. Let me credit Bill Simmons 9 ba-jillion page book for bringing back to relevance for me the ability to get one's shot off. Getting your shot off is half the equation. Putting it in the basket is the 2nd half of that equation. Surprisingly, looking at the stats, the teams shot better than I actually thought but across the board 3 pt% was atrocious. I watched Holland on BU score between 16-20 (here is a prejudice against small schools, if it was kemba I'd copy and paste the box score link for you, but this is the America East conference so I bet you don't care for the link). I've never seen him play before this, so maybe he can shoot, but today he couldn't. Hit the side of the rim on every J he took except for one 14 footer in the lane in the first half. But he scored. He got post position, he got rebounds, he got to the hoop, and mainly as an 85% foul shooter he got to the line. Looking at his season stats he made 145 foul shots in 30 games. That is slightly less than 5 points a game from the line. Trust me, these teams need the points. This is turning into a ramble and I'd love to talk about Melo going for 20 by getting to the line against Uconn in '03 when he lost by 20, or just mentioning how much I love J.R. Smith because he shoots from deep and can score inside but, I digress...Scoring is the goal of basketball and so often we praise other intangibles while forgetting the obvious, THIS DUDE CAN SCORE. At the NBA level it's different, because everybody can score. That is also the beauty of watching a future NBA scorer when he's in college, ala the 'Melo situation. Maybe their shot isn't dropping that night but they get to the line and end up with their 17.