Totally Unaltered Photo: What We're Up Against

I was perusing some MIAA websites the other day when I came across this (totally unaltered) picture on Hope's basketball page.

This should serve as a reminder that they DO have banners hanging in the DeVos Fieldhouse but none of them really come from their men's basketball team actually, you know, winning.

How Much More Do You WANT?

Calvin 75, Hope 49 (box score)

The thing about “The Rivalry” is that games don’t go like this. Calvin and Hope are – with a few exceptions – both very good teams every single year. They know each other; they see each other in the GRSHOF Classic and MIAA-CCIW Classic; they rarely surprise each other.

But then this game happened and the Calvin Knights surprised the pants off the Flying Dutchmen who were apparently not prepared to play a basketball game. Calvin was a heavyweight boxer who nearly knocked out the opponent in the first round, sending them to the corner on wobbly legs. When the second round began, they (the metaphorical Calvin boxer) stood in the middle of the ring with gloves at the side, accepted a small flurry of uncontested body blows, laughed, and then delivered the right-hook that would end the fight.

Fun Fact: Hope finally tied Calvin’s halftime score with 1:43 left to play in the game.

And I guess that’s where the ill-conceived boxing metaphor fails. Calvin didn’t win this game so much with an offensive barrage – though they put up a quite good 113.0 offensive efficiency rating – it was more the fact that their defense suffocated the Dutchmen from the get-go. From a raw defensive efficiency standpoint, it was their third best game of the season:

Opponent	DEff
Grace Bible	72.6
Anderson	73.7
Hope	73.8
at Kalamazoo	76.4
North Park	76.6
Wabash	79.3
Adrian	82.5
Finlandia	84.0
Alma	85.2
Aquinas	88.5
Wheaton	89.6
Ripon	89.8
Cornerstone	90.2
Manchester	92.2
at Albion	99.1
Carthage	107.4

Note the surrounding teams being Grace, Anderson, Kalamazoo, and North Park. This was easily the best defensive game if we account for the relative quality of Hope’s offense. It didn’t look like it last night, but Hope’s one of the best offensive teams in Division III. According to the Massey Ratings’ breakdown, they’ve performed as the 29th best offense in the country. Calvin did that – 49 points in a game played at a reasonable pace – against what is possibly one of the Top-30 offenses in the entirety of NCAA Division III. I also want to note that Massey’s data set – the data set that rates Hope’s offense at #29 – already includes last night’s futility.

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In Which I Write a Guest Post at BallinMichigan

Patrick Hayes started a series over at BallinMichigan featuring the best high school and college basketball rivalries in the state of Michigan. Naturally he wanted a feature on Calvin-Hope, so he approached me to write one.

Check it out:

Clipped from: www.ballinmichigan.com (share this clip)

Calvin and Hope meet on the court in what has become not only one of the greatest basketball rivalries in the state, not just the best in Division III, but one of the greatest rivalries (of any sport at any level) in the country. That statement probably sounds a great deal like hyperbole (and it probably is to an extent, I’m in far too deep to know for sure), but there’s good reason that the Calvin-Hope rivalry has been branded as “THE” Rivalry.

From www.ballinmichigan.com

BallinMichigan is an incredibly good blog that sprang up this spring. There's already over 200 articles posted, and it's the type of stuff you won't find anywhere else. Patrick Hayes (who also has written for PistonPowered.com and writes a weekly Detroit Pistons spot at Freep.com) has dedicated the blog to high school, small college, and mid-major basketball in the state of Michigan (and the players that come out of such programs).

It's great to see blogs and websites springing up around the internet to give coverage to "small time" basketball. I'm obviously a big supporter of that.

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World Premier Video: Caleb Veldhouse's Three Pointer

I'm willing to bet that there are other copies of this clip floating out there somewhere, but I have unfortunately not  come across one on the internet, and that's too bad. It's a great memory.

I'm a little bit ashamed to admit that I've had a digital copy of this game saved on my computer for more than six years now (a friend of mine in the dorms was able to record this game onto his computer for me at the time). I should have cut this video and uploaded it to YouTube a long time ago. I apologize profusely for not doing so.

Just a terrific, terrific moment in Calvin hoops history. Hope came into the game, having already claimed an 18-point win over the Knights at the newly minted DeVos Fieldhouse, with a 20-1 record and a #4 d3hoops ranking. The Flying Dutchmen never trailed in this game until the waning moments when a freshman would make the biggest shot of his career.

The basket immediately propelled Caleb Veldhouse to legendary status. It was a status that, in some respects, he would never fully be able to live up to with his play on the court (though he was a very, very good player for four years, and that's understating it a bit), but he was that highly regarded by most of the Calvin faithful.

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Hope Preview

	Game Sixteen (7-8, 2-2)
Who	#7 Hope Flying Dutchmen (14-1, 4-0)
Where	DeVos Fieldhouse, Holland, MI
When	Wednesday, January 18 -- 8:00 PM
TV	WGVU ( Over-the-air Channel 35 & 35.1, Comcast Channels 6 & 240)
Audio	Stretch Internet
Video	Stretch Internet (WGVU feed), MIAA Gameday
Stats	Live Stats, MIAA Gameday

**I have one general admission ticket available for tonight's game. Send me an email (use the email/letter icon on the sidebar) if you'd like to claim it.**

When We Last Met
Hope won last year’s MIAA Tournament Championship game in Holland by five points, but it wasn’t really a close game. The Dutchmen lead by twelve points for most of the second half, and although the Knights fought back to cut the lead to only three with thirty seconds left (courtesy of Hope only scoring four points between the 7:54 mark and the 0:30 mark), they never had the ball while trailing by only a single possession.

Tom Snikkers was Calvin’s best player that night; he scored 20 points on 16 shots, but the rest of the team shot putridly. The 3-19 that the Knights shot from three point range was the real killer. It was just one of those really bad nights.

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Top Ten Moments: 6. Hope's First Loss at DeVos, and Lightning Strikes Twice

Previously:
10. Andy Draayer En Fuego
9. Calvin Claims Final GRSHOF Tournament Championship
8. Calvin Wins "Home" Tournament Game in Aurora
7. Matt Veltema's Only Field Goal Was a Good One

6. Hope's First Loss at DeVos, and Lightning Strikes Twice (February 7, 2007 and February 24, 2007)
Hope College opened the DeVos Fieldhouse for the 2005-2006 season with a team that was on the verge of a dominating three-year run. They'd finish their next three seasons in the Sweet Sixteen, Elite Eight, and Final Four in successive order. It seemed at the time that the shiny new arena carried with it some magic, but, looking back, they just had some amazing talent on the floor.

Our story picks up in year two of that run. Calvin entered the February 7, 2007 matchup with a disappointing 12-8 record that included a 22 point loss to Hope in the championship game of the GRSHOF Tournament and a three point loss in the regularly scheduled home matchup with the Dutchmen. The Knights needed a spark to to turn their season around, but a road game against the #6 team in the country who was a perfect 28-0 in their new gym didn't look like a golden opportunity.

But instead of mailing it in, Calvin knocked Hope down early and withstood the inevitable barrage by the Dutchmen. Calvin outworked Hope 28-11 on the glass in the first half, and used a 7-15 performance from beyond the arc to take a 46-35 lead going into the half. Hope whittled the lead all the way down, and even took a two-point lead with 2:38 left in the game, but Calvin closed the contest out with a 12-4 run to stun the DeVos crowd. Chants of "First-loss-in-De-Vos" and a court storming ensued.

Earlier in the season, the Calvin women had been the first road team of any gender to win a game at DeVos Fieldhouse, and now the men did the same. I found it fitting that the Knights were the first to blemish both the men's and women's perfect home record.

But the season wasn't over. The Calvin faithful had learned that the Knights were capable of beating anyone, but their record wasn't going to be good enough to earn an at-large bid into the NCAA Tournament, so they were faced with the prospect of needing to win a second game at Hope to win the auto-bid.

Calvin strolled back into Holland and again controlled the scoreboard for the majority of the game behind a strong shooting performance and a solid rebounding effort. But those pesky Dutchmen kept themselves in the game and, in true Rivalry fashion, the game was tied with the shot clock off near the end of the game. I'll let the video take over from here:



It's both incredibly easy and nearly impossible to describe moments like that with words. Unfortunately we haven't had many lately, but wins, close wins especially, in do-or-die situations are the greatest thing to experience as a fan. Nothing matches the adrenaline rush.

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Don't Throw Out The Records In This Rivalry

It's something we like to say in any rivalry event, and we certainly hear it every time Beat Hope Week comes around:

"Throw out the records, it's a rivalry game!"

The idea here, I think, is that we don't need to consider the two teams' win-loss records coming into the game because both teams have an equal shot at winning. The boosted emotion and adrenaline level the playing field so that any gap in talent level is significantly reduced.

Is this old adage true? No. At least it's not true in the case of the recent Calvin-Hope Rivalry. If it was the case, we'd expect the team with the better record to still only win 50% of the time. Or, at least, a reasonably close percentage to that.

The two schools have met 31 times over the last ten seasons (since 2001-02). Four of those times Calvin and Hope came into the game with identical winning percentages (Calvin won two, and Hope won two); we'll remove those games from consideration leaving us with 27 contests.

Of those 27 games, the team with the better winning percentage coming into the day won 18 times. That's a 0.667 winning percentage for the "better" team. That's really not at all close to 0.500, especially when we're basically comparing it to 27 coin flips.

If the win probability truly was a 50-50 split, and we had thousands of sets of 27 games, we'd expect this result (the team with the better record winning 18 times or more) only 6% of the time.

So, I guess it's wrong of me to completely dismiss the idea. There is a 6% chance that the 0.667 winning percentage was a product of random variation of a 50-50 probability, but for now, I'm going to consider it 94% false.