Point Guards are eating utensils...

The short answer...pretty valuable, duh! OK. Blog post over. Back to your regular reading schedule.

Not really.

This is something I've seen a lot of this basketball season on many levels.

One of the kids in the youth group here at Central, and a point guard for Georgia Christian school has a torn ACL and MCL received during one of the games. Since then, needless to say, the team has suffered.

The UNC Tar Heels have now played almost 3 complete games without point guard Ty Lawson. Last nights win vs. Clemson was a steal...trailing nearly the entire game and really only making it to overtime due to a Clemson scoring drought (although I'm sure some of that credit goes to UNC defense). Making matters worse was backup PG Bobby Frasor's season ending knee injury over a month ago.

In the NBA, the poor Chicago Bulls have been without Kirk Henrich (oh, and Ben Gordon and Luol Deng). I don't think I even need to say how difficult (should I use the word entertaining?) it can be to watch a team run it's offense without it's starting starting backcourt plus a forward.

So a question comes up...why is it so hard to replace a point guard? If a star scorer goes down, a team will always find someone else to take the ball to the rack. If you lose a post player that averages 12 rebounds a game then there will be 12 rebounds available for other players (be it on your team or an opponent) to pull down.

But why is a solid point guard so irreplacable? I wish I could say any old bozo can dribble the ball down the court. But I think we know better.

UNC's game against Clemson last night was a nightmare to watch. Without a good point guard, Clemson's full court press was way too much for us. Their pressure caused all kinds of bad passes and novice turnovers that I believe could have been prevented with a solid point player.

I imagine other teams are going to jump on that bandwagon and aggressively attack/pressure Thomas and Ginyard the way Clemson did.

I realize that I still haven't answered the question, Why are point guards so hard to replace? I'm afraid I have no answer. Obviously you can draw comparisons to other sports. From time to time all hear point guards described as quarterbacks. I can' remember which one it was, but I once heard a college football announcer talk about quarterbacks saying "You don't have to have an awesome quarterback to win it all, but you do need to have a good one to win it all."

Point Guards don't necessarily have to be the star of the show. In fact, I personally believe the best point guard aren't the star of the show. The more unselfish, the better. In that way, I imagine point guards are like silver ware, you don't really know how important they are unless you don't have one.

This past Friday Jenny and I enjoyed our weekly Fri. night date. This time we ate at Red Lobster. When eating...have you ever realized how important your silverware is? I mean, if I didn't have silverware I would not have been able to eat my meal at Red Lobster. I would have asked the waiter/tress to bring me some so that I can partake of the fish.

Again, we tend to not think about how important silverware is until we don't have it. Point guards are the spoons and fork of the offense. They don't digest the food, but they help get it there.

It'll be interesting to see how these teams manage without their starting silverware. Injuries will always be a part of the game. You don't want to eat with a flat spoon or a broken fork...but until you get something figured out it's like eating rice with chopsticks.