Another Alarie Award

So if you're wondering what people in college athletic communications offices talk about when their teams are all shut down due to first semester exams, TigerBlog offers this conversation that took place in his office yesterday afternoon.

Who is a better player? Larry Bird or Kevin Durant?

There you have it. Those are the kinds of conversations that happen.

TB's colleague Warren Croxton says he'd take Durant. In fact, he said Durant is one of the 10 best basketball players of all time.

TB then rattled off a list of 10 players he thought were better than Durant: Jordan. Bird. Magic. Kareem. Lebron. Russell. Chamberlain. Robertson. West. Erving.

He actually texted the list to Warren, who looked at it and then said "if Durant and Bird played one-on-one, Bird would never score."

Ah, to be young. Warren is 32 years old, so he can be forgiven. And hey, at least he knew what team Jerry West played for (it's the Lakers).

TigerBlog started to try to explain David Thompson to Warren, but what was the point? 

TB was very fortunate to have been able to see ever player on his list play, even if he was a kid for some of them. Certainly with the emphasis on the three-point shot these days, the NBA is a completely different world than it was back then, when the thought was that you couldn't win a championship without a dominant low-post center.

Still, the NBA that TB watched in the 1970s was a great one. It's not Warren's fault he wasn't born yet. 

Anyway, that was the conversation yesterday afternoon.

Speaking of basketball, Bella Alarie was honored Monday night at the Philadelphia Sportswriters' Association as its amateur athlete of the year. 

Congratulations to our very own @bella_alarie on being named the Philadelphia Sports Writers Association Amateur Athlete of the Year‼️

We are so proud of the player but even more so the person you are, B! 🐯🧡 pic.twitter.com/82vy9vAl1w

— Princeton WBB (@PrincetonWBB) January 21, 2020

 
The PSWA website has a partial list of past winners, and there is nobody on that list who is from Princeton. On the other hand, the website also says that the  awards go back to 1905, so somebody from Princeton must have won before.

Pete Carril? Dick Kazmaier? Bill Bradley?

For that matter, how about Hobey Baker if it goes all the way back that far? 

Regardless of if she was the first Princetonian, Alarie is a most deserving winner. 

She is the two-time Ivy League Player of the Year, and she'll certainly be in the very serious discussions this year. She is closing in on Princeton's career record for points, and she already has the record for blocked shots. 

In addition, she is fourth in career rebounds at Princeton with 854, which leaves her six away from tying Niveen Rasheed for third. TB would not have guessed Rasheed was third in rebounds, since you don't think of her as a rebounder.

With 13 Ivy League games to go, Alarie would need to average 11.2 rebounds per game to get to 1,000. Ellen DeVoe is second, with 942, and Margaret Meier is the only woman ever to reach 1,000 rebounds at Princeton, with 1,099. 

Another Princeton record that Alarie has is most times being named Ivy Player of the Week. She won the award the last time Princeton played, after her 25-point, 11-rebound performance against Penn before exam break.

That was the 18th time in her career that she was named the league's Player of the Week. Only Harvard's Allison Feaster, with 21, has more.

What's most amazing about that is that the people who pick such things like to spread them around if they can. It takes a lot to say "okay, let's give it to the same person again."

And yet she's earned it, time and again.

Princeton is 1-0 in the league and 13-1 overall. Alarie has missed four games this year due to injury, but she seemed to be in top form against the Quakers.

There are still nine more days until Princeton plays again. The Tigers will jump into the thick of the Ivy League race next weekend, with their trip to Dartmouth and Harvard. 

Princeton will have played only the Penn game in a 33-day stretch and only two games in a 41-day stretch when that trip happens.

After that, it'll be 13 games in 37 days, to the end of the regular season.

Multiply similar numbers around other sports, and things are about to get really busy around here. That won't leave much time for trying to explain to Warren that sports began long before he started watching.