Maybe teammates had been so used to LeBron James needing his headband, whether it’s for comfort or appearance. Fighting for his life in these NBA Finals, fighting for his basketball stature, this accessory was the last thing James had on his mind in Game 6. Read More. Written by Shams Charania on Jun 19, 2013
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.
Michigan Wolverines went 2-1 in the Maui Invitational to nab third place. Michigan beat Memphis before losing to eventual champion Duke, 82-75. The Wolverines rebounded in the third place game, disposing of UCLA by 16 to make the trip at least somewhat successful.
The most important takeaway from the week was not necessarily how Michigan played, but how they played against certain opponents.
What we learned from Memphis: Freshman point guard Trey Burke is going to be the real deal, almost a lock for All-Big Ten if he decides to stick around. ESPN draft analyst Chad Ford told Daniel Wasserman, a Michigan basketball beat writer, that Burke could be a potential first round pick in next year's draft, for what that's worth.
Burke was a key against Memphis. His driving ability sets up the Wolverines offense much in the same way that Darius Morris did last year. The majority of Michigan's roster is guys who love to spot up and shoot, which fits Burke's style of play perfectly. Against Memphis, he scored 14 points, the second most on the team, along with four assist. He wasn't perfect by any stretch, but he played 35 minutes as a true freshman on a national stage and impressed.
Burke is only 5-foot-11, so his ability to drive is oftentimes directly related to how physical and big the opposing defense is. The Tigers biggest starting player is Wesley Witherspoon, who is 6-foot-9 but weighs just 207 pounds. Memphis has size that is perfectly suited to Burke's style of play, and the freshman was able to capitalize.
Burke also had a mindset--almost a swagger, if you will--that can't be taught. He plays with a confidence that convinces you he has been in college for years. Michigan saw another freshman come into Ann Arbor last year with that kind of mindset, and he turned out pretty well. That player is sophomore forward Tim Hardaway Jr., who was another key to the game against Memphis.
This will not be an uncommon theme. Hardaway Jr. is going to be the heart of the Wolverines, and when he is on like he was against Memphis, they will be able to compete with very team in the Big Ten, if not every team in the country.
Hardaway Jr. had a game-high 21 points and five assists, and grabbed seven rebounds. Primarily known as a shooter last season, Hardaway Jr. made his presence known near the rim, drawing 10 free throw attempts and converting nine of them. He started off strong, scoring nine of the team's first 18 points, and was absolutely relentless throughout.
For Michigan to contend, Hardaway Jr. will need to have these types of games almost every night. Having another scoring presence like Burke helps, but the load is going to lie on Hardaway Jr.'s shoulders.
What we learned from Duke: Michigan is going to struggle against bigger, physical teams. The Blue Devils start two players over 6-foot-10, and their starting point guard is 6-foot-4. The aspects that propelled Michigan against Memphis were exposed against a bigger, more physical Duke team.
Burke did not have a bad game by any stretch, scoring a career-high 17 points and nine assists, but the offense was limited near the rim. Michigan had two players shoot free throws on the night for just nine total free throws, with six of those coming from Hardaway Jr.
Burke wasn't able to do his thing near the basket, which limited the spot up opportunities on the outside. He played well, but Michigan was never able to really get things going offensively the way they did against Memphis. Drives to the basket were really limited, which messed with the flow of the offense and didn't leave as many open shots from the outside.
In Big Ten play, teams like Ohio State, Michigan State and Minnesota are going to play the Wolverines really well. Burke is going to be a player, no doubt, but his height will make things difficult around the net against teams with a big post presence. Duke exploited this, but the play of Hardaway Jr. also threw things out of whack for the Wolverines.
Nineteen points in a game is a good game for most players in college basketball, but not for Hardaway Jr. He was scoreless in the first half, which helped put Michigan in a hole it couldn't climb out of. He also did not have an assist and grabbed only three rebounds.
You can't have your best player and floor general be noticeably absent in the first half against one of the best teams in the country and expect to be successful. The Wolverines got scoring from other players, but Hardaway Jr. can't disappear for halves at a time if Michigan is going to compete.
Other thoughts: The big theme from Michigan's offense is the transition from Darius Morris to Trey Burke, and the role that Hardaway Jr. was going to play. So far, Burke has impressed, to say the least. He won the starting point guard job from senior captain Stu Douglass, and has looked the part so far this season.
But Morris played such a big role in Michigan's offense last year that its impossible not to expect a drop off for the offense. His usage percentage was a little over 27, but his passing ability was what separated him from the rest of the team. His assist percentage easily lead the team at 44-percent, as the next closet Wolverine was Hardaway Jr. at 12-percent.
The most telling stat is Morris' Hands on Buckets (HOB) percentage, which was an absurd 52-percent. Again, the next closet Wolverines was nowhere close to Morris, as Hardaway Jr. finished at 26-percent.
How Michigan is going to replace Morris's production will be paramount throughout the season.
Obviously, no one has fully picked up Morris's HOB this season, but many have shown great improvements. Hardaway Jr. leads the team at 35-percent, and Burke is right behind him at 33-percent. The rest of the Wolverines stay hovered around the teens, but that won't be an issue if Hardaway Jr. and Burke keep it up. Neither of them will come close to the numbers Morris put up last year, but combined, they are sitting pretty.
The statistic that should be a concern fir Michigan is assist percentage. Morris blew everyone else out of the water last year, but unlike HOB, the Wolverines aren't picking up the slack. Burke leads the team at 27-percent, but besides him, just three Wolverines are in double-digits.
Those numbers are going to have to go up if Michigan wants to sustain production from its entire lineup. Replacing Morris completely is never going to happen, but Hardaway Jr. and Burke also can't be the only guys stepping it up in those categories. Look for players like Douglass, senior Zack Novak and sophomore forward Evan Smotrycz to add to the HOB and assist percentage totals as the season goes on.
Michigan can't rely on just two guys to spread the ball around, because replacing Morris will continue to be a task for the entire roster.
Don't wait until March to start printing out college basketball brackets. With the Preseason NIT, Maui Invitational, Puerto Rico Tipoff and other excellent tournaments, you can start the madness in November.
Maui Invitational Tournament Articles
