The Bulls, Knicks, Warriors and Thunder won their first round series, but fell short of reaching the NBA's Final Four. Each team faces a pivotal offseason with many decisions to consider. Read More. Written by Daniel Leroux on May 21, 2013
The event gives front offices the opportunity to evaluate D-League players with the possibility of offering Summer League or training camp invites. Read More.
Tyus Jones, the No. 2 overall recruit for 2014 and an excellent point guard, was selected by Paul Biancardi, Adam Finkelstein and John Stovall. Read More.
The Legends Classic might be the most highly anticipated early season tournament because of the potential finals matchup between Indiana and UCLA. Both highly acclaimed programs have had struggles in recent seasons, and with both teams returning to the top of the polls, this game will generate more than its normal share of interest.
Indiana should have an advantage early in the season since they can depend so heavily on last year’s starting lineup. But I would expect at least one new face to make a big impact for the Hoosiers. Whether it will be freshman Yogi Ferrell, Jeremy Hollowell, or Hanner Perea providing a key spark, or the oft-injured Maurice Creek, the joy for the Hoosiers will be seeing which new player helps take the team to a championship level.
For UCLA, adding Top-5 recruit Kyle Anderson will be a big help, but the key question will be how such a tall lineup can function effectively. Offensively, UCLA needs to worry about its spacing and figure out what to do when teams dare the Bruins to take threes. Defensively, UCLA may have to play more zone than Ben Howland has ever utilized because his players may not have the quickness to keep perimeter players in front of them. But as Georgetown showed last year, a zone with four players 6’8” or taller can be extremely effective.
The expectations for St. Louis are somewhat lower now that head coach Rick Majerus has left the team for health reasons. But the Billikens returning lineup still looks strong enough to win the A10, and early in the season they should be particularly dangerous. Last year ineligibility issues limited the Jayhawks, but this year’s lineup looks like what you would traditionally expect from a Bill Self team. There are the veterans with Final Four experience like Jeff Withey, Elijah Johnson, and Travis Releford who should anchor the team in difficult situations. And there is a talented group of newcomers like Perry Ellis and Ben McLemore who should provide the athleticism to compete against the elite teams. Washington St. lineup is not strong enough to hang with the Jayhawks, but look for Kansas transfer Royce Woolridge to try to have a big game against his former team.
I think that there is a misconception that teams are only exciting to watch if they have Final Four expectations. North Carolina may be in rebuilding mode, but in my eyes that actually makes them more fascinating to follow this year. Freshman Marcus Paige will likely take over at the point-guard slot, and given Roy Williams track record as a coach who lets his elite freshmen recruits play, the team may live or die by how ready Paige is to pilot the Tar Heels fast-break offense. But North Carolina doesn’t have to depend on Paige to win this year. Dexter Strickland has some experience as a point-guard from last season and I would expect him to play major minutes at point-guard as well. But the real key is that North Carolina doesn’t have to run-and-gun to win this year. All the returning talent at the 2-guard spot should mean that North Carolina has the profile of a team that will be lethal in the half-court. If they choose to go four-guards around James McAdoo, they could attempt to replicate what Missouri did last year, and be plenty effective.
More realistically, Roy Williams will try to develop a few more post players alongside McAdoo. And Tar Heels fans may have to wait patiently as freshmen forwards Brice Johnson and Joel James make their share of mistakes early in the season. But it is all part of the broader North Carolina strategy. While Mike Krzyzewski’s Duke teams are usually in top shape in November and prepared to dominate from the start of the season, Roy Williams runs his lineup to be peaking in March. And all the mistakes Paige, Johnson, and James make in November should be worth it late in the season.
As usual, Texas has high expectations because of its talent including seven players who were top 100 recruits coming out of high school. This year the hype is focused on freshman forward Cameron Ridley. But for a team that will be relying entirely on freshmen and sophomores, Texas is surprisingly experienced. Myck Kabongo, Sheldon McClellan, Jonathan Holmes, and Julien Lewis all played major minutes last year and should be poised for breakout seasons. Their experience could very well carry Texas to the Maui title.
Marquette also has a number of quality pieces if only Buzz Williams can find a way to put them all together. How will he best utilize a roster of offensive specialists (like Davante Gardner) and defensive specialists (like Chris Otule) will determine how far the Golden Eagles can fly. But Buzz Williams has proven he can fill in for major losses year after year, and I would expect nothing less this season.
On paper, Marquette’s season outlook isn’t much worse than that of North Carolina or Texas. But this tournament ‘s title odds aren’t based on team quality as much as they are based on match-ups. Texas gets the favorable draw on the south side of the bracket with non-D1 Chaminade and offensively challenged USC or Illinois in the semis. Meanwhile North Carolina gets a favorable first round match-up with a decimated Mississippi St. roster but will face a tough semi-final matchup. On the other hand, Marquette gets the worst of all worlds, likely needing to beat a much improved Butler team to even get a crack at the semis.
The two most intriguing teams are teams that are switching conferences this year. Oral Roberts is joining the Southland conference where they will immediately be the favorite. And Belmont has dominated the ASun prompting the move to the OVC this year. Look for those two teams to meet in the final.
Last year’s Maui invitational may have had more big names. But the 2012 Battle 4 Atlantis tournament may very well be the strongest early season tournament that we have seen in a long time. It would not be a surprise for all 8 of these teams to make the NCAA tournament at the end of the year.
I have already explained why Duke should expect a bounce-back season. And while Louisville might have the best defensive team in the nation, the team has enough questions on offense to keep Rick Pitino up at night. I have already written about Missouri’s talented transfer class. And Josh Pastner is becoming a better coach as his roster of talented players matures into upperclassman.
But the real story here is the first round underdogs that could still make a deep run. Minnesota brings back all its key players from last year’s NIT runner-up team and adds Trevor Mbakwe back into the mix. Mbakwe was arguably Minnesota’s best player prior to his injury, and so his return is huge for the Gophers. Former Blue Devil assistant Johnny Dawkins is sadly on the opposite side of the bracket as Duke. But behind superstar sophomore Chasson Randle, Stanford might just be able to steal a couple of wins to give Dawkins a shot at his mentor.
Northern Iowa head coach Ben Jacobson took a veteran team to the NCAA tournament and upset Kansas three years ago, and he has a veteran team again this year. With all but one key rotation player returning, this looks like the year Northern Iowa makes some noise again. Finally, leading scorer Bradford Burgess is gone which will mean VCU will be searching for a new identity early in the year. But you can never count Shaka Smart out in a tournament setting.
This is another tournament where the mid-major squads should dominate. I can’t quite decide which under-the-radar player nationally I am more excited to see, Gary Bell Jr. of Gonzaga or Jake Cohen of Davidson. All Bell did last season was make 48% of his threes as a freshmen. And he almost single-handedly kept Gonzaga in its NCAA tournament game against Ohio St. last year. On the other hand, on a points per minute basis, few players are as productive as Davidson senior Jake Cohen. Cohen has never averaged worse than 12 PPG, despite never playing more than 62% of his team’s minutes. But when the season was on the line last year, he came up the biggest. Louisville’s defense was extremely stingy last season but all Cohen did was score 24 points against Louisville in the first round of the tournament.
The older I get, the more I see that one of the things I love most about sports is the variety of it, the diversity of it and the CHARACTERS. Men’s tennis is at its best in many years because, for the first time in a long time, the top three or four players all have wildly different styles. The Tim Tebow story was fun on so many levels, but one of those levels was that he was just SO DIFFERENT in how he played — I’d say we are entering a great time for quarterbacks, because Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers and Eli Manning and Drew Brees and Michael Vick and Cam Newton and Tebow and others are not really alike at all.
As a basketball fan, I’ve never understood the division that exists between fans of the NBA and the NCAA. While the NBA has the best basketball players in the world, March Madness is compelling in its own right and as entertaining as anything that happens on the professional level.
In the NBA, the owners of the 30 franchises consider turning a profit and getting an equal shot at the top players a right, regardless of how well (or how poorly) they run their organization and the respective size of their fan-bases. Since every losing team is a few ping pong balls from the rights to a LeBron James, Kevin Durant or Dwight Howard, personnel determines scheme in the NBA.
In contrast, the vast majority of the 344 Division I programs in college basketball have little chance of ever receiving a commitment from a McDonald’s All-American. But instead of petulantly trying to sabotage the sport in a misguided effort to legislate fairness, schools try many creative ways of leveraging the talents of the players they can recruit. As a result, scheme determines personnel in the NCAA.
At Syracuse, Jim Boeheim has made a Hall of Fame career out of running a contrarian scheme, in his case an aggressive 2-3 zone. The Orange traditionally have rosters full of “1.5’s”, 6’3+ combo guards lacking the quickness to defend elite PG’s and the size to defend SG’s, and “3.5’s”, 6’8+ combo forwards lacking the quickness to defend elite SF’s and the size to defend PF’s. However, because Syracuse never plays man defense, the athletic deficiencies of their players are minimized.
So while nearly every NBA team runs a fairly similar system of isolations, pick-and-rolls and man defense, an incredibly diverse array of styles can be found in the college game. On one end of the spectrum, teams like Missouri play four guards and pressure the ball 94 feet for 48 minutes, on the other, teams like Wisconsin run a deliberate motion offense, trying to minimize the number of possessions and shoot at the very end of the shot-clock.
In the NBA, the players are too good for the “40 Minutes of Hell” system (which Mike Anderson has brought to Missouri and Arkansas in the last few years) to be successful. Like Mike Leach’s bizarre pass-happy offense in college football, Anderson’s system, which he learned as a member of Nolan Richardson’s staff in Arkansas in the 1990’s, has philosophical holes that professional athletes can exploit. Nevertheless, that doesn’t make them any less entertaining on the collegiate level.
And with 68 teams set to compete in the NCAA Tournament, there are a lot more surprises in the college game. Even programs ranked in the top-15 like Murray State have barely been on national TV this season.
We have a pretty good idea of how teams like the Pacers and the 76ers match up with the top of the Eastern Conference but not whether an undersized Murray State squad can handle the size of an elite team from a Power Six conference. It’s an open question how Isaiah Canaan’s speed and athleticism translates outside of the Ohio Valley Conference. Non-conference play in college basketball generally ends in late December, so it’s almost impossible to gauge how younger teams like Texas, Washington and Tennessee who have found their groove in the last two months will fare in March.
In the NBA, it’s hard to envision a scenario where Chicago, Miami and Oklahoma City aren’t three of the final four teams left in the playoffs. In the NCAA, as many as two dozen teams have a legitimate shot at making a run at the Final Four.
Of course, in terms of entertainment, none of this makes the NCAA necessarily better or worse than the NBA, just different. But, as Posnanski writes, there’s something to be said for the concept of “different” in the modern sports world. Basketball fans of all stripes should enjoy March Madness; the NBA will still be here in a few weeks.
My preseason rankings can be found in the November 14th edition of ESPN the magazine. But what good are predicted Pythagorean rankings if you do not use them to predict games? Time to use my tempo free season predictions to predict the early season tournaments.* I also include links to printable brackets for these tournaments. Don’t wait until March to fill out a bracket, print these out today!
Oklahoma St. has a chance to win the NIT, but Oral Roberts is one of the most dangerous small conference teams in the nation this year, and they have a very good chance to upset Oklahoma St. in the second round. Meanwhile Virginia Tech and George Mason really is a toss-up in the second round of that pod. Syracuse’s four-team pod is far less compelling. The overall strength of the Orange combined with their easy path makes them the prohibitive favorites in the NIT.
Arizona lost an exhibition game this year, and I’ve already spent a lot of words on why I think Texas A&M and Mississippi St. are over-rated. But if I am going to be down on all three teams, I guess that makes this prediction seem pretty equitable. Arizona is the favorite, but not the only team that can win this four-team bracket.
Other than Maui, this might be the best preseason tournament in the country this year. If Alabama, Purdue, Temple, and Wichita St. win in round one, the semifinals will be extremely balanced. But there is no guarantee those top four teams will advance. Maryland, Iona, and Colorado may not be good bets to win three games in three days, but they can all pull an upset.
Head-to-head, Vanderbilt would and should be favored against Texas. But with all apologies to OSU’s Jared Cunningham, Vanderbilt draws a much tougher first round opponent in NC State.
Kentucky has a young team, and these odds more closely reflect the odds in March than in November. But on paper, none of these teams comes close to matching the Wildcats.
This would have been a much more exciting tournament last year. But with Georgia losing a pair of players to the NBA, and Missouri’s Laurence Bower’s injured, you get these odds. I’ve gone on the record that I think the Pac-12 will still struggle this year. But if the conference wants to prove me wrong, California can start by winning this event.
Memphis vs Michigan is an outstanding first round match-up in the Maui Invitational. Both teams return a ton of talent, but Michigan had better margin-of-victory numbers last year, and I see them as a slight favorite. (I don’t think people acknowledge how much Joe Jackson struggled last year. While he was great in the CUSA tournament, he was a huge disappointment for much of the season. I was much more impressed with how Tim Hardaway Jr. was able to run John Beilein’s precision offense and become an efficient scorer.) But the bottom line is this: Don’t bet against Duke in November. Not only is Duke the best team, they also get the weakest D1 team in the bracket, Tennessee, in the first round.
This is another mini-tournament that would have looked a lot better last year. Remember when Richmond was making an NCAA tournament run and Illinois had all those seniors? I loved what Mike Rice was able to do at Rutgers last season, but Kadeem Jack is injured and Rutgers lost some key seniors too. Illinois has the best recruiting class, so that makes them the favorites.
I guess this tournament is a nice chance for San Francisco or New Mexico St. to show something. But for those of us that remember the glory days of the Great Alaska Shootout, this field is sad.
The country may be rooting for Harvard after the Crimson narrowly missed the NCAA tournament last year. I see Harvard beating Utah in the first round, but I think Harvard will have a hard time beating Florida St. in the semifinals. UConn has won 11 tournament games in a row, and they are the clear favorite.
New Mexico has a better team than Villanova, but Villanova draws UC Riverside in the first round, and that looks like a first round bye. St. Louis has had to play a ton of freshmen the last two years, so perhaps it is fitting they play such a young Boston College team in the first round of this event.
Dave Rice has said that he wants to reinstate the run-and-gun mentality at UNLV. But will he be push the tempo against North Carolina if the teams meet in the title game of this event?
Very sneaky move by Hawaii to schedule the weakest BCS team (Auburn) as their personal first round opponent.
*These odds probably give the favorites too high a probability of winning. The problem is that there are two sources of uncertainty. The first source is the random variation when teams face each other. The second is the noise related to the fact that we do not have an accurate read on the teams yet. These odds are only accurate if you believe my preseason rankings are 100% accurate. So if your team only has a 10% chance to win, don’t worry. Maybe they are better than I think.
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