Stupid French explorers.

I'm not sure how, and I don't mean this to disparage The Athletic Reporter (which you should all go read right now), but I just can't shake the feeling that somehow Joe Mulder is responsible for this.

So now I'm all depressed, not quite in a Francisco Cabrera-Dennis Gibson sort of way, but still fairly upset at last night's turn of events. It's some consolation that we got beaten by their best, but we prided ourselves on shutting down teams' best, and the 77-74 score suggests that they took the game to us and played it at their pace, not ours.

And I'm wondering what we're going to hear over the next few days about the whole Donatas Zavackas fiasco. He's a senior and gone, so it's not like the team will have him around a la Scottie Pippen refusing to go back into that playoff game, but this also makes me wonder about Howland's snap decision-making--just what does your tough-as-nails senior have to say during a Sweet Sixteen to get himself buried on the bench? I can't remember this much intrigue around a Lithuanian since the collapse of the Soviet Union led to the breakup of Boris Zhukov and Nikolai Volkoff. At least that I understood. Major geopolitical events are going to have serious ramifications on tag teams; that's just a part of life. But the Zavackas thing just baffles me. I hate to be the type of fickle fan who turns on a coach at the drop of a hat, but there is that school of thought which says that the coach who rebuilds the program is not necessarily the guy to get you over the top. So while it would be a short-term blow, a small part of me now thinks that Ben Howland taking the UCLA job would not be the worst thing to happen in the history of basketball.

As for The Bolsheviks, well, I hope that somehow, somewhere, they were eventually able to patch up their differences, and maybe they now roam their former homeland doing good deeds and then slipping off into the night. Or maybe they have desk jobs with WWE. Either way.