Posts by Nathan Fowler at FanHouse - AOL Sports Blog

Knicks fans wanted a PG tonight, and they certainly didn't want Danilo Gallinari, booing him vigorously every time his name was mentioned. The chants for O.J Mayo were loud and often to begin the night but after he was selected #3 overall by Minnesota and Westbrook at #4 by Seattle, the Knicks fans inside the MSG theater settled on Jerryd Bayless as their object of desire. When the Knicks went on the clock at #6 overall, the crowd was strongly pulling for Bayless to be the pick. As you can see in this video ... their prayers weren't answered, and they reacted just as you would expect Knicks fans to react.

If you wanted to get tickets for tonight's NBA Draft at the WAMU Theater at Madison Square Garden - all you had to do was go to the box office and pick up tickets when they went on sale at 11am this morning for the tiny fee of $15. Sounds great, right? Oh, I forgot the part where you had to get in line before 7am or you would miss the sale. During the morning, as the crowd of several thousand die hard NBA fans strung out into a long line halfway around the entire block that MSG covers in a light drizzle, most had no idea that they would be spending 3-4 hours waiting patiently for the right to walk away empty handed.



It was much like being outside at a college stadium before a big game, at first just a smattering of die hards (the line started at 1am!) wearing jerseys and face paint and trying to stay awake. Slowly the line continued to stretch out, a collage of every possible NBA jersey and hat and chants and shouts as various fanbases began to eagerly talk about their favorite players in the draft and their merits. General consensuses were hard to find, outside of the widely held belief that Brook Lopez is going to be a stiff and a huge bust. I didn't hear from a single person who would have been happy to have their team pick him.

Over Memorial Day weekend the news broke that troubled junior college transfer Tyree Evans would not be attending Maryland after all and it looked like Gary Williams was going to have trouble putting 5 ACC caliber players on the court next season. Williams' roster predicament became even more perilous with Tuesday's news that former top 50 recruit Gus Gilchrist is going to transfer out of the program after losing his second appeal to the ACC to lessen his eligibility penalty for backing out of his original letter of intent to Virginia Tech. Without delving into the correctness of the ACC's decision (it's a garbage ruling in my opinion) - this is a huge blow to a Maryland roster that was already going to be very thin up front and was going to depend on Gilchrist to replace graduated seniors James Gist and Bambale Osby and anchor the paint in ACC play.

This off season has wreaked havoc on the Terrapin roster. The list of recruits who committed to Maryland who will now fail to make it onto the court for the 2008-2009 season includes Bobby Maze, Tyree Evans and Gus Gilchrist. In addition to those 3, Shane Walker transferred out of the program in April. The bad news might not be over either, as incoming recruit Sean Mosley has not yet academically qualified and it's still not 100% certain whether or not Jin Soo Kim will be coming in the class of 2008 or 2009. Even if both Kim and Mosley end up in College Park this fall, Maryland will still only have 12 players.

Gary Williams has already said that Maryland is still recruiting and that "we're going to have more players than what we have". Whether that means that Williams and his staff are going to comb through the junior college ranks or try and find an undiscovered gem from high school that hasn't been signed yet or even look internationally isn't clear - but it's going to be a tall task for them to come up with an ACC caliber player this late in the recruiting year no matter where they look. What is clear is that a Terrapin program that won the national championship in 2002 is seriously struggling to field a complete roster just 6 years later without any NCAA probation or other outside circumstances. There's no way to view this other than a total failure in recruiting and player retention over the past several years.

Professional cycling races are held on closed roads with police escorts and swarms of fans. Amateur cycling races are held on public roads with other traffic and no fans. Everyone who has ever competed at even the lowest of levels in cycling is aware of the dangers that automobiles pose to cyclists, it's the ever present fear that accompanies any group ride.

Yesterday in Monterrey, Mexico those fears were realized for a group that was racing along the US border. A drunk driver had fallen asleep at the wheel and careened across the median line head on into a peleton. The result is the horrific picture you see above, and a very sad fatality. Even in a low level amateur race, a peleton on a flat surface is moving at around 30 mph, so the closing speed in the wreck was probably at least 60mph or more. Considering the circumstances, it's a miracle that only one rider was killed.

Since Maryland won the NCAA Tournament in 2002, it's been a rough several years for the Terrapins basketball program. There was the whole John Gilchrist saga and his deteriorated relationship with Gary Williams, there was Chris McCray's academic problems that ended up with him failing out of school and there's been a lot of mediocrity and all too frequent trips to the N.I.T.

It's not been a huge secret that Gary Williams and Athletic Director Debbie Yow haven't seen eye to eye on a number of issues, but it really has come to a head this spring.

The Maryland roster isn't stocked with talent at the moment, largely because Gary Williams isn't the type to cater to high school prima donnas. As such, he has had a couple of very thin recruiting classes in a row.

In a somewhat desperate attempt to inject some talent into the roster and help avoid yet another N.I.T season, Williams tried dipping into the JUCO ranks this spring for a guard. The first candidate was former Oklahoma PG Bobby Maze, who was not qualified to enroll at Maryland at the time and was working through summer school.

If you couldn't be in the Alamo Dome on Monday night, Allen Field House was the place to be. The venerable old building has seen many great moments in it's history, and as you can see in this homemade video it was pandemonium last night when "Super Mario" hit the game tying 3 pointer.

Kansas basketball reveres the names of it's famous contributors. There is a tombstone bearing the name Naismith in Lawrence. There is a statue bearing the name Phog Allen out in front of the famous fieldhouse. There are jerseys that hang from the hallowed rafters inside Allen Field House, names like Wilt Chamberlain, Clyde Lovellette, JoJo White and Danny Manning - some of the greatest players in the history of the game. Sometime in the near future, Mario Chalmers will return to stand at the center of the court inside the old stone fieldhouse and see the banner bearing his name and number unfurled next to those other banners - that's the protocol at Kansas for NCAA Tournament MVP's.

I doubt that the weight of history has hit Chalmers yet, and it will probably take years for him to fully feel it - but he's now a permanent part of the lore of a program that cherishes it's history more than possibly any other. Parents will tell their kids about him, and point out his number when they take them to their first games in "The Phog". It's amazing how much someone's life can change in a period of five seconds or less.

Mario Chalmers drilled a deep 3 pointer to tie the national championship game with just over two seconds tonight, a shot that propelled Kansas into overtime and onto the title. When Derrick Rose had hit an improbable falling away jumper a few minutes before, Billy Packer called it the shot of the tournament. Chalmers made sure that title didn't last long.

As an immediate post game reaction - I've gotta wonder where that ranks in NCAA Championship Game history? Do you think it's right up there with Keith Smart and Michael Jordan? The North Carolina State airball / alley-oop?

My feeling is that since it only tied the game it can't be quite on the level of the shots that won games outright, but it has to be in the top 5 or so of all time. It capped a great comeback by Kansas and was a very high degree of difficulty considering the distance he shot it from. It's certainly one we'll be seeing for a very long time on a ton of highlight reels.

Russell Robinson, Darnell Jackson, Brandon Rush, Mario Chalmers, Sasha Kaun - those guys were the key pieces of Self's first two recruiting classes at Kansas, and they went through opening round losses in their first two seasons to Bucknell and Bradley. In the national media they were labeled chokers, underachievers and were written off as mentally weak - whether or not that was actually an accurate portrayal.

Now, they are national champions. And not just that, but they exhibited an unbelievable amount of composure and mental fortitude down the stretch of one of the most competitive title games in years. Even when Memphis got a 9 point lead late in the game, they never backed down and just made play after play while the Tigers wilted at the free throw line.

Congratulations Jayhawk upperclassmen, your legacy as champions is now secure.

All the talk leading up to this game was about how tough Derrick Rose and Chris Douglas-Roberts were for other teams to matchup with, but the Kansas guards are really taking it to them on both ends of the court. Robinson and Collins are doing a great job keeping Rose out of the lane, slowing down the Memphis offense and turning him over. Chalmers has played terrific help defense and his quick hands are causing all sorts of problems. CDR had a great first half, but Rush is a huge reason why Kansas is hammering the Tigers on the glass and is scoring himself.

At the beginning of the year most pundits tabbed the KU backcourt as the best in the country, and right now they are living up to that billing. Tough, terrific defensively and willing to share the ball or score themselves, it's hard to imagine a better quartet of guards this season.