Rush The Court

The Lede.  Big Monday came through with a shocker tonight, and only part of it involved Jim Boeheim attacking the Syracuse media for what he deemed unfair reporting.  We’ll discuss this more below, but did Kansas State turn the proverbial corner on its season this evening with a superb showing against its bitter rival, or did we just witness the 2011 version of Devan Downey knocking out #1 Kentucky?

Your Watercooler Moment.  K-State Obliterates #1 Kansas, a Nation Wonders How? Everyone in the building and watching on television knew exactly the moment when it was over.  Not over in the scoreboard sense necessarily — after all, there was enough time for a big comeback by Kansas — but over in the heads-hanging, back-breaking sense.  With about ten minutes to go in the game, K-State’s Jacob Pullen, who had broken out of his season-long slump with 25 points in the first half, shot a long three that spun around the rim, bounced up to hit the backboard, and dropped right back in.  It’s the kind of shot you only get when the night is yours, and Pullen, on his way to a 38-point masterpiece, the second-most points scored in a game against a #1 team ever, drained it for his fourth trey of the evening.  It was almost as if all of the team’s pent-up frustrations about preseason expectations, the suspensions, the finger-pointing, the NIT flap, the overriding average-ness of this team, came out in one glorious game against its hated rival.  As it turns out, the Wildcat victory tonight represented only the third such win in its last 45 tries against Kansas, a streak so unbelievable on its face that you start to think maybe K-State should only agree to play the Jayhawks when they’re ranked #1 in the polls (two of those three wins came as such).  As for tonight, Kansas State hit everything it threw up (56% FG), out-rebounded (+4) and generally out-toughed Bill Self’s top-ranked team.  They played like a team with something to earn, while Kansas played like a team with something to lose.  The big question is whether this transcendental win for Frank Martin’s guys means anything in the long run — conventional wisdom is that KSU still has some work to do before getting itself back onto the NCAA bubble, but only Florida State, Wisconsin and the Wildcats have wins over #1 teams this season.  It’s not a matter of whether — obviously if Frank Martin’s team can beat KU by nearly twenty points — they have the capacity to win four of five games the rest of the way (we’re assuming Texas in Austin is a loss).  But will the same Pullen and the same aggressive defense that we saw in Bramlage Coliseum tonight show up against the likes of Oklahoma and Nebraska, Missouri and Iowa State?  Kansas, on the other hand, once again looked completely listless in a game where we can only presume that they expected K-State to kneel down and take the beating like they had done in Lawrence a few weeks ago.  That’s what really scares us about Bill Self’s team — it’s not that they don’t have the talent and experience in droves, because they do — it’s that, as we saw in the Northern Iowa game last year and a few other near-misses since then, sometimes they’re just not mentally all the way there.  Tonight the Jayhawks were down 30-16 (thanks to a 20-8 run) before they seemed to realize they were going to have to play to win the game.  They are good enough to win the national title when playing full bore, but as Self alluded to in the postgame, if they think they can waltz in and intimidate teams with their pedigree alone, they’re vulnerable to getting shocked.  Pullen and K-State definitely did the shocking tonight; it’s up to those capable individuals to determine if it’s sustainable.

Your Watercooler Moment, Pt. II.  Boeheim Wins #850, Trashes Media Afterward. Coming into tonight’s game having lost five of seven games and two in a row, the Orange needed a home win to remind everyone of the team that ran out to an 18-0 start earlier this season.  Despite the same bugaboo that has caused major troubles in the Syracuse defense appearing again (three-point defense), the Orange were able to shut down WVU in the last eight minutes of the game, holding the Mountaineers to a mere three points during that stretch and pulling away.  WVU hit 11-22 from deep, though, which means that the vaunted 2-3 defense employed by SU is still having trouble getting to shooters; luckily, West Virginia didn’t appear to have much other offense than that outside the arc (6-25 from two).  The win moved Syracuse to 21-6 (8-6 Big East) and was also Jim Boeheim’s 850th win in his career (second only to Coach K among active coaches).  Boeheim used the post-game presser to rip the media about their preseason predictions and comparing his record against other coaches.  Here’s the entire thing, but we’d suggest you watch starting at around 3:00 to get the gist of it.

Tweet of the Night.  Complete agreement… during the Kansas-KSU game, it was incredibly distracting.