B's Stories of the Week #5 - 3/14

The playoff pushes in the NBA and NHL seasons are fully underway and the MLB season is almost upon us. March Madness starts exactly one week away from today, and there is already so much controversy surrounding the sport of college basketball. This week we get into the winners and losers of the week and my top stories of the past week.

Stories of the Week:

1. Florida Panthers – This is a team that made it to the Stanley Cup Finals despite barely making the NHL Playoffs. Last season they eliminated a Boston Bruins team in the first round that was historically good, the best Toronto Maple Leafs team since 2004 and a Hurricanes team who were unstoppable. This season, they have the best record in the entire league and have shown obvious signs of improvement from last season.

This is a team that would just try to outscore their opponents two years ago while not playing great defense, this year all that has changed. Last season, they conceded two-hundred-seventy-two goals which was fourteen above the league average. This season, they have given up one-hundred-fifty-five goals which is forty-five less than the league average. With sixteen games left in the season, the Panthers will have a chance to lessen their goals allowed from last season by a hundred goals. The Panthers are also seventh in the league in penalty kill percentage (81.8%). This defense is an immovable object that has come a long way in the past two seasons.

Offensively, the Panthers have also been killing it. The Panthers are not as great offensively as they are defensively, but they still have a potent offense as they are ninth in the league in goals scored. The Panthers are the only team with four different players to be in the top twenty-five in points (goals and assists); Sam Reinhardt (77), Matthew Tkachuk (74), Aleksander Barkov (66), and Carter Verhaeghe (66). No team is better than this team at making the most out of their power-play opportunities as the Panthers score seven out of every ten times they get a power-play. They are a team that has the playoff experience to carry them far in the playoffs and the balance in their team to win the Stanley Cup again.

2. Mayday in Milwaukee – Some people have midlife crises; the Bucks are having a midseason crisis that exhibits all the signs of a midlife crisis. Sometimes, a man or a woman feels their relationship is not working out for them after twenty years of marriage and fall in love with someone else. That is the situation in Milwaukee right now, but the problem is that this too might not be the right fit and Milwaukee might have gotten a divorce too soon. Adrian Griffin, the Bucks coach for the first forty-three games of the season, yet was fired towards the end of January with a record of forty wins and thirteen losses. Since Doc Rivers has been hired, the Bucks have had ten wins and ten losses which is not terrible but when you consider the inconsistencies, it is concerning.

The Bucks in their first ten games at the helm of Rivers lost seven games and won three. They proceeded to win six in a row then lost three out of their last four. This includes a loss to a Sacramento Kings team by thirty-five despite having a healthy roster. The inconsistencies are startling, but the one consistency is their health. This team relies heavily on the three ball, as there is a seven percent difference in their six game win streak (shooting 39.5%) versus their most recent four games (shooting 32.5%).They also rely on how well Brook Lopez and Giannis Antetokounmpo play at the rim as in their last four games they averaged forty-one rebounds compared to in their win streak when they averaged 47.3 rebounds per game.

The Bucks need to find any form of consistency in the final month to hold on to their position for the playoffs. They are four and a half games ahead of the Knicks who are getting healthy and a half a game back of the Cleveland Cavaliers who are a team that has been hot recently and is also getting healthier. The Bucks currently have the two seed meaning they will have home court advantage in the first two rounds, but if they continue to slip, they will have to play the historically good Celtics in a series where they won’t have home court advantage. They need to make sure their backcourt steps up in this all-important final stretch because if they can’t get rebounds, they can’t be efficient enough to knock down threes. In three of their next four games, they play divisional opponents and after their next four games we will have a better idea of what seed the Bucks will have.

3. Women’s College Basketball – Last weekend saw Women’s College Basketball at its best and its worst. At its best, Juju Watkins and Caitlyn Clark set both of their respective conferences ablaze. Selection Monday is four days away and I can hardly contain my excitement. At its absolute worst, we saw a great game marred with controversy and inexcusable behavior.

Caitlin Clark about two weeks ago set the record for most points scored by a single player in college basketball history men’s or women’s. She has been playing out of her mind for the past four years and was just drafted by the Indiana Fever where she will join my favorite WNBA player, Aliyah Boston. Juju Watkins has already surpassed Caitlin Clark’s historic freshman season in total points and is second in the nation in points average (27.0) to Caitlin Clark’s (31.9). This sport is seeing a senior break records nobody thought could be broken while a freshman is following in her footsteps.

At Women’s College Basketball’s worst, was a scrum that broke out on Sunday during the SEC Championship game between South Carolina and LSU. To be fair, tense rivalries and scuffles is not something that is unseen in the sport of basketball and this was a game that was heated from start to finish. The problem is when you have a brother of a player run onto the court and a coach shows no accountability for her team’s part in an ugly incident. We will get into that later but it’s a shame this game was overshadowed by the altercation that took place as South Carolina exhibited dominance over their little sister for the sixteenth time in a row.

Losers of the week:

Kim Mulkey – A complete lack of integrity on the end of LSU’s Women’s College Basketball coach who seems to like being in hot water. When Britney Griner ended up being locked up in Russia for a minor violation, Mulkey remained silent about her former star hooper which showed the utmost class. Earlier this season, her and Angel Reese had some clubhouse issues which led to Reese being suspended for a few games.

            This past weekend Mulkey showed her true colors by contradicting her own argument she made in a similar situation. In a heated game where Florida played LSU, Angel Reese got into a minor scuffle with players on the opposing team. Mulkey said about that incident, “Angel wasn’t going to let that girl do that to her teammate. … You just did that to my teammate Ima give you a body check, (It’s) not dirty that’s just I got your back teammate.”

Now on Sunday, Flaujae Johnson who owned up to her mistake, intentionally fouled MiLaysia Fulwiley and shoved Ashlyn Watkins which led to Camila Cardosa leveling Johnson. Kim Mulkey said about Cardosa’s part in this incident, “I wish she would have pushed Angel Reese. Don’t push a kid – you 6’8″. Don’t push somebody that little. That was uncalled for, in my opinion. Let those two girls that were jawing, let them go at it." Attacking a kid on the opposing team in a press conference is crazy a) b) do not add fuel to the fire by invoking a player’s name who was not involved in this incident who is already a hot head. (Nothing wrong with being a hothead just do not go pouring gasoline onto a burning fire.)

Duke and Kyle Filipowski – Duke player crying wolf, what is new? In a game t a couple of weeks ago, Duke lost to Wake Forest and as is normally the case when there is an upset in college basketball, the court was stormed. Kyle Filipowski was tripped accidentally during the court-storming but in the video, it looked like he was trying to push a fan of Wake Forest. It is only speculation, but it did not look intentional but of course he went to the locker room and said it was intentional and his coach Jon Scheyer argued that court-storming should be banned from college basketball.

            This event brings us to this past weekend when North Carolina star Harrison Ingraham was trying to get back on defense and was tripped by none other than our guy Kyle Filipowski. At the end of the game, Ingraham was asked about this incident and said he did not want to say anything because he hadn’t seen the film yet. This is how you defuse the situation. Now as for Jon Scheyer, his beloved Cameron Crazies (Duke fans) threw debris onto the floor as North Carolina players waved goodbye to them. I personally have come to the far-fetched assumption that throwing things at college athletes is far worse than court-storming but then again what do I know? These were two embarrassing events from Duke basketball that were managed poorly as was the situation with LSU’s women’s basketball team.

Winners of the Week: Dawn Staley – Class. That is what the South Carolina Women’s Basketball coach exemplified on Sunday as she took accountability for her team’s actions in the melee that took place. She said, “I just want to apologize to the basketball community. You know when you are playing championship basketball in our league things get heated. No bad intentions. … Their emotions got so far ahead of them that sometimes these things happen.” This is what accountability and leadership looks like. Dawn Staley won her eighth SEC Championship in ten years this past weekend and I hope the media looks at the dynasty she is building as opposed to the controversial event that took place. (More to come on Dawn Staley’s Lady Gamecocks.)

Denver Nuggets – The Nuggets have won ten of their last eleven games and four in a row. They are heating up right before playoff time where they will have a chance to be the first team to go back-to-back since the 2018 Golden State Warriors. In this stretch, they have not won by less than two-possessions and their one loss was to the Pheonix Suns in overtime. They are fourth in the league in assists as a team (29.2), meaning they thrive off moving the ball through Jokic.

A couple of days ago, I talked about how this team relies heavily on Nikola Jokic, but I don’t think that is the worst thing because of how dominant he is. In each of the last three games, the Nuggets have had different leading scorers: Jamal Murray (37) against the Jazz, Nikola Jokic against the Raptors (35) and Michael Porter Jr. (25) against the Heat. Currently, the Nuggets are first in the Western Conference by half of a game which means they will put themselves in a great position to win the west again if they can hold on. They have the fifth easiest schedule in the entire league, and as they have shown last season, and this season consistency is something that is a part of their identity.

Thing to watch:

            Selection Sunday - Tomorrow, I will be more in depth with everything going on in the world of college basketball, but college basketball will be the talk of the nation for the next month. As some of you may know Cincinnati, a team that nobody is putting in the tournament beat Kansas a team many people who project the field of sixty-eight have as a three seed. The chaos of conference tournament weekend is only beginning.