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As of Thursday, Feb. 12, this little blog has relocated to a new home on AJC.com. It’s the same newspaper, the same Web site and the same writer (feel free to groan) — there’s just a new URL.
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Home > Mark Bradley > Archives > 2008 > April > 06
Sunday, April 6, 2008
Former UGA signee, Memphis on cusp of history
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
San Antonio — Don’t misunderstand: Robert Dozier wants his team to win. But the 22-year-old from Lithonia cringes at the thought of what could happen if the Memphis Tigers beat Kansas tonight to become national champs.
“It’ll be crazy,” Dozier said Sunday. “It’s been crazy all year. … If we win, we won’t be able to go anywhere [back in Memphis].”
Given that the Tigers have been under severe curfew all year — “I can’t remember the last time I went out,” Joey Dorsey said Friday — that shouldn’t be such a burden. Should it?
“I’m talking about during the day,” said Dozier, shaking his head. “About just going to eat. People harass you because they love you. There’s nothing you can do. Last year we could get away with little things — nothing serious — but not now. Everybody knows who we are.”
The love directed toward the ascendant Tigers isn’t just flowing from their fans. The national media, a crabby and jaded body, is getting giddy over Memphis in a way not seen since the 1983 and Houston’s soaring fraternity of Phi Slama Jama. The same media types who kept harping on the Tigers’ inability to make free throws — I confess I’m among this group — are suddenly swooning over Derrick Rose and Chris Douglas-Roberts and this swift and fearless team.
Do the Tigers have any concept of the impression they’ve made these last two weeks? “We try not to pay attention,” said Dozier, a junior forward. “We don’t listen to what this reporter says or what that reporter says.”
Part of that is because they’re too busy listening to their coach. John Calipari spent much of Saturday’s semifinal against UCLA screaming at Dozier, who scored but six points and who, alone among Tigers, has had a quiet NCAA tournament. “He was on me the whole first half,” Dozier said, “but not as much as he was on Joey. He was on him the whole game, and I thought he played great. [Calipari] made it sound like he had a zero-points, two-rebound game.”
Dorsey had no points, true, but he took 15 rebounds and limited Kevin Love to 12 points, only two in the second half. But that’s the Coach Cal Way: He yells, he says, because he loves.
Not every Tiger grasps this, at least not at first. When Dozier arrived in Memphis, migrating from Lithonia High by way of Laurinburg Prep, he wanted badly to board that midnight train to Georgia. “When I first got here, I was like, ‘Mom, I want to come home. I’m sick of this dude — he’s crazy.’ “
But he stuck it out, and now he’s on the cusp of a national title. Originally Dozier signed with Georgia, but his SAT score was flagged and he wound up at Laurinburg instead. That’s where Calipari saw him. “It was a blessing in disguise,” Dozier said. “At Georgia I don’t think I would have had as much fun. Here I’ve had three Elite Eights, a Final Four and now a championship game — what more could I ask for?”
About the game: Memphis keeps shocking opponents — Michigan State and Texas and UCLA, to name the three most recent — with its size and speed. “They’re not used to seeing guys with long arms and quick feet,” Dozier said. “It’s like we’ve got six guys on the court.”
But Kansas is big and fast, too. “It’ll be crazy, up and down.” Here Dozier patted his chest. “Get the ol’ windpipes ready.”
The belief here is that Memphis will win — hey, nobody’s more fervent that the recent convert — because the Tigers have done what few teams ever do: They’ve hit the Big Dance squarely on the sweet spot. Said Dozier: “We’re definitely better than we’ve been all season. We’ve turned it up to a whole new level. We’re executing way better than we did during the season.”
The only concern is that sudden stardom has a tendency to singe the recipient. Even Dozier’s parents — Robert Sr., who repairs transmissions in Ellenwood, and Jackie, who works at Macy’s at Perimeter Mall, are here for the weekend — have joined in the furor.
“They harass me, too,” Robert Dozier said, smiling, and it might behoove the overnight sensations to find a little quiet time before tonight’s game. Lest we forget, Phi Slama Jama lost to N.C. State.
Permalink | Comments (31) | Post your comment | Categories: UGA/SEC
Heels, Williams hit right between the eyes
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
San Antonio — Roy Williams says he rarely looks at the score. Maybe that explains how he could allow his North Carolina Tar Heels, the nation’s No. 1 ranked team, to fall 26 points behind — a deficit soon to grow to 28 — before deigning to call his first timeout.
But what explains a team that seizes a 28-point lead on the game’s biggest stage having to hang on to win? What explains the strangest game the Final Four has seen since … well, since Duke overrode a 22-point lead against Maryland in 2001?
“It was three different games,” said Bill Self, the Kansas coach. “In the first game we were great. In the second we weren’t very good, and they were great. And we were super down the stretch.”
For 14 minutes Kansas looked like the greatest team in the history of basketball. The Heels couldn’t complete a pass, let alone make a shot. (Carolina would finish the first half having made 10 turnovers against nine baskets.) The Jayhawks were everywhere, blocking layups and stealing interior feeds and making every shot of their own. And this wasn’t Davidson they were trashing — truth to tell, Kansas was lucky to beat that Carolina-based school — but the snooty crew from Chapel Hill.
But then you could see it start to happen. You could see the Jayhawks begin to think, “Hey, we’re playing so well we can do anything.” So they tried to do everything. They tried to win by 50. Having gone so fast, they sought to play even faster. And by halftime the lead was only 17, and midway through the second half it was down to …
Four.
Were you believing this?
We all know about the famed Carolina Comebacks — trailing Duke by eight with 17 seconds left; Dean Smith saving all those timeouts — but this would have been the mother of all comebacks. This would have made Kansas fans hate Ol’ Roy more than they already do, something heretofore thought impossible.
It was 54-50 with 10 minutes left and Kansas had gone 11 possessions without a point and Carolina’s Wayne Ellington was making like Walt Frazier. The Jayhawks were so rattled they were yelling at one another and shaking their heads when someone didn’t go where he was supposed to go, and everyone along press row was thinking, “Bill Self might as well resign after the game if his team blows this.”
And then we saw the flaw in all of Ol’ Roy’s teams, same as we’d seen in those first 14 minutes. His teams simply don’t defend the way they should for more than a few minutes at a time. (His one national title, with Carolina in 2005, was a case of overwhelming talent masking inherent defensive deficiencies.) When finally Kansas calmed down — and it took a long, long while — it found that it again could get any shot it wanted.
And that was the difference. The Jayhawks started going inside again, and soon everything was a lob-dunk or a layup, and soon it was Kansas breezing again, as if all those palpitations had never happened. The Jayhawks would win by 18 and wound up making 53.1 percent of their shots — a week ago, Louisville made 52.7 percent against Carolina — on a night when they trumped not just their own jitters but their old coach to boot.
“They hit us right between the eyes,” said Ol’ Roy, who looked as if he’d been hit right between the eyes. “They were really something … We had a marvelous run, but our dreams were bigger than this.”
Waiting in the final is Memphis, which put to rout the last questions about its legitimacy by dispatching UCLA with something approaching disdain in the first semifinal. Waiting is a team that can match Kansas for talent and speed and defensive commitment, and it seems unthinkable that either could steal a 28-point march on the other. But the more you come to this event, the more you realize: You never ever know.
Permalink | Comments (11) | Post your comment | Categories: Tech/ACC
Calipari has final chuckle
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
San Antonio — It was John Calipari’s little joke: Between UCLA and Memphis, he noted Friday, the programs have combined to win 11 NCAA titles.
This is no joke: If there’s to be a 12th national championship won by the Bruins and the Tigers, it won’t be going back to California. It’ll be paraded down Beale Street, borne by the team that spent three seasons winning nearly all its games but only in the past 10 days has won the unchallenged respect of a basketball-watching nation.
Memphis beat UCLA here Saturday by 15 points, and six minutes in, you knew the Tigers would win. You knew because they’d scored on nine consecutive possessions against the Bruins, who keep reaching the Final Four by virtue of their barbed-wire defense. You knew because the Bruins, who can guard anybody, couldn’t guard Memphis.
It’s possible nobody can guard Memphis, not with its dribble-drive motion offense and the players who keep dribble-driving every opponent to distraction. Russell Westbrook was voted the Pac-10’s best defender this season, but the problem was that the guys from Westwood had only one Westbrook.
Memphis had both Derrick Rose and Chris Douglas-Roberts, and Westbrook couldn’t guard both. (Or, to be blunt, either.) He tried, but whichever one he wasn’t defending did essentially as he wanted. The freshman Rose overpowered Darren Collison, regarded by many as the nation’s best point guard, to the extent that the Bruins leader decided, with 2:53 remaining and his team down 11, to commit his fifth foul at midcourt for no good reason. It was a gesture of surrender.
“We played like we played all year,” said Calipari, the Memphis coach. “We defended. We made it hard for them. The reality of it is: I’ve got a good team.”
How good? Well, UCLA lost in the 2006 and 2007 Final Fours to Florida, the greatest team of the past 30 years. From what Ben Howland saw of Memphis, would the Bruins coach put the Tigers in the same exalted class? “They both have strengths in all areas,” he said. “They can play at any pace … They’re similar in a lot of respects.”
UCLA’s best players are Collison and Kevin Love. The former made one basket and had more fouls and turnovers (five apiece) than assists (four). Love made one second-half basket and was outrebounded 15-9 by the Tigers’ Joey Dorsey.
“Going into the game, we knew we were going to win,” said Rose, who scored 25 points, took nine rebounds and made four assists. “There really isn’t too much to say.”
There really wasn’t. The massive freshman Love was winded in the first half, and the other Bruins weren’t exactly light on their feet. Rose again: “They were fatigued. It was like, ‘I’m not going to take another jump shot.’ That was crazy. I was going to go to the hole.”
And UCLA could do nothing to stop him or Douglas-Roberts, who scored 28. This, you should know, is the UCLA that was believed to be the better-coached side. Said Calipari: “Whoever the small man [Collison] was on, he was going to post up … Whoever had that guy on him, that’s who we went after.”
That, folks, is Coaching 101. John Robert Wooden — who steered UCLA to 10 of those 11 titles — could have done no better. And to think: A homespun column in Saturday’s Los Angeles Times characterized this game as “a coaching mismatch.”
When someone asked the Memphis players about the story, Calipari broke in: “C’mon, Ben’s not that bad.”
Another joke. Again, the assembled media laughed hard and long. But at this late date nobody’s giggling harder and longer than these Tigers.
“The negativity [toward his team, now 38-1] was silly the whole year,” Douglas-Roberts said. “When we hear that stuff, we just laugh.”
For Memphis, there’s one game to go. One more punchline waiting to be cracked. A first national championship there to be won.
