Milne | Great Scot: first exposure to hoops at Philly Classic

This is more like it.

After my failed attempt to find a Black Friday-priced suit small enough to fit a European, I needed some cheering up this past weekend.

So I headed to the Palestra Saturday afternoon for day two of the Philly Hoop Group Classic to chill out and form my first impressions of college basketball.

Basketball is the only American sport I have ever played, although the extent of my involvement at any remotely advanced level of the game is the movie Space Jam.

I received a few responses to my previous column on college football suggesting that I wasn’t impressed with the sport because the only game I had ever seen was Penn’s slow-moving matchup against Bucknell. Those people had a point — and I had a blast at the fast-paced Homecoming game. Puck Frinceton!

Three straight basketball games, I reasoned, should be enough to form a more balanced opinion.

To answer Russell Crowe’s famous question, I was indeed entertained.

The first score grabbed my attention, as it came less than ten seconds into the first contest between Brown and Siena. Immediately the other team counterattacked and scored off a rebound.

Within a couple of minutes, both sides had racked up more points than in whole matches of the international test rugby series that just wrapped in Britain.

I’ll roll with this, I thought.

Soon, my selective memory of high school gym class kicked in, and I began to get a grip on the rules.

I was particularly impressed with the 35-second scoring limit. I’d forgotten just how fast basketball is, and that rule made the tournament so exciting for me.

Although football has its four-down rule to theoretically stop the game from stagnating, those four downs can take a while to play out. No such problem in basketball, where the swift counterattacking contrasts favorably with the five-minute “Yay, we got an interception!” celebrations that so annoy me in football games.

Sitting behind one of the benches in every game taught me another lesson: basketball coaches get real mad real quick.

The Siena coach was understandably annoyed when his side failed to get an early lead against Brown, but he continued to rant and swear at his players even once his squad had established the clear lead.

While the whole of the Delaware coaching staff was like that in the next match, first prize in the beetroot impersonation contest goes to former Penn coach Fran Dunphy of Temple. I don’t envy my hoops beat colleagues after listening to those guys all night.

I was impressed by the high score of the first game, (Siena won, 99-79) but my favorite match by far was the tense narrative of Delaware vs. Virginia Tech.

It was a close match throughout, with Delaware constantly trailing but by little enough to keep the game interesting. Time after time, Delaware’s Blue Hens caught up only to miss a crucial shot and let the Hokies increase their lead. Eventually, to the delight of its supporters, Delaware finally went ahead — for all of five seconds.

In a thrilling climax straight out of a bad sports movie, the Blue Hens forced a tie in the last minute — only to get clobbered in overtime.

I also have to thank Temple and St. John’s for teaching me what bad basketball looks like.

Temple was the only team to bring cheerleaders and its mean-looking mascot to the Classic. Although they may have inspired Temple’s large crowd, even their gymnastics couldn’t rally the players.

The teams slogged away for an hour and a half, both sides missing multitudes of shots.

The former basketball referee I was sitting next to was clearly mad at what a mess the teams were making of his beloved sport. Anticlimactic though it was, the game was certainly educational.

I guess I had a rounded experience at the Philly Classic: a high-scoring game, a great story and a complete mess. I enjoyed my college basketball debut, and I’ll be back to the Palestra for sure.

STUART MILNE is a junior international relations major and an exchange student from St Andrews, Scotland. He can be contacted at dpsports@dailypennsylvanian.com.

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