Radio chat leftovers

Whenever I do TV or radio, I get off thinking: Well, that was pretty fun, but there was so much more to say. So here are some of the notes I jotted down during today’s radio conversation on WUNC:

1. Pre-Stephen, post-Stephen, all that stuff: I think something some people forget, or never knew, or just don’t care to know, is that Davidson under Bob McKillop has been playing good basketball for a good long while -- well before Stephen showed up. The year before he came? NCAAs. The year before that? Undefeated in the league. NCAAs in ’02. NCAAs in ’98. NIT in ’96 and ’94. Point being, Davidson basketball, in its place within the ecosystem of the sport, has been consistently good and often spectacularly good, and that’s been true now for more than a decade and a half.

2. What March of ’08 did, and what Stephen did, and his star power, was it took a program that already was very good and was on the cusp and pushed it across that line that divides the most avid fans of college basketball and the most casual fans of sports or even non-fans altogether.

3. Stephen as “media darling,” still, even now in the NBA (because I was told that might be something they’d want to discuss): Why? Style of play. Scripture on the shoes. Dad and mom: He’s a basketball prince. Also: Accessible frame. Accessible face. Read into that whatever you will. But he can kind of swing both ways -- by which I mean he fits in on the campus at Davidson College, and he fits in at the Charlotte pro-am, and he fits in inside an NBA locker room. Take the GQ diary. That makes sense. That’s a brand he can be associated with, and not that many athletes can. And he’s not even in New York playing for the Knicks -- he’s in Oakland, for goodness sake, tipping at 10:30 in the east. He’s got to perform on the court to make any of these early opportunities matter, of course, but you can see the beginning of his professional (corporate?) persona starting to take shape. And I don’t mean that in a bad way. It’s smart.

4. This season? Who knows? But that’s part of the fun. There are questions, and there are answers, and they’re out there somewhere. Find them. The last time Davidson went into a season with some of these kinds of questions? Look it up: 29 wins. So it’s conceivable, I suppose, that this year’s group could go, like, 16-14. Given the built-up record of success, though, it’s not all that likely.

5. This is the kind of year where McKillop tends to do his best work.