1. Washington State lost its dispute with Oregon over a controversial technical foul call at the end of the first overtime in a New Year’s Eve conference game in Pullman.  The issue arose after Wazzu seemingly won the game with 0.3 seconds remaining when several bench players and at least one fan stepped onto the court.  A technical foul was called, and Oregon was awarded two FTs to tie the game, sending it into double-OT where they won 91-89.  From our viewing of it here, it looked like a hundred other exciting endings that happen during the normal course of a season, but the Pac-10 chose to hide behind the technicality.
2. St. Louis coach Rick Majerus, in the midst of a somewhat promising season at 12-6 and 3-1 in the A10, took an opportunity to throw his conference (the Atlantic 10) under the bus yesterday, sparing no complaint about the expensive East Coast cities, the travel, the airports and even the old standby, academics.  He said he’d prefer to play in the MVC, which makes geographic sense, but what’s left unsaid is that he’d prefer the built-in advantage of playing in Arch Madness for a trip to the NCAA Tournament just minutes from the SLU campus.  He didn’t mention whether a lack of high thread count towels in their budget hotels factored into his decision.
3. Another interesting insight from Mike DeCourcy — Duke’s much-lauded point guard Jon Scheyer isn’t getting it done down the stretch of close games.  Someone out there surely has the time and energy to track his numbers in those games, right?  Let us know in the comments if you do.
4. Gary Parrish: not a fan of the Christian Drejer/Lucca Staiger method of doing business.  We think the lesson here is that coaches will have to carefully vet European players they’re recruiting to try to ensure they’ll have a modicum of loyalty to the school should an offer appear on the table back home midway through the season.
5. Luke Winn moves Kentucky up to #1 in his Power Rankings.  He refers to it in the Tennessee section (#7), but it’s worth noting that KenPom rates the Cats #13 in his latest rankings, in large part because the defensive efficiency is a pedestrian #36 in the nation (offensive efficiency is #11).  The biggest two drivers of that stat are the fact that UK doesn’t defend the three well (36%, #254) and doesn’t force a lot of turnovers (20.9%, #167).  This should be somewhat concerning for John Calipari, as his best Memphis teams (2006-09) all had superb defenses that consistently shut down the three-ball.  If/when Kentucky loses, expect it to be because of a hot shooting night from deep.

rtmsf (3998 Posts)

This entry was posted on Friday, January 22nd, 2010 at 2:45 am by rtmsf and is filed under morning 5, Regular Features. Tagged: atlantic 10, duke, iowa st, jon scheyer, kenpom, kentucky, lucca staiger, oregon, pac-10, rick majerus, st louis, washington st. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.