Mostly basketball with a little bit of golf

This is one of the busiest times of the year for the sports calendar. 

Congratulations to the University of Connecticut men and the South Carolina women on becoming the college basketball national champions. Connecticut completely dominated the tournament. They won most of their games by double digits and won the final game over Purdue by 15 points. They completed the mission of winning back-to-back championships. I think having a run like that will be easier now because of how easy it is to recruit players and the freedom of top players to transfer. On the women’s side, South Carolina was able to complete an undefeated season with five new starters from last year. South Carolina was a very tall team who crushed everyone in the regular season as well as in tournament. 

The runner-up, Iowa, had two very exciting seasons. It was fun to watch Caitlin Clark, who has dominated the college basketball world in the media for two years. She plays like a combination of Steve Nash and Steph Curry. Now that she’s going to play in the WNBA, hopefully her popularity will help the WNBA players receive higher salaries and also help with the TV ratings. I don’t know why the rest of Iowa’s team did not get the attention they deserved until the Final Four. They were also really good.

I think South Carolina will take over in terms of the most popular team for high school players to go to from Connecticut because Dawn Staley is a lot younger than Geno Auriemma, UConn's coach, who seems close to retiring.

The NBA regular season is about to come a close. The Eastern Conference playoff picture has just become wide open in terms of who is likely to make the conference finals along with the Boston Celtics. The Milwaukee Bucks just lost their best player Giannis Antetokounmpo for an undetermined time because of a calf injury. There are only three games left in the season and nobody knows when he can come back. So that opens everything up for the New York Knicks, the Cleveland Cavaliers and hopefully the Philadelphia 76ers. Joel Embiid just came back from his knee injury. I was surprised how much better the team is playing with him just playing the last three games. I don’t know whether the 76ers have enough support for Joel for the team to make it to the conference finals, but we will see.

This week is Masters week, which is my favorite golf tournament to watch all year simply because of how beautiful Augusta National is and how iconic the second nine holes are. Tiger Woods is coming back to play in the tournament, but I don’t think he has much of a chance to win this year because he’s only played one-and-a-half competitive rounds this year because of all of his injuries. The weather is not going to help the players out this week either. Augusta had a two-and-a-half-hour rain delay to start the first round, which means Tiger and others are not going to be able to finish their first round until Friday. This will force him, and the afternoon players, to play 20 or more holes on Friday. For now, Bryson DeChambeau is winning at seven-under par. He plays on the LIV tour, which means I don’t get to see him to know how well he’s playing on a regular basis. I expect the winning score to be between 12- and 15-under par. I will recap the tournament next week and very much look forward to watching it play out over this weekend.