Most of the years, The Basketball Tournament seems like an improper term. Yes, it’s a tournament where they play basketball, but they call it The The basketball tournament is a stretch. After all, there is the NCAA tournament, the NIT, those strange tournaments below the NIT and a lot of professional and international competitions that all show that the decisive use of The Basketball Tournament in the definite article “the” is a lie. . But by 2020, everything else disappeared. There were no bright moments in March; the NBA season paused just a month before the playoffs, and now the teams are bubbling into a COVID hotspot, hoping that everything will be fine. Right now, there is only one basketball tournament. The Basketball tournament. And it’s beautiful
The basketball tournament – TBT for short – started running for 2020 on July 4th and will end with its championship game on Tuesday evening. The tournament, which has been played every year since 2014, has adapted to the threat of coronavirus more skillfully than most sports leagues. All the action took place in Columbus, Ohio. (Columbus is a big fan of an asset The.) While previous tournaments typically had 64 teams, this one had only 24. Players were subjected to strict quarantine rules, not leaving their hotel except games, and five teams were eliminated from the tournament for positive tests. (Four backup teams were ready.)
The championship game on Tuesday evening will see the participation of a team of Marquette’s alumni who appeared in last year’s championship, competing against Sideline Cancer, the 22-seed in a 24-team tournament. It covers what has been an exceptional tournament, full of many of the things we love about March Madness, right in an empty Ohio gym in July.
TBT is the closest thing that ever existed to professional college basketball. It’s a single-elimination tournament with teams made up of players who were stars in college but didn’t make it to the NBA, making sure they get trapped in the amber of American basketball’s memory as college scammers rather than professionals. TBT is truly a #tbt.
Many of the teams are made up of guys who played together in college, so they decided to rejoin those ex-teammates to create alumni teams. The best way to summarize this is that there is a team of Syracuse alumni called “Boeheim’s Army” who runs a 2-3 zone. (Yes, Eric Devendorf is on the team. Why did you even have to ask?) You can’t be a fan of basketball in college and not get a deep sense of inner satisfaction by watching a team that opens 3 seconds on some Syracuse suckers who are afraid of defend themselves.
Last year’s TBT champion was Carmen’s Crew, whose list is roughly the same as the 2011 Ohio State Buckeyes. For personal reasons I won’t go in, the 2011 Ohio State Buckeyes is my basketball team. favorite of all time. So I was very pleased to see the crew lose the first game of this year’s tournament thanks to an incredible performance by the former South Dakota state marker Mike Daum, who eventually took his revenge for losing against the Ohio State in the 2018 NCAA tournament:
The basketball tournament also has game winners. In fact, literally has to have the winners of the game – the Tournament uses Elam Ending, which was also adopted by the NBA All-Star Game this year. In this system, the winner is the first team to reach a certain goal score instead of whichever team is leading after time runs out. This forces the teams to continue scoring towards the end of the game even if they have an important advantage and ensures that each game ends with a bucket done:
Perhaps more importantly, the basketball tournament has Cinderella. The most dominant team in TBT history is Overseas Elite, which won 25-0 by winning back-to-back-to-back-to-back tournaments from 2015 to 2018. While most of the opponents were former college players Teammates, Overseas Elite was more like a select team of players who you may not have known in college but who have proven themselves superstars in professional international leagues. He had Errick McCollum, a former EuroCup MVP and scoring champion in both China and Greece; DJ Kennedy, a scoring champion in Germany; Kyle Fogg, also a scoring champion in Germany; Justin Burrell, MVP of the Japanese league; and Jeremy Pargo, four-time champion in Israel. The overseas elite was the team for the players who finally wanted to be recognized in the United States for the talents they had long shown elsewhere. Plus, they made $ 7 million for winning four consecutive tournaments, which is nice.
Last year, the Overseas Elite race ended when they lost Carmen’s Crew for the first time. But rather than melting, added Joe Johnson, a seven-time NBA All-Star and by far the most famous player he has ever played in TBT. Last year Johnson completely dominated the Big 3, the Ice Cube’s 3 out of 3 summer championship composed primarily of retired NBA players.
Joe Johnson wasn’t just Overseas Elite, he was American Elite. And when Overseas Elite added Johnson after his first defeat, it was like when the Warriors added Kevin Durant after the 2016 finals. While many of the players from previous Overseas Elite performances have not been able to return this year, it looked like they would be able to reach the title with Johnson.
In the semifinals, they faced 22-seed Cancer Sideline. Sideline Cancer is led by Marcus Keene, 5-foot-9, who was the NCAA top scorer at Central Michigan in 2017 and was recently seen attempting to win the Taiwanese league alongside 7-foot-5 giant Sim Bhullar. (I saw!) The overseas Elite had a double-digit advantage most of the way, but Sideline Cancer ran a 20-8 run and won in the most electrifying way possible: they were losing by one, but the former George Washington guard Maurice Creek drilled a 3 to reach the target score:
In Tuesday’s league game, Sideline Cancer will line up against the Golden Eagles, a team of Marquette alumni with former NBA players Travis Diener, Dwight Buycks and Darius Johnson-Odom. The winner will receive $ 1 million, the loser will get nothing. And if Sideline Cancer wins, $ 100,000 will go to pancreatic cancer research. So it’s Maruqette against the Cinderella story with the undersized star and a large donation to cancer research. Honestly, I’m not even sure if Marquette’s former students should cheer on Marquette.
I have spent the past four months looking for casual sports to watch – the Bundesliga, Taiwanese basketball, various romantic comedies with sports subtitles – but so far TBT has been my sporting attraction. Even if it goes back to being alone A Basketball tournament in future years, I will never forget how The The basketball tournament was the sports experience more enjoyable than quarantine.
