To keep Dwight Howard, the Lakers will have to sell him on a vision for 2014 and beyond. As a result, if championships are his goal, the Rockets are the safer bet for a whole host of reasons. Read More. Written by Jonathan Tjarks on May 23, 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.
While my preseason projections won’t be available until the end of October, I have cranked out the odds for the holiday tournaments based on my rankings. Today’s column looks at who is likely to win each early season tournament, and what storylines to keep an eye on.
Do not hesitate to print out the tournament brackets and follow along as they happen. It is extremely easy to get busy with the Thanksgiving holidays and miss some of the best games of the season. But if you print out these brackets and fill them in, you won’t miss the upsets. Just click on the handy links throughout this document to find the printable brackets.
I’ve already expressed my doubts about Michigan and my faith in Pittsburgh. But Pitt’s second round opponent will be very dangerous. Both Lehigh (led by NCAA hero CJ McCollum) and Robert Morris (led by super-scorer Velton Jones) have the ability to knock off Pittsburgh. These teams have a real chance to win the Patriot League and Northeast Conference, and this is the type of game that can mean the difference between earning a 15 seed and a 13 seed come March.
OSU’s Jared Cunningham, Alabama’s JaMychal Green, Purdue’s Robbie Hummel, and Villanova’s Maalik Wayns are gone, and those players were not only their team’s leading scorers last season, they were the heart of their respective offenses. Which rebuilding team will forge a new identity first? Because Anthony Grant has become a dominant defensive coach, while Craig Robinson has not, Alabama is the favorite here.
There are some big name conference schools here, but this tournament is a dream for fans of mid-major squads. Murray St. won’t be able to duplicate last year’s 31-2 record, but with superstar point-guard Isaiah Canaan returning, Murray St. should have enough to beat Auburn and St. John’s. In fact, they might even face the College of Charleston in the semifinals. This offseason Charleston added head coach Doug Wojcik, a veteran coach who hasn’t been able to get to the NCAA tournament, but a coach who has consistently built strong defensive teams. If Wojcik can get Charleston to play great defense this season, he has enough returning talent to make a run at an NCAA tournament bid. Andrew Lawrence is clearly Charleston’s best returning offensive player, but the real player to keep an eye on is Adjehi Baru. Baru was ranked 37th in the nation out of high school and is one of the highest ranked recruits to ever attend Charleston. And while Baru was a nice complimentary player as a freshman last season, it will be very interesting to see if he can break out as a sophomore.
Of course the clear favorite here is Baylor. Baylor may have lost some key post players to graduation and the NBA, but they have plenty of incoming talent. This will be our first chance to see the highly acclaimed 7’1” freshman Isaiah Austin in action.
Oklahoma St.’s odds aren’t poor because Oklahoma St. is a bad team. The Cowboys add Top 10 freshman Marcus Smart alongside former Top 10 recruit LeBryan Nash. That one-two punch will make Oklahoma St. a likely NCAA tournament team this year. But the Cowboys have a terrible tournament draw. First Oklahoma St. has to face Akron. Akron point guard Alex Abreu may be under-sized, but he’s an extremely talented player, and 7 foot center Zeke Marshall could have played for a number of BCS teams. And while the MAC hasn’t had multiple NCAA bids since 1999, Ohio and Akron are strong enough to break that trend.
Meanwhile Tennessee is a heavy favorite to be the second round opponent. Tennessee may have only finished 19-15 last year, but the Vols played substantially better after Jarnell Stokes joined the team mid-season. And with Trae Golden and Jeronne Maymon becoming efficient scorers for head coach Cuonzo Martin, a lot of people have taken notice. Florida head coach Billy Donovan has gone on the record to say that Tennessee is the team to beat in the SEC this season.
And if Oklahoma St. wins that game, they only have to face NC State in the final, the same NC State team that many people have labeled as the ACC favorite. So no, Oklahoma St. isn’t a bad team. But their path to a Puerto Rico tipoff title is brutal.
If you get tired of the sloppy play by all the new players in November, please don’t miss Notre Dame vs St. Joseph’s in the first round of the Coaches vs Cancer tournament. Both teams return all five starters from last season and have plenty of offensive stars. I’m going to keep writing about the shot-blocking CJ Aiken, super-slasher Carl Jones, and the super-efficient Langston Galloway until St. Joe’s gets more love, but this four team field is wide open.
Notre Dame is the favorite, but I do have one question for Irish fans. Given Scott Martin’s middling efficiency numbers in his career, was it a good thing that the NCAA granted him an additional year of eligibility? Martin made just 26% of his threes and 40% of his twos last year, and while injuries may have contributed to that, it is clear he wasn’t an elite player last year.
Despite a host of mid-major schools, this tournament looks very dull. Mercer and Iona might compete for the ASun and MAAC titles this year, but neither looks like a likely at-large bid.
And still Connecticut’s tournament odds are not great. First NCAA tournament sanctions led to a host of transfers this off-season. Then the Huskies lost Jim Calhoun to retirement. And as we’ve seen in recent seasons, UConn has been a different team when Calhoun is out. He’s a special coach who can elevate the level of his players, and he will not easily be replaced.
Steve Alford’s team might actually be a little better on offense this season. The team loses Drew Gordon at the forward position, but New Mexico also loses AJ Hardeman. And as great an offensive player as Gordon was, Hardeman was a black hole on offense. With Alex Kirk returning from injury to provide that shot-blocking presence in the paint, and all the returning talent at the guard spots, New Mexico deserves more preseason praise.
Washington’s Abdul Gaddy has had an injury filled career, but with Tony Wroten leaving early for the draft, this is Gaddy’s team. The senior point-guard will have to integrate some new pieces throughout the Washington lineup. Seton Hall will have a number of new faces as well, including Georgia Tech transfer Brian Oliver and Southern Illinois transfer Gene Teague. Realistically, the winner of this game will probably be headed to the NIT, but a win against Ohio St. would be a fantastic notch on any NCAA resume. While Ohio St. is the clear favorite thanks to the efficient high volume shooter DeShaun Thomas, there are questions about how the Buckeyes offense will run without Jared Sullinger.
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.
Hall of Fame Tip-Off Tournament Articles
