In a little more than two weeks, the state boys basketball tournament will begin with no shortage of intriguing story lines, including whether Randallstown can capture a fourth straight title, who will emerge from the scrum that is the Class 1A North region and whether Howard County can grab a state championship for an unprecedented third consecutive year.
Whatever happens between the first-round games on March 1 and the title games in College Park on March 15, there's one thing that certainly won't happen: None of the games will be played with a shot clock.
There's hardly anyone around who can remember an NBA game played without the 24-second clock, and no one wants to remember the college game before the 35-second clock began in 1993 or its 45-second predecessor, which came into play in 1985.
Yet, all these years later, even as the game moves faster and faster than it ever has, the Maryland public school game is often reduced to a fourth-quarter crawl, as a team gets a lead, then attempts to go Dean Smith and dribble the clock out.
That "four corners" approach would be aesthetically attractive if there were some Phil Ford types around who could pull it off. But there aren't, and the game suffers for it.
Earl Hawkins, the Prince George's County athletics coordinator who serves as the state boys basketball committee chairman, has said that the use of a shot clock historically takes away strategy.
Assuming that's true (and why in the world would you?), there's a reasonable compromise that could appease the strategists and those of us who live in modern times: Use the shot clock but set the possession time high, say at 45 seconds or a minute. That way, teams can dribble to their hearts' content but actually have to take a shot down the stretch.
Virtually the best
There's an interesting Internet soap opera going on each week involving Lance Stephenson, the Brooklyn junior who is regarded (at least within the five boroughs of New York) as the nation's best schoolboy basketball player.
Stephenson, a 6-foot-6 guard, is the subject of a Web documentary titled Born Ready, which follows his weekly travails. A new episode drops each Tuesday and lasts three to five minutes.
The segments, which appear at www.bornready.tv, run the gamut from inane (spending an evening at home with Stephenson and his girlfriend as they babysit his kid brother) to dramatic (waiting for the results of a magnetic resonance imaging after he hurts his knee in a game). But they are illuminating, despite the fact that New York school officials won't permit cameras in the school while class is in session.
