On my walks this week, I have been listening to a book entitled “Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World” by Margaret MacMillan, detailing at length the efforts after the armistice to remake the world and render what the planet had just endured The War to End All Wars, efforts that, to put it mildly, did not succeed. The attempt to prevent a recurrence of the horrors of a scale theretofore unseen in human history, horrors that killed an estimated 20 million people from the Guns of August 1914 through the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, originally known as Armistice Day and still celebrated in this country over a century later as Veteran’s Day, failed to prevent new hostilities (or some would say a resumption of hostilities), less than a generation later, which killed another estimated 50 million people.
Not that they did not try. Month after month, against the backdrop of not only the trauma of the preceding four years, but also of such trifling matters as the Russian Revolution and ongoing Civil War, an endless number of territorial, political, ethnic and religious disputes all over the world, and a subject with which we are now much more familiar, a global pandemic, the victors, led by British and French Prime Ministers David Lloyd George and George Clemenceau and our own President Woodrow Wilson, with contributions from countless others, worked tirelessly to resolve an bottomless list of issues and put in place a structure, most notably a League of Nations, which would allow the world to survive and perhaps even thrive.
Yesterday, the subject was the Balkans, a topic to which an extensive chapter was devoted, which was only fitting since it was “some damned thing in the Balkans”, the assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, presumptive heir to Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria, who had taken the throne in 1848, a pretty big year, as years go, and was still there 68 years later (even longer than Coach K ruled college basketball), that triggered the Great War to begin with.
The issues regarding the Balkans were, and I expect remain, staggeringly complex. Serbia. Croatia. Slovenia. Bosnia-Herzegovina. Montenegro. Bulgaria. Albania. Romania. Transylvania. Hungary. Greece. Turkey. I could not begin to do it justice. But using one of the lenses through which I filter history—basketball--I can say that the description of the efforts to form Yugoslavia, which held together however imperfectly in 1919 and through the era of Marshall Tito before falling apart so disastrously in the 1990s, brought to mind a classic 1996 story in Sports Illustrated written by Alexander Wolff about the multi-ethnic Yugoslavian team led by Vlade Divac, Toni Kukoc and Dino Radja that trained and played together day after day and year after year, twice defeated a U.S. team with Larry Johnson, Gary Payton, Lionel Simmons, Scott Williams and Stacy Augmon to win the World Junior Championship in 1987, and then found themselves on different sides of a brutal civil war. The article ended with the haunting quote that led me to find and re-read the article this evening, by another great player from that team Teo Alibegovic of Oregon State:
This talk of names and labels causes Alibegovic to fall silent
for a moment. Then he delivers himself of a thought: "You know,
I never knew what nationality anyone was when we were playing
with each other. And I bet you they never knew what I was."
All of a sudden he seems very old. "Well, now we know."
All of which is to say that, to paraphrase a transcendent and timeless movie from the war after The War to End All Wars, it doesn't take much to see that the problems of one little basketball team don't amount to a hill of beans. And that an intriguing and possibly compelling part of the 2024-25 Pitt basketball team, Amsal Delalić, did not just materialize in Oakland one day in the summer of 2024. Instead, he came with his own story, his own history, as it were, a history, I suspect, it would be useful and certainly interesting to learn more about.
On the 2024-2025 Pitt basketball team I envisioned, Amsal Delalić would have been the second or third best player, or possibly even the best. As thirteenNine said, in a worthy comeback from his out-of-character remarks on the Dunn injury, “the tape is the tape.” The “Bosnian Bub”, as we were told, and which we saw with our own eyes on the tape.
Amsal Delalić is a gifted offensive player. He just is. How he moves, how he shoots, how he passes, what he can see. Anybody who knows anything about basketball can see that. My own balance of engagement and self-care in this crazy world in which we now find ourselves has included, in addition to history and limiting myself to no more than two political podcasts per day, even more college basketball than usual. Amsel Delalić’s offensive talents would fit nicely on many teams, perhaps as much as any on a foreign-heavy Saint Mary’s team I have come to enjoy on a number of late nights, including tonight. The Gaels are led by a smooth lefty guard named Augustus Marčiulionis, the returning West Coast Conference player of the year, from another part of the world with a complicated history (including an important part of my own family history), Lithuania. If the name is familiar to you but you are having trouble placing it, I suggest that you check both the James Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame and the FIBA Hall of Fame, where you will find his father, Šarūnas Marčiulionis. Amsal Delalić might make Saint Mary’s a Final Four team, especially if their coach, Randy Bennett, a defensive specialist, could bring that part of Amsal Delalić’s game along a bit faster.
Until today, for whatever reasons, Amsal Delalić has not been able to bring his talents to bear on this recently-struggling Pitt basketball team. Although it has puzzled me, and frustrated me, I am disinclined to find fault. The coaches see him every day. They have every incentive to do everything possible to win. In the tip of the iceberg we have been privileged to see, although there have been flashes, there also have been signs of not adapting to the college game as quickly as we might have hoped. Mostly on defense. A little bit with the speed of the game. Handle a little loose. A little quick with the fancy pass, what Al McGuire used to call “French Pastry”. Plus, when we have seen Amsal Delalić, we have seen him mostly relegated to his own corner, like a child in time-out, waiting, often forlornly, for a chance to launch one long shot before he is returned to the bench.
There were other good things today. Some old-fashioned senior leadership from Ishmael Leggett and Zack Austin. A really nice second half from Brandin Cummings, including a key stop on the dangerous Matthew Cleveland, whom Austin held in check so well, a stop that I did not think Cummings was capable of making. Some polished and athletic moves and some key plays on both ends by Cam Corhen, plays that outweighed other plays that frustrated me in a way that Cam Corhen rarely frustrates me, even as he regularly frustrates others here, and which, as much as anything, turned what by rights should have been a 15-20 point win into a nine point win.
But today was Amsal Delalić’s day. Today we started to see the whole movie. The scope and scale of his offensive game. More impact on the boards than the statistics might reflect. Even the defense was good enough. The pure shooting form. Above all, the passing.
Maybe it will be the mirage. The Brian Davis of Pitt basketball. It’s possible. I don’t know.
I do believe this, though. The team that lost the four games prior to today was shrinking, not growing. It was very unlikely to turn this once-promising season back around. This team, with the return of a healthy Jaland Lowe, might.
I have spent much of the season debating the merits of Jaland Lowe with a person whose opinion I greatly respect. I am a huge Jaland Lowe fan, and defender. I concede that his play has fallen off some in past couple weeks, especially on defense; I believe Jaland Lowe was wearing down before he was injured. To a degree, my friend and I are in agreement. We both feel that Jaland Lowe is the player who could raise the level of this team. I just held him less responsible for his failure to do so. One reason was that the 2024-25 Pitt team I envisioned featured Amsal Delalić in a co-starring role, two gifted offensive players with capacious scoring and passing talents, along with the defense, toughness, finishing and leadership of Ishmael Leggett.
That was the team I could envision today. A team that could get on a roll again, even with its limitations on defense and on the boards. I haven’t given up on the twins either, especially Guillermo. They can see it, too, if they can just find the strength to stand their ground and execute, and they can shoot if they can find their confidence. But the essential ingredient, the thing that would give the 2024-25 Pitt basketball team a real chance to reach its potential, would be for Amsal Delalić to become right now the player I believe he can be, should be and someday will be.
At halftime today, I texted my friend to summarize my assessment of this hill of beans. It could have been this entire post, and would have saved anyone still reading a good bit of time, albeit at the cost of some priceless history:
“Amsal = Hope”
Onward.
Not that they did not try. Month after month, against the backdrop of not only the trauma of the preceding four years, but also of such trifling matters as the Russian Revolution and ongoing Civil War, an endless number of territorial, political, ethnic and religious disputes all over the world, and a subject with which we are now much more familiar, a global pandemic, the victors, led by British and French Prime Ministers David Lloyd George and George Clemenceau and our own President Woodrow Wilson, with contributions from countless others, worked tirelessly to resolve an bottomless list of issues and put in place a structure, most notably a League of Nations, which would allow the world to survive and perhaps even thrive.
Yesterday, the subject was the Balkans, a topic to which an extensive chapter was devoted, which was only fitting since it was “some damned thing in the Balkans”, the assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, presumptive heir to Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria, who had taken the throne in 1848, a pretty big year, as years go, and was still there 68 years later (even longer than Coach K ruled college basketball), that triggered the Great War to begin with.
The issues regarding the Balkans were, and I expect remain, staggeringly complex. Serbia. Croatia. Slovenia. Bosnia-Herzegovina. Montenegro. Bulgaria. Albania. Romania. Transylvania. Hungary. Greece. Turkey. I could not begin to do it justice. But using one of the lenses through which I filter history—basketball--I can say that the description of the efforts to form Yugoslavia, which held together however imperfectly in 1919 and through the era of Marshall Tito before falling apart so disastrously in the 1990s, brought to mind a classic 1996 story in Sports Illustrated written by Alexander Wolff about the multi-ethnic Yugoslavian team led by Vlade Divac, Toni Kukoc and Dino Radja that trained and played together day after day and year after year, twice defeated a U.S. team with Larry Johnson, Gary Payton, Lionel Simmons, Scott Williams and Stacy Augmon to win the World Junior Championship in 1987, and then found themselves on different sides of a brutal civil war. The article ended with the haunting quote that led me to find and re-read the article this evening, by another great player from that team Teo Alibegovic of Oregon State:
This talk of names and labels causes Alibegovic to fall silent
for a moment. Then he delivers himself of a thought: "You know,
I never knew what nationality anyone was when we were playing
with each other. And I bet you they never knew what I was."
All of a sudden he seems very old. "Well, now we know."
All of which is to say that, to paraphrase a transcendent and timeless movie from the war after The War to End All Wars, it doesn't take much to see that the problems of one little basketball team don't amount to a hill of beans. And that an intriguing and possibly compelling part of the 2024-25 Pitt basketball team, Amsal Delalić, did not just materialize in Oakland one day in the summer of 2024. Instead, he came with his own story, his own history, as it were, a history, I suspect, it would be useful and certainly interesting to learn more about.
On the 2024-2025 Pitt basketball team I envisioned, Amsal Delalić would have been the second or third best player, or possibly even the best. As thirteenNine said, in a worthy comeback from his out-of-character remarks on the Dunn injury, “the tape is the tape.” The “Bosnian Bub”, as we were told, and which we saw with our own eyes on the tape.
Amsal Delalić is a gifted offensive player. He just is. How he moves, how he shoots, how he passes, what he can see. Anybody who knows anything about basketball can see that. My own balance of engagement and self-care in this crazy world in which we now find ourselves has included, in addition to history and limiting myself to no more than two political podcasts per day, even more college basketball than usual. Amsel Delalić’s offensive talents would fit nicely on many teams, perhaps as much as any on a foreign-heavy Saint Mary’s team I have come to enjoy on a number of late nights, including tonight. The Gaels are led by a smooth lefty guard named Augustus Marčiulionis, the returning West Coast Conference player of the year, from another part of the world with a complicated history (including an important part of my own family history), Lithuania. If the name is familiar to you but you are having trouble placing it, I suggest that you check both the James Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame and the FIBA Hall of Fame, where you will find his father, Šarūnas Marčiulionis. Amsal Delalić might make Saint Mary’s a Final Four team, especially if their coach, Randy Bennett, a defensive specialist, could bring that part of Amsal Delalić’s game along a bit faster.
Until today, for whatever reasons, Amsal Delalić has not been able to bring his talents to bear on this recently-struggling Pitt basketball team. Although it has puzzled me, and frustrated me, I am disinclined to find fault. The coaches see him every day. They have every incentive to do everything possible to win. In the tip of the iceberg we have been privileged to see, although there have been flashes, there also have been signs of not adapting to the college game as quickly as we might have hoped. Mostly on defense. A little bit with the speed of the game. Handle a little loose. A little quick with the fancy pass, what Al McGuire used to call “French Pastry”. Plus, when we have seen Amsal Delalić, we have seen him mostly relegated to his own corner, like a child in time-out, waiting, often forlornly, for a chance to launch one long shot before he is returned to the bench.
There were other good things today. Some old-fashioned senior leadership from Ishmael Leggett and Zack Austin. A really nice second half from Brandin Cummings, including a key stop on the dangerous Matthew Cleveland, whom Austin held in check so well, a stop that I did not think Cummings was capable of making. Some polished and athletic moves and some key plays on both ends by Cam Corhen, plays that outweighed other plays that frustrated me in a way that Cam Corhen rarely frustrates me, even as he regularly frustrates others here, and which, as much as anything, turned what by rights should have been a 15-20 point win into a nine point win.
But today was Amsal Delalić’s day. Today we started to see the whole movie. The scope and scale of his offensive game. More impact on the boards than the statistics might reflect. Even the defense was good enough. The pure shooting form. Above all, the passing.
Maybe it will be the mirage. The Brian Davis of Pitt basketball. It’s possible. I don’t know.
I do believe this, though. The team that lost the four games prior to today was shrinking, not growing. It was very unlikely to turn this once-promising season back around. This team, with the return of a healthy Jaland Lowe, might.
I have spent much of the season debating the merits of Jaland Lowe with a person whose opinion I greatly respect. I am a huge Jaland Lowe fan, and defender. I concede that his play has fallen off some in past couple weeks, especially on defense; I believe Jaland Lowe was wearing down before he was injured. To a degree, my friend and I are in agreement. We both feel that Jaland Lowe is the player who could raise the level of this team. I just held him less responsible for his failure to do so. One reason was that the 2024-25 Pitt team I envisioned featured Amsal Delalić in a co-starring role, two gifted offensive players with capacious scoring and passing talents, along with the defense, toughness, finishing and leadership of Ishmael Leggett.
That was the team I could envision today. A team that could get on a roll again, even with its limitations on defense and on the boards. I haven’t given up on the twins either, especially Guillermo. They can see it, too, if they can just find the strength to stand their ground and execute, and they can shoot if they can find their confidence. But the essential ingredient, the thing that would give the 2024-25 Pitt basketball team a real chance to reach its potential, would be for Amsal Delalić to become right now the player I believe he can be, should be and someday will be.
At halftime today, I texted my friend to summarize my assessment of this hill of beans. It could have been this entire post, and would have saved anyone still reading a good bit of time, albeit at the cost of some priceless history:
“Amsal = Hope”
Onward.
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