Basketball On The Internet.

BOB'S BONUS: Basketball has lost another one of its past greats, as US correspondent BOB CRAVEN reports today from Seattle, while also giving us a wrap of how the WNBA playoffs stack up starting Wednesday (Thursday our time) and how our Storm finished Sue Bird's last regular season.

AFTER this past weekend, the WNBA playoff teams are set, and we have the initial matchups.

These first-round games are best out of three, with the first two games hosted by the higher seed.

The matchups are:

#1 Las Vegas vs. #8 Phoenix on Wednesday.

#2 Chicago vs. #7 New York on Wednesday.

#3 Connecticut vs. #6 Dallas on Thursday.

#4 Seattle vs. #5 Washington on Thursday.

As they’re local, I’ll note that Seattle played an amazing final game in Las Vegas against the Western Conference champion Aces. 

Las Vegas won 109-100 with a strong final quarter.

Seattle tied the league record for made 3-pointers in a game with 18 (of 40 attempts), led by Jewell Loyd, who was 8-of-14 from beyond the arc and scored a career-high 38 points. 

In her final regular season game, Sue Bird hit her 1,000th career three-pointer.  The only other player in history to do that is Diana Taurasi.

FOR THOSE of us of a certain age who have followed US college hoops for decades, today was a very sad day. 

We lost one of the all-time great coaches — ever — in Pete Carril.  He was 92. 

For almost 30 years, beginning in 1967, he coached the men’s team at Princeton U.  Princeton is in the Ivy League, the top academic grouping among US universities. 

Princeton, along with their fellow Ivy League institutions, such as Harvard and Yale among others, do not give out athletic scholarships for any of their college sports teams.  Therefore, they almost never are able to recruit the best players in any sport.

Despite what should have been a death sentence for his teams, Carril was amazingly successful as their coach, with many Ivy League titles and numerous trips to the NCAA tournament. 

He devised an offensive strategy that took advantage his smarter players who were willing and able to execute his offences. 

It was heavy on passing the ball, setting screens, taking only good shots, and not getting into a running game against opponents who always had better and bigger athletes. 

This slowed the game down and tended to frustrate their opponents, who were not used to teams who were willing to patiently run an offence and make the other team play defence a lot longer than they wanted.

Eventually there would be a defensive breakdown and Princeton would have a good open shot.

As a former player, it was fascinating for me to watch a group of team players beat a team that had much better athletes, but who couldn’t play together as a team very well. 

One of the best examples of this was almost 30 years ago when Princeton, a #13 seed in the NCAA tourney, took down one of the giants—UCLA--in a huge upset.