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Home > Mark Bradley > Archives > 2008 > March
March 2008
Final Four features fearsome foursome
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It was bound to happen someday, and someday just arrived. The 2008 Final Four will offer the first congregation of just No. 1 seeds, and it’s not as if any of the four got hot in mid-February: These were the top four teams in both preseason men’s basketball polls (and also in the AJC’s rankings). These four, in sum, are really good.
How good? Last season’s Florida Gators were widely regarded as one of the greatest teams ever. Well, Florida finished 35-5. None of these Final Four qualifiers has lost more than three games. Memphis lost only to Tennessee; North Carolina to Maryland and Duke; UCLA to Texas, Southern Cal and Washington; Kansas to Kansas State, Texas and Oklahoma State.
Aggregate record of this Final Four: 143-9.
Average NCAA tournament margin of victory for these four teams: 18.5 points.
So fearsome has this foursome been that it has rendered this Big Dance a relative bore. If not for Davidson’s dead-on impersonation of George Mason, Rounds 3 and 4 would have been memorable for creating almost no March memories. Only two Week 2 games — the first (Xavier-West Virginia) and last (Kansas-Davidson) — were decided in the final minute.
This time a year ago we regarded the 2007 Final Four as a star-spangled collection of equals, but Florida proved peerless. It’s hard to imagine any of these four lapping the other three. None has done anything to make us believe it doesn’t belong: Each won its conference title (Kansas shared the Big 12 regular-season crown with Texas), and each won its league tournament. Not one has had even a two-game losing streak.
Only one has lost a game since Valentine’s Day, and the one — Memphis — hadn’t lost before that. There were no January slumps for this bunch, no moment of real crisis. All four started hot and kept going, and now they’re bound for San Antonio.
There’s no clear favorite, no possible Cinderella. There are only four superb teams, each skillfully coached, each brimming with talent. If there’s an edge in either semifinal, it’s a hairline thing. But somebody has to win, and the guess here is that Saturday’s winners will be UCLA and North Carolina.
UCLA came the closest of the four to elimination, needing clutch shots by Kevin Love and Darren Collison and a key non-call to nose past Texas A&M in Round 2, and UCLA also had the softest regional to negotiate. But the Bruins have something none of the other three possess: The bulk of their players have been to a Final Four. (Two, to be precise.)
The Bruins defend too well to be overrun by Memphis’ depth of talent the way Michigan State and Texas were, and playing in the Pac-10 has steeled UCLA. The Tigers have proved they can beat just about anybody from anywhere, but in Conference USA they simply weren’t asked to prove it twice weekly.
Carolina will beat Kansas because it has Tyler Hansbrough, who wants every big shot, and the Jayhawks, for all their blessings, still haven’t found such a man. They nearly squandered a late lead against Davidson because Brandon Rush kept passing instead of shooting. The Roy-Williams-versus-his-old-school subplot will be beaten to death, but the real story in the second semi will be the indomitable Psycho T.
As good as Carolina has been in this tournament, one tiny flaw continues to nip at its, uh, heels. Louisville made 52.7 percent of its shots in the East Regional final, and that’s an awfully high number. The belief here is that UCLA’s defense — the staple that powered these Bruins to those two Final Fours before Love arrived — will give them the tiniest of edges against Carolina in the final.
The schools that will convene in the Alamodome carry 17 national championships among them, the most ever for a Final Four quartet. What could be more fitting than the 2008 championship being taken by the school that has won more titles than any other? What could be more fitting in this season of few surprises than that least surprising of results — UCLA winning it all?
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Tar Heels withstand toughest test
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Charlotte — We celebrate the winners at this time of year, the players with the nets around their necks and the trophy in their hands. But here’s a word about a noble loser. Here’s a word about a Louisville team that played about as well as it could play — “We did exactly what we needed to do to win,” Rick Pitino would say — and lost simply because the other guys were a tad better.
Especially one other guy.
Louisville had North Carolina on its Tar Heels here Saturday night. Louisville had surged from 12 points down at halftime to tie the score with a little more than 10 minutes to go, and the roaring throng in Charlotte Bobcats Arena had developed a catch in its collective throat. But over the next nine minutes one Heel would score 11 of his team’s 16 points, and surely you know his name even before you see it written.
“Tyler Hansbrough made two shots you pray they’re going to take,” Pitino said. “I was following the ball on both of them, and he couldn’t even see the basket. But that’s what an All-American does — he makes those shots … Rarely have I seen a player who plays as hard as he does.”
Then this: “I’ve never seen one, actually.”
Carolina has been the best team in this tournament, but its first three games were a case of a splendid squad running free and easy. (Aggregate margin of victory in those three games: 91 points.) What unfolded in this frantic East Regional final was something different. It was a shining example of a really good opponent posing a series of difficult questions and great team having every single answer.
Said Marcus Ginyard, the Carolina forward: “When we need to dig deeper, to play harder, to play smarter, we always do.”
Said Pitino: “They were a little bit better. But our guys hung tough in a very difficult environment.”
Yes. Not many teams could have played Carolina so well in this city. Of the 19,902 on hand, surely 18,092 came wearing powder blue. Not since March 1 — nine games ago — have the Heels played a game beyond the state border, and familiarity has bred such confidence that it seemed unthinkable they could lose here.
But then it was 59-all and the unthinkable was becoming a distinct possibility. And then Hansbrough, who finished with 28 points and 13 rebounds, seized the ball and the game and flung his team all the way to San Antonio.
He scored underneath. He hit from the perimeter. He made three free throws. He hit a long jumper with his team ahead by five inside the final three minutes. He hit a longer one 55 seconds later. Said Roy Williams, Hansbrough’s coach: “He made those shots because he’s made them hundreds of times [in practice].”
Said Hansbrough: “Marcus said something walking over here [to the news conference]: ‘It feels like we did something big, but we can do something bigger.’ “
A year ago Carolina had carried a fat lead into the waning minutes of the East Regional against Georgetown, only to lose in overtime. “That was in the back of a lot of our minds,” Hansbrough said. “The difference this year is that we handled that [opposing] run better.”
We know now that Carolina, which has scarcely been challenged over the past month, can hit back when somebody does happen to land a blow. We know now that a team with Tyler Hansbrough is a team with an asset nobody else can match. We know now that, no matter who else shows up in San Antonio, the Heels will have as much going for them as anybody.
And we wouldn’t have known all that without the contribution of a game band of Cardinals. Said Pitino, proud in defeat: “We don’t like to lose, but we’ve got to give credit to a great basketball player.”
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Pitino’s evolution makes Louisville dangerous
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Charlotte The former egomaniac Rick Pitino appears before us as a changed man, older and wiser but still as charismatic as all get-out. He changed college basketball two decades ago with his pressing and his 3-point shooting, and for the next few years he figured he’d outcoach everybody. Turns out nobody outcoaches everybody for very long.
“I’ve come to realize why you win and why you lose,” Pitino said Friday, the day before his latest team will face North Carolina in the East Regional final, “and it has nothing to do with me or with Roy [Williams, Carolina’s coach] — players win or lose. It’s less and less about what you know and more about what your guys do.”
We pause to reflect: In 1995 a Pitino-coached team played North Carolina in another regional final, and the day before that game Pitino compared his program to Dean Smith’s and said, “Both have great coaching.” Carolina beat favored Kentucky rather easily, and to his credit the self-described “great coach” used the bitter defeat as a life lesson.
“That loss was the pilot that helped us win a national championship [in 1996],” Pitino said. “We were disappointed in our shot selection.”
From that day forward, every Pitino team has sought to blend 3-point shooting with inside scoring, and we saw the results yet again as Louisville, his latest team, trashed Tennessee 79-60 in Thursday’s semifinal. The Vols were what a Pitino team used to be; the Cardinals are what a Pitino team is.
And what is Pitino himself? One of four coaches to take four programs (Boston U., Providence, Kentucky and Louisville) to the Big Dance. The only coach ever to guide three schools to the Final Four. He’s no longer the prodigy who sparked the epic Providence run of 1987 — Billy Donovan, that team’s star, has grown up to win more NCAA titles than his mentor — but he’s still among the two or three best in the business.
Said Louisville forward Juan Palacios: “Coach P, he knows what he’s doing. He’s been coaching 32 or 33 years — whenever you ask him how long, he always gives you a different answer.”
Said Pitino, speaking of a famous 150-95 loss he suffered against Williams and Kansas in 1989: “I have no feelings [about that game]. Like Tello [Palacios] said, I try to forget how long I’ve been coaching. I remember the good things and forget the bad ones. I don’t ever remember coaching in Boston.”
Here he laughed. If we’re looking for the reason Pitino at 55 isn’t half as full of himself as the 35- or 45-year-old model, we need only to recall those 3 1/2 seasons with the Celtics. Hailed as the savior of the NBA’s proudest franchise, he resigned midway through Season 4 having suffered the first real failure of his professional life.
Pitino: “I learned more from losing those four years with the Boston Celtics than I’ve learned at any time with the exception of my two years with Hubie Brown [as a Knicks assistant in the mid-’80s]. I learned patience.”
After leaving Boston, Pitino surfaced at Louisville, where he discovered something about human nature. The Kentucky fans who’d lionized him in the ’90s were now calling him Traitor Rick. But it must be noted that, for the Cards’ game against Tennessee, the man known as Mr. Wildcat — Bill Keightley, Kentucky’s equipment manager since 1962 and an avowed Cardinal hater — was seated in the first row of the Louisville section.
“I’ve learned a little about the game of life,” Pitino said. “[Keightley’s] never going to like Louisville — that’s not in his makeup. But he understands friendship and loyalty, and we’re friends for life. A lot of guys I thought were my friends, they weren’t my friends.”
Once the driven young ruler of college basketball, Rick Pitino is now the aging (but not yet graying) eminence. This isn’t the best team he has ever had, but because it’s his team it has a chance against anybody. Even Carolina.
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Rocky toppled: Volunteers exposed
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Charlotte — Tennessee beat Memphis on Feb. 23 and became No. 1 in the land, and the Vols were never the same. The stakes got too big for them. Now they’re gone.
Gone in Round 3 of the Big Dance, gone after having a nervous time against American in Round 1 and nearly a nervous breakdown against Butler in Round 2. Gone despite being the RPI champion and, for one shining moment, the nation’s top-ranked team. Gone on a night when they were exposed by an opponent that does all the things the Vols did, only bigger and better.
Gone because they were outplayed by Louisville, but also because they were outcoached. Bruce Pearl, who never met a microphone he didn’t seize, made the silliest tactical decision the NCAA tournament has seen since Houston’s Guy V. Lewis went to his stall — the Loco-motion, he called it — with a lead against N.C. State. Maybe you recall how that turned out.
Pearl changed point guards 34 games into a season that had yielded an SEC regular-season championship, benching Ramar Smith and going with J.P. Prince. The Vols got away with it, just, against Butler despite Prince’s six turnovers. Louisville, as expected, made them pay. Prince had four more turnovers Thursday night, and Tennessee mustered just 19 baskets in 40 minutes.
The Cards and Vols pressed and harried one another with unbridled fury, as you’d also expect, and the result was an unsightly game that featured more deflections than crisp passes, more motion than artistry. But the chaos favored Rick Pitino’s team, largely because he pretty much invented this sort of thing 20 years ago.
Louisville led 24-8 after 11 minutes, and by then it was clear something was wrong with Chris Lofton, the pride of Maysville, Ky. The SEC’s all-time 3-point champ had scored only 14 points in Tennessee’s first two NCAA games, and he’d hurt his ankle against Butler. Against the school that once recruited him as a defensive back — Bobby Petrino, whom you might remember, was then the Cards’ football coach — Lofton managed two first-half points, those on free throws.
Lofton didn’t make his first basket (a 2-pointer) until 12:08 remained, didn’t nail a trey until 8:18 remained and his team was 10 points down. By then it was too late. He would finish with 15 points, a credit to his fighting spirit, but Louisville would win by 19. In his final game as a collegian, Lofton missed 12 of 15 shots and had four blocked.
In the end, its reliance a smallish shooting guard was Tennessee’s undoing. It had no half-court offense except to throw the ball to the Maysville flash and let him work some fallaway wonder. Once the Vols ascended to No. 1, they wilted under the accompanying scrutiny. They lost to Vanderbilt three days after beating Memphis, nearly lost at home to Kentucky and had to come from behind against Florida in Gainesville.
It took a Lofton trey, naturally, for Tennessee to fend off South Carolina in the SEC tournament, and then Lofton missed at the buzzer and Arkansas prevailed in the semifinals. That was the tale of Pearl’s team: If Lofton hit, the Vols had a chance. If not, they were just another bunch of guys who needed to steal the ball to score.
Louisville is somewhat better. Louisville has a half-court offense — Pitino learned in 1995, when Kentucky lost a bitter regional final to North Carolina in Birmingham, the folly of total dependence on 3-pointers — and has scorers inside. The Cardinals mightn’t be good enough to beat North Carolina on Saturday, but they at least have a chance. Tennessee would have had none.
Tennessee was a nice team in a weakened SEC. Tennessee was No. 1 in the polls for one fleeting week, but this was never the nation’s finest assemblage. And now it’s gone, clearing the stage for better squads.
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Tar Heels looking unstoppable, unbeatable
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Charlotte — This is getting out of hand. Just when everybody figured the only way to halt rampaging North Carolina was to slow the pace and clamp down on Tyler Hansbrough, the infernal Heels showed the basketball world they can win big at any speed, can win big even on a night when Psycho T began as if on lithium.
So now the watching world is wondering: Is there any way to beat these guys? Because if there is, nobody’s found it since before Valentine’s Day. And nobody’s come close in the Big Dance, through which the top-seeded Heels have whirled their way halfway to a national championship.
They beat Mount St. Mary’s in Round 1 by 39 points, and maybe you thought, “OK, that’s the play-in winner. Let’s see what they do against a spry team from a power conference.” Then they beat Arkansas by 31, and maybe you thought, “Well, Arkansas was the only team that lost twice to Georgia. Let’s see what they do against an opponent that’s famously hard to play.”
Here’s what the Heels did: They beat Washington State, a team that hadn’t been beaten by more that 10 points all season, by 21. They turned what seemed, at least on paper, an intriguing contrast in styles into just another Baby Blue blowout.
They won a night when the nation’s best player — Hansbrough, the indefatigable Psycho T — was their fifth-leading scorer in the first half. He missed his first four shots, missed his first two free throws and lost the ball three times in the first seven minutes. And still Carolina led by 14 at the half. (And still Hansbrough, who had two points in the first 20 minutes, finished with 18.)
What figured to be a waltz with barbed wire turned into something so breezy that coach Roy Williams could open his postgame briefing with a little joke. “I always thought the media had power, but I just found out that Tyler is one of our five guys selected for drug testing [standard NCAA tournament procedure], and they told him he had to talk to the media before he uses the bathroom. That’s power!”
Then this: “Other than that, we’re ecstatic.”
It might be time to stop looking for flaws in these Heels. Carolina’s 2005 NCAA championship team sometimes won in spite of itself: Rashad McCants would fly off on tangents, and the whole bunch sometimes neglected to play defense, even as late as in the Syracuse Regional final against plodding Wisconsin, which scored 82 points against the laissez-faire Heels.
This team is slightly less talented but far more focused. There have been defensive lapses — Boston College’s Tyrese Rice scored 46 points against the Heels, 34 in the first half — but none recently. They limited Washington State to 31.6 percent shooting, and nobody’s going to beat Carolina shooting 31.6 percent. It might be that nobody’s going to beat Carolina, period.
Asked if, in its cold-blooded way, beating Washington State by 21 was more impressive than trashing Arkansas, guard Ty Lawson said: “I think so. It was a tough-type game, a grind-it-out game.”
And now we know the Heels can bump and grind as well as rip and run. Said Williams: “We put on the board before the game that we had to be tough enough, patient enough and poised enough.”
His team went 3-for-3, and what happened here Thursday had to be chilling for the rest of the remaining NCAA field. If you can’t come close to Carolina on a night when Hansbrough does next to nothing for a whole half, when might you?
“I like to win games in the 80’s and 90’s and the 100’s,” Williams said. “But sometimes you’ve got to be tough enough to win them in the 60’s and 70’s.”
So now the prettiest team in the land has proved it can mud-wrestle as well. What’s next for these resourceful Heels? Running the Princeton offense better than Princeton? Pressing more ferociously than Tennessee? Getting more officiating breaks than UCLA?
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Hawks are better, still not good
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Good news: Mike Bibby has made the Hawks better.
Bad news: He hasn’t made them good.
The Hawks are 10-12 with Bibby (and that’s giving him credit for the resumed “game” against Miami, which they finally won without technically scoring a point during those 51.9 seconds). Of those 10 victories, only three have come against teams with winning records.
The Hawks will almost certainly make the playoffs because their remaining schedule - six of their final 11 games are against losing teams - is soft and nobody below them in the East seems capable of bolting upward. But what then?
They’re locked in as the No. 8 seed, which means they’d play Boston, which means they’d lose in five games if not four. They’d lose not because their starting five can’t compete - with Bibby, their starters are quite good - but because they have little else.
The hidden cost of the Bibby trade was that it defoliated a bench that wasn’t lush to begin with. None of the guys they shipped to Sacramento - Tyronn Lue, Anthony Johnson, Shelden Williams, Lorenzen Wright - are all that great, but at least they were bodies. Now the Hawks’ bench essentially begins and ends with Josh Childress. In the loss at Chicago on Tuesday, every starter worked at least 32 minutes, and Bibby and Joe Johnson worked more than 40.
The Bibby trade was the right move because it gave the Hawks - sorry to bring this up for the 1,000th time - a real point guard and jump-started a team that mightn’t have made the playoffs otherwise, but will simply making the playoffs in the uninspiring East be enough? Enough for this city to get energized over the prospects of a first-round loss? Enough to change our longstanding perception of this flailing franchise?
We have only to look toward the Hawks’ brothers-in-Spirit for the answers. The Thrashers made the playoffs last season after being propped up by a flurry of deadline moves - they even won their division - but were swept by the Rangers in Round 1. Now they’re without a coach and without Marian Hossa and they hold the 28th-best record in a 30-team league.
It seemed like a big deal at the time, the Thrashers finally qualifying for the postseason. In hindsight it seems rather less. Unless something changes with the Hawks - unless, say, Salim Stoudamire turns into Vinnie Johnson and Solomon Jones into John Salley - the same will happen with them. They’ll get in and be gone in the wink of an eye, and we’ll ask ourselves, not for the first time, “Is that all there is?”
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Tournament has offered some sweet stats so far
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The NCAA tournament is a numbers game: 65 minus 49 equals 16, some of them more imposing than others but all with a fighting chance. Counting down the Sweet 16, not necessarily in order of sweetness:
1 — Homegrown Kentuckians in Western Kentucky’s starting lineup. The one, Ty Rogers of Eddyville, made the tournament’s signature shot — the 3-pointer at the overtime buzzer to beat Drake in Round 1.
2 — Technical fouls incurred by Stanford coach Trent Johnson in the first half of the Cardinal’s Round 2 game against Marquette. He became the first coach ejected from an NCAA game since Bob Huggins in 2003.
3 — Free throws missed by Texas swingman Damion James in the final 60 seconds of its nervous Round 2 defeat of Miami. The three misses helped the Hurricanes slash a 16-point deficit to two in the span of four minutes.
4 — Overnight margin of UCLA’s shaky Round 2 victory over Texas A&M. The score was reset to an even shakier 51-49 the next day when officials announced Russell Westbrook’s breakaway dunk came after the buzzer.
5 — Years since Kansas has reached the Final Four. Bill Self took over for Roy Williams in 2003 and has lost twice in Round 1, twice more in regional finals. With a tepid Midwest field remaining, he’d better win this time.
6 — West Virginia sixth man Joe Mazzulla nearly had a triple-double against Duke. Asked if Mazzulla was better than he’d expected, Mike Krzyzewski said: “He was better than Bob [Huggins] expected. Otherwise he’d be starting.”
7 — Trips to the Sweet 16 for Michigan State over the past 11 years. This one came courtesy of a Round 2 victory over Big East champ Pitt that was so comprehensive it didn’t seem like an upset.
8 — Xavier victories vs. Huggins when he coached crosstown rival Cincinnati. Counting its win against Kansas State last season, Xavier is 9-8 against Huggins, whose West Virginia team it faces tonight.
9 — Points North Carolina ran off to open its Round 2 defeat of Arkansas. Take away that 9-0 lead, and the Heels would still have won by 22. They’ve won two NCAA games by an aggregate 70 points and have yet to trail.
10 — Assists by Memphis point guard Derrick Rose in his first two NCAA games. According to NBAdraft.net, the freshman stands to be the second player taken (after Michael Beasley of Kansas State) in June.
11 — Louisville players who scored in the Cardinals’ Round 2 rout of Oklahoma. The 11 included substitute center Terrance Farley, who managed to miss a free throw wide right, prompting Rick Pitino to blame the wind.
12 — Consecutive games won by Wisconsin, which hasn’t lost since Feb. 9. Over those dozen games, the Badgers have yielded 60 points only twice and have held four opponents, Michigan State among them, under 50.
13 — NCAA games won by Villanova as a lower seed, the most by any school since seedings were implemented in 1979. Only one of those has come this year: In Round 2 the 12th-seeded Wildcats dispatched No. 13 Siena.
14 — Points scored in two NCAA games by Tennessee’s Chris Lofton, the SEC’s all-time leading 3-point shooter. Lofton had five points against American, nine against Butler. He hurt his ankle in the latter game.
15 — First-half points scored by Stephen Curry in Davidson’s two NCAA victories. He had a fairly astonishing 55 in the second halves against Gonzaga and Georgetown, making him the breakout star of Rounds 1 and 2.
16+1 — Baskets that Washington State has yielded in its past 60 minutes. The Cougars held Winthrop to four second-half hoops in Round 1 and limited Notre Dame to 13 field goals in the entirety of Round 2.
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It’s called Madness for a reason
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Birmingham — What can we say about an NCAA tournament that still includes as many No. 12 seeds as No. 2’s? How do we account for the Sun Belt having as many teams remaining as either the ACC or the SEC? How can we describe a Big Dance that twirls onward without Coach K but with Stephen Curry and Courtney Lee?
That such craziness, coming after a year in which favorites held swaggering sway, is more like it?
Well … yeah.
“Tennessee is one of the top teams in the country,” Butler coach Brad Stevens said here Sunday. “And we took them to overtime. And we shot 36 percent.”
We don’t set our calendars to March Sameness. It’s called Madness for a reason, and there was little of that in 2007. The lowest seed to reach the Sweet 16 was UNLV, a No. 7. This year there’s a No. 7 (West Virginia), a No. 10 (Davidson) and two No. 12’s (Western Kentucky and Villanova). UCLA, the choice of many, if not most, to win it all, was lucky to survive Texas A&M in Anaheim on Saturday, and one day later the board was nearly swept clean of No. 2’s.
Duke lost Saturday. Georgetown lost Sunday. Texas barely held off Miami. And Tennessee, ranked No. 1 in the polls at the end of February and still No. 1 in the RPI, was forced to work five extra minutes to subdue Butler, a Brand Name Underdog that didn’t play very well.
These were the Vols’ final two possessions of regulation: J.P. Prince threw the ball out of bounds, and then he walked. And why, you might be asking, was J.P. Prince on the floor playing point guard, a position he’d barely manned all season, for a No. 2 seed in the 40th minute in the second round of the Big Dance? Because Bruce Pearl, the Vols’ overstated coach, decided to tinker after the SEC tournament.
“The point guard play we were getting wasn’t going to win a national championship,” Pearl said, and the point guard play — Prince had more turnovers (six) than assists (five) — the Vols got against Butler almost kept them from the Sweet 16. Pearl again, trying to convince himself: “What happened totally gives us a better chance to advance.”
He wasn’t saying the same thing in the moments between regulation and OT. Instead, Pearl said, he told his men this: “J.P. and I did not close out regulation well — bail me out.”
The Vols outlasted Butler because Tyler Smith blocked an A.J. Graves layup inside the final minute — “I don’t know if I caught it on the way up or the way down,” Smith said, and it was close — and because Graves and Mike Green, the senior guards who’d led the Bulldogs to heights unknown picked the worst day possible to miss 27-of-37 shots between them.
“It was just me and the rim,” said Green, who missed eight shots inside five feet, “and I failed to finish.”
It’s hard to imagine Tennessee beating anyone remaining in the East Regional with such a performance, but the lesson of March Madness is that there are no lessons. This isn’t the BCS: There are no style points in this event, and this week’s shaky winner could be next week’s power player.
Still, the temptation to re-handicap the field is too powerful to resist. Any of the four remaining teams — Memphis, Texas, Stanford and Michigan State — could win the South Regional without it seeming an upset, but it’s hard to imagine any squad but Kansas prevailing in the Midwest. Or any team winning the West except UCLA, even after its scare.
The glamour region is the East, the only one that has seen its four top seeds advance. Louisville is playing too well for Tennessee, and North Carolina was clearly the class of the first weekend. Still, the Heels will have to fight past plodding Washington State on Thursday and probably Louisville on Saturday, and the Cards have the depth and the talent to give Carolina a run. But nobody is apt to unhorse the Heels before the Final Four, if then.
We learned again this weekend that just about anything can happen in March. Even with all the undulations, the championship will come down to UCLA against Carolina. Unless Western Kentucky pulls a Texas Western. Unless Davidson pulls a Villanova. Unless Villanova pulls another Villanova.
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Duke no longer basketball royalty
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Washington — They got tired (Kyle Singler faded badly at season’s end), and they got sick (Mike Krzyzewski had the flu and DeMarcus Nelson had something), and then the Yankees of college basketball got beat. And it didn’t feel like an upset because it really wasn’t.
The better team won. Not the team with more McDonald’s All-Americans — Duke has eight to West Virginia’s none — but the one with better players. Duke is like the Yankees in that it polarizes the electorate into either hating or loving, but it’s also like the Bronx Bombers in its penchant for signing guys who aren’t half as good as advertised.
Duke was lucky to reach Round 2, needing a late Gerald Henderson swoop to outlast Belmont. The Devils were lucky again to be leading by eight points with 17 minutes to play Saturday. Then they got unlucky. West Virginia realized Duke was, on ability if not reputation, nothing special. West Virginia, the fifth-best team in the Big East, realized it had no business losing to these guys.
And the Mountaineers didn’t. Indeed, they won handily. The team with eight McDonald’s All-Americans managed 14 baskets in the game’s first 38 minutes and got outrebounded 47-27. The better team prevailed.
“The top six or seven teams in the Big East would be on a par with Duke,” said West Virginia’s Joe Alexander, and going on this weekend you’d have to say there was scant difference between Villanova, seeded No. 12 and presumably the last at-large team in the field of 65, and Duke, which was seeded No. 2. (Villanova beat Clemson, which had beaten Duke six days earlier, Friday night.)
“I can’t say [Duke was] a bad rebounding team, but they gave a lot of offensive rebounds,” said the Mountaineers’ Da’Sean Butler. And then: “Coach [Bob Huggins] said it’s easy to offensive-rebound against them.”
Said Alexander: “Playing in the Big East tournament makes every other tournament seem like nothing.”
Such sentiments will fall heavy on the ears of those along Tobacco Road, but the ACC was a one-team league this season. North Carolina is really good. Duke was really well-coached. Everything else was a varying shade of mediocrity. (Which is why Georgia Tech’s failure to break upward will rankle for a long while.)
If you’d put other jerseys on these Blue Devils and handed them to another coach, you’d have had a 22-12 aggregation. Because Krzyzewski is the best in the business — and because the ACC was most forgiving — Duke wound up 28-6. But no team can subsist on guile and aura forever: The Devils were 22-1 on Valentine’s Day, 6-5 thereafter (and two of the six were one-point wins, and two more came against Tech).
“We had a great season,” Krzyzewski said Saturday, and nobody could deny that he’d gotten full value from a team that lacked height and heft. A few minutes earlier, someone had asked Henderson about the rebounding managed by “undersized” West Virginia, and Krzyzewski broke in: “As opposed to the oversized guys we have? Both teams were the same size.”
That has become Duke’s undoing: For all its big-name signees, too many of them are the same size and do the same things. (Sounds like the Hawks under Billy Knight, huh?) Krzyzewski insisted Friday he’s “OK with our recruiting,” but you wonder.
The program that reached the Final Four seven times over nine seasons in the ’80s and ’90s hasn’t been since 2004. This marks the second year running the Devils have been eliminated in the tournament’s first week. Duke won its last national championship in 2001. At the time, the Yankees had just begun their pursuit of a fourth consecutive World Series title. They fell short that autumn and haven’t won the Series since.
The lesson herein: Reputations can endure even after results have begun to wane. Steinbrenner’s men are no longer the gold standard in their sport, and neither are Coach K’s guys. As West Virginia proved, the Dookies are now just … guys.
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One title still left in these Braves
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
There’s one more division title left in these Braves, one more to prove that consecutive third-place finishes weren’t quite the end of the road, one more to put a big fluffy bow on a era that has spanned nearly two decades.
They would have finished first last season if they’d had any starting pitching beyond Tim Hudson and John Smoltz, and now they do. The key to the offseason wasn’t so much Tom Glavine, who’ll help, but Jair Jurrjens, who should do more than help. He should galvanize a rotation that has been in recycle mode. He’s the Live Young Arm this franchise hasn’t had since … who? Kevin Millwood? Steve Avery? Smoltz himself?
Pitching is what long ago made the Braves the Braves, and pitching is what will make it 15 division titles over 17 completed seasons. The rest of the bunch doesn’t have long to run: Glavine will be 42 Tuesday; Smoltz is 40, Mike Hampton is 35, Hudson 32. Jurrjens, who’s 22, could be the link between the aging staff that will squeeze out one more first-place finish and the new group that will keep this team in contention beyond 2010.
The discrepancy in those ages is the reason these Braves have one more title left in them, one only. This could be Glavine’s last season, and surely Smoltz’s isn’t far behind, and how many different muscles can Hampton pull before he gives it up for good? Among the everyday eight, Chipper Jones turns 36 next month and Andruw Jones is gone and Mark Teixeira is probably going.
Teixeira is primed to have the best season of a stellar career. He’s obviously tickled to be a Brave, but throughout baseball Teixeira is regarded as the truest believer of all Scott Boras’ famous clients. Even if the Braves reach the World Series and he’s named MVP — both of which could well happen — there’s not apt to be any hometown discount offered or even considered.
“With the Rangers,” Teixeira said this spring, “there was so much unknown. You were always hoping you’d have a good season. With the Braves, you expect to have a good season.”
Even if Teixeira departs for bigger money come the fall, that doesn’t mean the Braves were wrong to trade for him. It was the right deal at the time: Andruw Jones was about to exit and leave a hole behind Chipper Jones in the order, and the prospect of stacking Chipper and Teixeira back-to-back — two splendid switch-hitters, neither of whom is going to strike out at Andruw’s numbing rate — was too good to pass up.
If a miracle occurs and the Braves somehow find the money to keep Teixeira — or, miracle of all miracles, if Boras decides to ask for less instead of his customary more — then that trade will give this team a flying start on the next decade. If not, it was still a risk worth running. The past two seasons have taught us that the Braves can no longer count on winning just because they’re the Braves and they win every single season. They had to make a big move to maximize what’s left of this run of excellence, assuming anything is.
And there’s one more division title to be plucked. The Mets, the advent of Johan Santana notwithstanding, must live with the knowledge that they blew a season that was all but impossible to blow. The Phillies nearly fired Charlie Manuel a year ago and are still a combustible enterprise. These Braves can do this: They can win one more for Bobby Cox, one more for their legacy.
“What they’ve done over here is absolutely incredible,” Teixeira said. “It should go down in history as one of the greatest achievements in the history of the sport.”
The great run isn’t quite done. There’s one more postseason berth out there, one more to show everyone that the Braves aren’t yesterday’s men just yet, one more before the rebuilding begins in earnest.
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Mark Bradley - Bio
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley arrived at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on March 5, 1984, not exactly by popular demand. More than 24 years later, he’s still here, not exactly by popular demand.
His career highlight is coaching a team with Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson as his guards in Dominique Wilkins’ summer charity exhibition in 1988. (Bradley’s team won 173-169, thanks mostly to his superior tactics.)
His career lowlight is shattering his right kneecap in September 1997 and, while in the emergency room at Kennestone Hospital, being greeted by the orthopedist on call — one Stanley H. Dysart — with this: “Are you the Mark Bradley who writes for the paper? Do you remember that column about there being no way Florida State would lose to Notre Dame in 1993? Boy, you were wrong.”
He was born in Maysville, Ky., which used to be known as Rosemary Clooney’s hometown but is today known as Chris Lofton’s hometown. Bradley never met Rosemary Clooney, nor has he met her famous nephew George. He has, however, met George’s dad Nick. And Chris Lofton, too.
He has, believe it or not, won a few awards. He was named best columnist in the highest circulation category by the Associated Press Sports Editors in 1985 and has finished in the top 10 of that contest four times. He has also finished in the APSE top 10 for feature writing twice.
He lives in Mableton/Smyrna/Vinings with his wife and two daughters, all of whom are much better persons than he is.
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