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ESPN, as usual, has cast a line into the sports media waters and pulled up a dispute that wouldn’t have been there had they not stocked it themselves. Why? Any legitimate sports critic who thinks this year’s men’s NCAA championship game between Duke and Butler is in the discussion for “best ever” has to be kidding themselves.
Not only is Duke the worst national champion in the past decade or so, but they also almost lost the game to the worst championship contender in a long while. That is not to take anything away from either of the teams who each earned their place in the game, but both were recipients of an extremely lucky path to the finals.
First, take Duke. Even though they were undisputedly the lowest of the four number one seeds, they were placed in a cupcake bracket that only got easier when Villanova was upset by an overachieving St. Mary’s team. In the Final Four, they dodged another bullet when West Virginia upset Kentucky in the Elite Eight, which pitted Duke against just the kind of athletic, poor shooting team that they were designed to beat. In that game, the Mountaineers were clearly hampered by their lack of point guard play with starter Truck Bryant — sidelined for the tournament with a broken foot — and the Blue Devils capitalized on their inability to make plays and feed the post.
On the other side of the bracket, Butler was underseeded which allowed them to play Syracuse before Arinze Onuaku could come back healthy. In the Final Four, they were granted a huge homecourt advantage by playing a shuttle ride away from their campus and had the fortune of playing a Michigan State team that was without their leading scorer. If they had been matched up against Ohio State or Kansas, they would have been run out of the gym, but Butler had the biggest obstacles in their path removed by some other Cinderella hopefuls.
The entire 2010 tournament, highlighted by the championship game, was a microcosm of this year’s unstable college basketball season: replete with number one seeds playing down to competition, watered-down power conference teams, and fundamental basketball rising to the fore where talent failed.
Certainly this year’s national championship was a very entertaining game, but for it to be called the best ever, I’d like to have my cake and eat it too. To me, Duke winning this year felt like Argentina winning the gold in the 2004 Winter Olympics. The USA, like this year’s talented squads, came in with too much cockiness and not enough leadership — and lost to solid, mistake-free basketball teams.
Would anyone argue that Argentina over Italy was the best Olympic game ever? No, because there wasn’t elite talent on the floor. Look no further than Kansas and Memphis in the 2008 national championship for a game that had both great talent –with eight future NBA players on the court — as well as great basketball.
As far as Duke vs. Butler goes, I had a great time watching the game, but it was decidedly not the best championship ever played.
Bangor Daily News