ESPN was at its best Thursday

I wince at the sound of ESPN announcer Ryan Ruocco’s voice.

I don’t like televised basketball partly for Ruocco and announcers like him, but for Stanford at Arizona he was restrained, blessedly.

With room to talk, color analyst Rebecca Lobo celebrated Stanford’s bigs, noting the Cardinal forwards are many in number and in inches. For a spell, Stanford played 6-7 Betts, 6-4 Brink, and 6-2 Belibi together, and I swear I was reminded of schoolyard games in which the teams were formed by grade level and the ‘big kids’ were undefeated.

Rebecca Lobo is one of the best bigs ever. If she loves your forward rotation, your staff has made some wise decisions.

I said after Utah’s loss at Stanford that 6-1 Young looked lost out there, and Coach Roberts said: “They all did.[The Cardinal] are so _big_”.

I just had the thought that 6-3 Brooke Smith — my favorite center on early ’00s teams — would be their ideal *small forward* today.