Duke's big win gets experts thinking
Editor's note: Each week, 2005 Tewaaraton winner and four-time Major League Lacrosse all-star Kyle Harrison and former Virginia Cavaliers All-American and MLL all-star Brett Hughes will use this space to debate their thoughts on the sport. And these Southern California roommates have a lot on their minds.
Brett Hughes: So K-Harri, I guess our topic from last week just couldn't wait to figure itself out. Duke beat up Virginia over the weekend, which we got to watch together. That game had me thinking: If you could only have one, would you take an offense driven by ball movement, or an offense with a catalyst who can take it to the rack or draw and dump. Basically, have a ball-movement offense or a Dwyane Wade-style slash-and-dish offense.
I'd rather watch one or two guys to create offense for a team, but I think that as defensive players get more specialized these days, the best offense is one that just makes the ball fly around until a defensive unit has heads spinning. Princeton has a tendency to play like that, and Duke absolutely did this past weekend. Most of the shots coming UVa's way were step-down bombs due to defensemen losing their man.
Kyle Harrison: I agree that it's important to have unselfish ball movement, but at the end of the day you still need a few guys who can just flat-out beat people offensively. Having the ball fly around is definitely a good thing, but a very disciplined defense such as Princeton's or Navy's will communicate well. If you don't draw a slide, they'll shut your offense down.
For example, Brett, you and I play a few teams from Japan in Hawaii every year. They're great at moving the ball and can zip that thing around the outside six times before anyone else knows what's going on. But they never dodge to go to the goal. So no matter how good they are at moving the rock around, we're never even thinking about sliding to them, as they have never had any real initiators.
If you take a look at what Duke did over the weekend, I completely agree that they moved the ball around, which caused problems. But it all started with someone slashing to the hoop and beating their man. Between Ned Crotty and Max Quinzani, the Blue Devils have two guys who can initiate offense and get the ball flying around.
Watching the Day of Rivals over the weekend got me thinking a bit about the bet rivalries in our sport. Being a Johns Hopkins kid, I've clearly got a few teams I considered rivals, but which is the favorite lacrosse rivalry to watch? I'd have to go with North Carolina versus Duke. In basketball, it's one of the oldest and best rivalries, and it's no different with lacrosse. The teams genuinely don't like each other, the universities genuinely don't like each other and it's a game that is circled on both teams' calendars the second the schedule comes out every year. Throw records and rankings out the window any time these two teams step on the field to play each other; no matter who is having the better season or who is the better team, this will always be a tight game because of its history.
BH: While I do not think lacrosse has an Ohio State-Michigan or Red Sox-Yankees rivalry, there are a bunch of good ones that I could choose. … But I think I have to say Army versus Navy. Granted, Navy is always better -- Navy took down Army 8-4 this past weekend -- but I just love watching the service academies do their thing. I think it's the best scene in any sport. Maybe we can get them all doing push-ups for goals! Sets of 1 through 10 would be nothing for those guys.
I also asked former Terrapin Joey Walters to weigh in on this rivalry topic. Growing up in Rochester and then going to school at Maryland, Joey probably saw a ton of matchups.
Joe Walters: I'd have to say Syracuse versus UVa or Hopkins versus Maryland. I think both of those games have all the skill you need, and the teams always get up for those specific games.
KH: I'm definitely an Army-Navy fan, and I hated playing against both teams back in college. Those players just have a different mentality than most and cause all kinds of problems on the field.
BH: Lacrosse bracketology stuff is coming out, so I wanted to see what people are saying about who is in and who is out. I realized Denver and OSU are really on the outside looking in. Why haven't these teams come further along? They have great facilities (especially Ohio State -- they have one of the best indoor facilities in the country), good coaching staffs (Jamie Munro at Denver and Nick Myers at Ohio State) and great fan bases.
I think it's simply that most kids think that geography of lacrosse really matters; that if they can't go to schools such as Hopkins, Cuse, Maryland, Virginia, Loyola, etc., they should go to a second-tier school nearby. I'm a Midwest guy myself, so I was ready to get out, but I'd like to see some of those Great Western Lacrosse League teams make a jump. (I am leaving Notre Dame out because they are bringing it this year, but I need to see a few years in a row of success before I can consider it a team in that next level.)
KH: I've got to believe it's simply that they aren't getting the same type of recruits that the schools back East are. We're starting to see some parity in our sport, and teams such as Notre Dame or Colgate are starting to make some noise. But late in the season, I think it's important to have a deep bench and be able to rotate players through once it gets a bit warmer outside, and that's where the Denvers and Ohio States have trouble with the Marylands, Cuses and Loyolas of the world.
It's all about depth, and while teams from the GWLL will steal a few top recruits from the East, their overall rosters aren't as talented as a lot of the Eastern schools. I'm interested to see how Notre Dame and Colgate fare in the tourney; it's great for the sport that both programs have had successful seasons thus far.
Now I have a completely unrelated question: What are the best Air Jordans of all time? I'm going with the XIs in Carolina blue.
JW: Jordan IV in black and red or the Jordan IIIs in all black.
BH: Man, I love the IVs, because that's one of my favorite numbers, and those are the shoes I always wanted growing up but never had a chance to get. But the XX2 limited editions with the gold graphics on them are easily the best.
Brett Hughes is the lacrosse editor of ESPNRISE.com, ESPN's high school sports site. Check out his blog.
