Preview: Kennesaw State v Creighton

GAME INFO

Time: 8 o’clock in the PM

TV: FSN. Check your local listings. Use Fox Sports GO to access the stream; do not use the new Fox Sports app as they do not have regional Fox Sports coverage available.

Radio: 1620AM / 101.9FM / 1620 App feat. the voice of Xmus Jaxon Flaxon-Waxon Bishop.

OPPONENT INFO

Kennesaw State University is located in Kennesaw, Georgia, a city almost directly north of Atlanta. It’s the third largest public university in the state of Georgia.

This will be Amir Abdur-Rahim’s first season as head coach for the Owls. He formerly played at Southeastern Louisiana, moved his way into Murray State, and eventually became the director of player development at Georgia Tech. After a stint at College of Charleston, he landed a gig at Texas A&M before joining the almighty Tom Crean in Georgia for a season before getting the head job at Kennesaw State.

Abdur-Rahim’s brother, Shareef, played in the NBA for 12 years, getting named to an All-Star team in 2002 when he was with the Atlanta Hawks. Shareef is currently the president of the NBA G League.

Abdur-Rahim took over a Kennesaw State program that went 6-26 last season, ranking 338th in adjusted offensive efficiency and 299th in adjusted defensive efficiency. Their eFG% in the 2018-19 season was a very, very bad 40.9%. This squad got housed on the regular and couldn’t shoot threes to save their lives. Only 21% of their total points came from beyond the arc, good for 353rd in the nation.

Simply put, this is a bad team. It’s why they let go of Al Skinner. It’s also why Boston College let go of Al Skinner in 2010 after posting a 15-16 season.

So, Amir Abdul-Rahim inherited a shitty program. They’re likely going to offer a different, less shitty look at what they put forth last season, but this is a program in transition. There’s no lightning in the bottle or potential for a mind-blowing upset because if there was I wouldn’t talk about it because of superstition of being completely and utterly wrong.

This just so happens to be Kennesaw State’s midwestern swing through the early portion of their “buy game” schedule. They’ll take a bus from Omaha to Des Moines Wednesday morning and play Drake on Thursday night. Then they’ll return home and battle it out with Mercer before going to an early season tournament.

Three Players That Exist In This Universe

Tyler Hooker - listed at 5’10 on the Owls’ website, but 6’0 on Kenpom - is their leading scoring threat. He’s a small guard that uses his quickness to get to the basket, shoots lights out from the charity stripe, and dishes out assists at an OK clip. He’s shifty and fast, loves to draw fouls when he gets in the trees, but he’ll have to put together a masterpiece to beat Creighton. He will not shoot threes. He simply wants to slash.

Danny Lewis is a 6’4 skinny guard who shoots all the threes. He tossed up thirteen in a loss to Liberty in a losing effort. In games where the Owls got blown to bits he was nowhere to be seen, but when they only won six games it’s hard to properly gauge how important he is on offense. He’s got quick hands and can pick guards apart with his skinny arms but that’s about all he can offer defensively.

Bryson Lockley will be the big guy down low, I guess. He fouls a lot and didn’t score much last year; he had two games where he scored 15 points, one against Gardner Webb and another against Florida Gulf “Dunk City” Coast. He occasionally gets a block or two but isn’t a scoring threat.

Verba de Ludis

Why are people allowed to have a billion dollars? What in this world can someone do with a billion dollars? I think about having a million dollars and that seems satisfactory. But then I think of one thousand million dollars and I get paralyzed by the thought of having that much money. I think the first practical thing I would do is donate a lot of it to things that my community desperately needs, like buying a mayor that will do what I tell them or buying a company that will emsla- I mean employ all of my enemies. That seems like a true fool’s errand though, to buy a company to try to make another billion dollars, or at least stack more cash atop an already generous pile of greenbacks.

It doesn’t quite add up why these few people don’t just give away their money. If you have a billion dollars, please email me and give it to me. I’ll give it to other people. It’ll be like a game of telephone except with a billion dollars. That sounds pretty cool and stupid, doesn’t it?

Then I start thinking, “what impractical things could I do with a billion dollars?” I think the obvious answer is to buy a botfarm in Indonesia or Russia or whatever and then have them email people at random with complimentary messages. These bot farms are being used for nefarious dealings, why not have them do something innocuous and pleasant? Again, if you have a billion dollars, please feel free to use this idea.

Warren Buffett lives like a mile or so away from me. He has a billion dollars or something, right? If you know him please get him in contact with me. I have a lot of ideas. Here are a few more:

• Build statues of ordinary people without their consent and then scatter them around the city
• Bankroll a thinktank to produce a more efficient thinktank
• Build a school for really dumb kids so they have somewhere to be. We both needed this when we were kids, dear reader.
• Ice skating rink on the moon
• Oh shit
• Basketball in space

Yeah.

That last one sounds really fucking cool. You’ve seen basketball before, right? You’ve seen space too, right? Well, maybe you haven’t. Wait, are we existing in space right now? Would you consider the earth to be a part of space, or is the conceptualization of “space” or, as it’s more formally known, the cosmos, the existence of everything absent of earth? Okay, well, just think about a place that’s more vast than the Rocky Mountains, more vast than the Grand Canyon, more vast than your patience with whatever you’re reading. Picture that. Then picture basketball in all its glory - the hoops, the clock, the ball, the shoes, the angry fan and the pleased fan, the whistle, and the clipboards - and put it into the cosmos.

It’s magical, isn’t it? The absence of light around the court. The eternal darkness. It’s truly bliss.

It makes my fingers tingle with delight. I would spend a billion, maybe even a trillion, to see basketball without the confines of gravity. Wouldn’t you?

Song of the Day - Born a Worm by Dan Reeder