(M Basketball) Princeton-Brown Live Blog
Live blog of Princeton men’s basketball’s 63-46 win at the Pizzitola Sports Complex in Providence, RI against the Brown Bears. Tigers move to 10-5 (1-0) on the season with the win.
Post-game: Dominant performance from the Tigers tonight. They were never in danger here (except in the first few minutes), and even though they let up a bit in the second half, by that time, the game was pretty much done, and Brown could not put a major dent in the lead. Brown did not look much better than Goucher tonight, and it showed in the stats. Brown shot 30% from the field, compared to 44% for Princeton. Princeton also shot 41% from 3, versus 22% for the Bears. The Bears were pretty weak defensively, and their offense could just not keep up, especially with the solid defense of the Tigers tonight.
Rebounding was pretty even, 33-31 for the Tigers. Brown had a few more turnovers. Brown shot 20/28 from the free throw line… got a lot of calls tonight, compared to 4/8 from the line for the Tigers. Buczak was hampered by foul trouble, as well as Saunders.
Stat leaders:
Doug Davis with 16 for Princeton, all in the first half. Matt Mullery scores 10 for the Bears, but only shot 2/8 from the field. Andrew McCarthy had 9 rebounds for the Bears, compared to 8 for Dan Mavraides for the Tigers. Doug Davis had 4 assists, no Bear had more than 1.
Read More
World Cup 2010 Draw – USA could be in big trouble
So, the seeds for the World Cup draw, to be performed on Friday in South Africa starting around noon EST, have been published. The seeds are decided in some convoluted and complicated fashion that takes into account FIFA rankings (as meaningless as they are) in October, to avoid giving an added benefit to teams that had to play more competitive fixtures to reach South Africa.
Each group of four will take one team from each “pot” (as the seedings are called) without any regard to where the teams are from. The pots are arranged to put together teams from the same continent, as well as actual skill level (for the first pot), to avoid having teams from the same continent together in the same group, if possible, although, for example, this is notably impossible for European teams, since there are more teams from that continent than groups (as the USA knows quite well, having drawn a “group of death” last time around in 2006 with the Czech Republic, Italy (the eventual champion), and Ghana). How this is done practically is that the first pot has the “seeded” teams (these are the supposedly best teams, plus the host South Africa), while subsequent pots have teams from different continents. The pots for the draw are as follows:
Pot 1 (seeds): South Africa, Germany, Brazil, Italy, Spain, England, Holland, Argentina.
Pot 2 (Europe): France, Portugal, Slovenia, Switzerland, Greece, Serbia, Denmark, Slovakia.
Pot 3 (Africa and South America): Ivory Coast, Ghana, Cameroon, Nigeria, Algeria, Paraguay, Chile, Uruguay.
Pot 4 (Asia, Oceania and North/Central America): Japan, South Korea, North Korea, Australia, New Zealand, USA, Mexico
What these pots mean is that the US could conceivably draw a group with Brazil or Spain or England (all three are equally difficult, in my opinion), Portugal or France (at least talent-wise, far superior to the US), and Ivory Coast or Ghana. A group like that would, I think, spell doom for the US effort before it began. What US soccer fans have to be hoping for is to draw South Africa from Pot 1, and Greece or similar from Pot 2. We’ll see, but some luck will be required for our boys to have a chance to advance out of the group stages (must finish in the top two places after a round-robin). At least Charlize Theron will be doing the actual drawing…