In a somewhat shocking turn of events at the FIBA Under-19 World Championships in Latvia, Team USA lost 79-74 Friday to Russia in a quarterfinal game where the Yanks simply could not throw the ball in the ocean from outside the arc (0-9). Nor, apparently, could they defend it, as Russia dropped 12 threes on its end, making it virtually impossible for a team lacking much of an inside presence to win the game. The American team regrouped to throttle Poland on Saturday before finishing the tournament by beating Australia, 78-77, Sunday to take the fifth place trophy (USA’s worst showing since 2003, also a fifth place finish). Connecticut’s Jeremy Lamb was the undisputed leader of this team, averaging 16/4 in taking 53 more shots than anyone else on the team, but the surprise of the squad may have been Creighton’s Doug McDermott, the 2010-11 MVC ROY but someone that most national fans haven’t yet heard of. The rising sophomore went for averages of 11/6 in the tournament and proved the only player on the roster capable of reliably hitting threes (39.3%) — keep an eye out for this future March Madness hero in coming seasons.
So what happened to cause a disappointing fifth place finish (Team USA was expected to win gold or silver) in Latvia this year? Luke Winnwrites that the hordes of A-list stars who opted to stay stateside this summer — from UNC’s Harrison Barnes to Ohio State’s Jared Sullinger — had an obvious impact; but he also mentions some of the chatter from NBA GMs and scouts who openly suggested that some of the players didn’t take the competition seriously enough. Whether this is yet another indictment of the infernal AAU system in America, or simply a matter of players foolishly failing to recognize that the rest of the world can play too, we’re not sure. But the fact remains that USA Basketball is nowhere near as fearsome of an entity as it once was — especially at the younger levels.
We always talk about ranking the programs on the measure of how well they put players into the NBA, but that doesn’t always give us the entire picture. For example, a school might have ten players in the League, but they may all ride the pine. Another school might have half that many total players, but three or four of those could be All-Stars. Dollars for Ballers took a stab at this problem by considering player salaries. While @SportsGuy33persuasively argues that NBA salaries are not always commensurate with talent and productivity (hello, Rashard Lewis!), it’s a better proxy than none at all. So given this, would you believe that Michigan State’s five players — Jason Richardson, Zach Randolph, Morris Peterson, Shannon Brown, and Charlie Bell — had the highest salary average at $7.76M than any other school with at least three players? Duke, with its 13 total pros, many of whom have been around for a while, collected nearly $90M in salaries last season. Really, the only way to do this kind of analysis accurately is to tie programs to individual and team outcomes, but this is a decent start.
Some players get tattoos and carve messages into their hair to rep for their families; incoming Kentucky freshman Michael Gilchristdecided to change his name. According to his tweet on Friday afternoon, one of the best freshmen in the country has officially changed his name to Michael Kidd-Gilchrist. He chose to add Kidd to his existing surname to honor his deceased uncle, Darrin Kidd, a mentor who suffered a fatal heart attack on the same day MKG signed his letter of intent last year; and, of course, his father, Michael Gilchrist, Sr., was shot and killed fifteen years ago.
On a sad note, former TCU head coach Neil Doughertydied last Tuesday during a jog in Indianapolis. He wasn’t carrying identification and is not a local resident — he was in town as part of his current job with iHoops, an NBA/NCAA joint initiative — so after passing during the run, his body was kept as a “John Doe” until last Friday when his identity was revealed. Dougherty was a long-time assistant throughout the 80s and 90s, most notably at his home-state school of Kansas under Roy Williams, and his age of only 50 years has many folks in Lawrence and Fort Worth shaking their heads. He leaves a wife, Patti, and three children. RIP, Coach Dougherty.
Rush The Court is back with another edition of One on One: An Interview Series, which we will bring you periodically throughout the year. If you have any specific interview requests or want us to interview you, shoot us an email at rushthecourt@yahoo.com.
One of the great things about college hoops is that with nearly 350 Division I teams, you can find any and every playing style under the sun. Some teams push the ball at frenetic paces in an effort to wear down the opposition, while others prefer to slow down and make every possession count. Smaller teams rely on outside shooting and bigger teams assert their dominance down low, so in comparing teams to one another, how do you account for such widely varying styles of play? This is the question that cult hero and statistician Ken Pomeroy longs to answer. The solution isn’t always simple, but it boils down to evaluating how teams fare on a possession-to-possession basis, rather than using the commonly-held method of measuring events from game to game. At KenPom.com, fans can track the performance of all 345 Division I teams in his tempo-free style. Over the last few years, his approach has moved from the underground into the mainstream, mentioned by media outlets such as ESPN.com and The Wall Street Journal during the college hoops season. He is also a regular contributor to Basketball Prospectus and you can follow him on Twitter (@kenpomeroy). In this interview, Ken took a few minutes to talk with us about his methodology and the growth of his website.
RTC: For our readers who are used to the more traditional “counting stats,” what makes your analysis different and worthwhile?
Ken Pomeroy: In all of the statistics I use, I’m trying to equalize opportunities. If you’re going to compare one offense to another, it’s not fair to look at raw points. North Carolina, for instance, has more opportunities to score (than an average team). It’s also not fair to compare defenses for the same reason. We look at rebounding percentage, for instance, which takes into account how many rebounds are available to a player when he’s on the floor to get an appreciation for whether he’s a good rebounder or not. Those are the things I try to do with all these stats.
RTC:One thing that makes your analysis easy to digest is that most of the teams that excel in traditional stats and occupy the top spots in the rankings also excel according to your tempo-free analysis. There are some exceptions, though – what are some schools in recent years that may not have had those alluring traditional stats but were more eye-catching in your analysis?
KenPom darling Belmont compensated for a lack of size with a brigade of long-range shooters like Mick Hedgepeth. (Getty Images)
KP:Wisconsin played at the second-slowest pace in the nation (ed. note – 58 possessions per game, compared to the national average of about 67), but had a very effective offense. They weren’t effective all of the time — they obviously had that ugly game against Penn State in the Big Ten Tournament which called into question just how good their offense was. Georgetown in their Final Four run in 2007 had an outstanding offense, but played a very slow pace. North Carolina’s 2005 championship team was criticized for their defense based on the points they allowed, but tempo-free, their defense was one of the best in the country. If you win 90-75, it looks like you gave up too many points, but when you factor in that the game was 80 possessions, it reveals a better defensive performance. Read the rest of this entry »
The Reign Man is heading back to Seattle. Sort of. Washington announced yesterday that Shawn Kemp Jr. (yes, that one; no, we won’t be making the obvious Jr. joke) had signed a financial aid agreement to get the final scholarship the Huskies had available. Kemp Jr. has taken an interesting path to get to Washington as he previously committed to Alabama in 2008 before being declared academically ineligible and to Auburn in 2009 before being declared academically ineligible again. Now it appears that he is academically eligible although coach Lorenzo Romar has already said, “The first thing he’s going to have to do is get into condition.” Unfortunately that isn’t the first time we have heard that about a player named Shawn Kemp.
After Kyrie Irving went down last December, Jared Sullinger stepped up to become the premier freshman in the country. This season the Ohio State star is looking to take his game to another level by attempting to lose up to 30 pounds in an effort to get into better shape and develop his game more. It is rare that we would question any big man trying to lose a few pounds, but given Sullinger’s inside game and his relatively good conditioning (not falling apart late in games even as a freshman) we have to wonder if Sullinger’s play might actually suffer in a weird way from him getting into shape.
UNC coach Roy Williams was honored yesterday in Marion, North Carolina, where he was born, with the unveiling of a sign honoring him with the official ceremony to follow on July 18, which Williams is expected to attend. Before fans of rival teams start harping on the cost of the sign in these fiscally challenging times it is worth noting that the sign was paid for with private donations. The more interesting thing for us is that due to his very well-documented difficult childhood Williams actually spent very little time in Marion and grew up in Asheville, North Carolina.
Luke Winn checks in with his summer update from the FIBA Under-19 Tournament in Latvia, and the biggest storyline involves a player who isn’t even suiting up this summer. Youssef Mejri is a 6’8″ power forward prospect who has committed to Davidson despite never playing a minute of American high school basketball, and few people are quite sure as to whether the Wildcats are getting a major sleeper or an unfulfilling headache. Several other D-I players that Winn evaluates include rising freshmen Kevin Pangos (Gonzaga), Sim Bhullar (Xavier), Jackson Aldridge (Butler), and Hugh Greenwood (New Mexico).
Finally, one of our correspondents, Kelly James Powers, was in Indianapolis yesterday for the adidas Invitational and noted that in addition to the star power on the court (Andre Drummond and Shabazz Muhammad were showcasing their considerable talents) there was plenty of star power in the stands (John Calipari, Mike Krzyzewski, Rick Pitino, and Tom Izzo, just to name a few). As exciting as the on-court skills of the players might be, the positioning and interactions of these coaches while evaluating these prospects would be fascinating to watch. Obviously Calipari and Pitino have to act like the other doesn’t exist, but what about the other coaches there?
If you are interested in participating in our ATB2 feature, send in your submissions to rushthecourt@gmail.com. We will add to this post throughout the day as the submissions come in so keep on sending them.
General News
Tony Jones to be named head coach at Alcoa High School: “”Former Vol assistant and interim head coach Tony Jones will apparently be sticking around the Knoxville area: Alcoa High School will hire him as its next head basketball coach as early as tomorrow, according to sources within Alcoa City Schools.” (Rocky Top Talk)
USA Squeezes by Lithuania, Takes Control of Group F: A recap and statistical analysis of Team USA’s close victory over the Lithuanians. (Villanova by the Numbers)
USA Loses by Two to Croatia: Team USA was not as fortunate the next day against Croatia as they were unable to hit the necessary shots at the end up, but will advance to single-elimination play. (Villanova by the Numbers)
In the past eighteen months, those of us who love college sports — NCAA Division I sports, specifically — have witnessed a series of near-misses that has threatened to overhaul and redefine the games we care about so dearly. The first shot across the bow was the NCAA’s presumptuous near-expansion to a 96-team NCAA Tournament, an idea hatched with dollar signs in its eyes and only quashed when the public and media covering the sport threatened to go Vancouver at the organization’s Indianapolis headquarters. The second shot was last summer’s conference realignment madness, a tumultuous sequence of fits and starts that didn’t as much change the landscape of the six power conferences as it left everyone shaken by just how brazen and inequitable the system underlying major college athletics has become.
Is the NCAA Tournament As We Know It On Its Last Legs? (Getty/A. Lyons)
The point of these two events — neither of which resulted in sea changes, mind you — is that, as the power and influence of the alpha dogs of college athletics rises, we appear to be pushing closer to a tipping point where we’ll no longer discuss what almost happened rather than what did happen. The 74 basketball schools (and 66 football schools) that comprise the ACC, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12, and SEC wield the vast majority of everything — dollars, budgets, fans, television contracts, merchandising, etc. And as their profit margins continue to increase, these schools and leagues are correspondingly irked that their governing body, the NCAA, is getting in their way. Whether they see the future of intercollegiate sports as allowing the payment of players or involving agents or full-cost scholarships or third-party enforcement of rules, these power schools know that ideas ultimately favorable to their bottom lines are often at odds with the other 250+ NCAA D-I schools. This is why, despite existing statements to the contrary, many observers believe that the endgame of all of this wrangling will result in a complete secession of the schools from the major conferences to their own separate entity. Call it the Confederate Collegiate Athletics Association, if you like, but don’t ignore the possibility.
Big Ten commissioner Jim Delaney was recently quoted in a piece by Steve Wieberg at USA Today, and it’s abundantly clear that he (and likely the other power conference commissioners) see an Armageddon-like future to blow up the NCAA as his ‘nuclear option.’
The big news yesterday was the death of Armen Gilliam, who starred at UNLV and led the 1987 Rebels to a 37-2 record and a Final Four appearance. Gilliam died while playing in a pickup game near Pittsburgh and although initial reports suggested that he had died of a heart attack in fact the cause of death will not be officially determined until an autopsy is performed at a later date. In addition to his playing career at UNLV and in the NBA, Gilliam also coached at Division III Penn State-Altoona. No announcements have been made yet regarding funeral services for Gilliam, but we expect a big turnout like NC State had for Lorenzo Charles this past weekend if the Gilliam family chooses to do so.
Georgia Tech transfer Brian Oliver announced yesterday that he would be heading to Seton Hall. Oliver, who averaged 10.5 PPG and 4.5 RPG last season as a sophomore including a 32-point outburst against Syracuse. Despite a disappointing end to his season where he missed the last eight games due to a broken thumb, Oliver likely would have remained at Georgia Tech if not for the firing of Paul Hewitt. The Pirates were able to win Oliver’s services over a handful of teams and after he sits out a season they should have a potential All-Big East performer in Oliver.
Apparently one game over .500 in three seasons is enough to get a contract extension in college basketball because Stanford announced late yesterday that they were giving Johnny Dawkins a two-year extension through the 2015-16 season. After a relatively promising 20-14 record in his first season in Palo Alto, Dawkins has seen his Cardinal team fail to break .500 in the past two season and may have worked his way out of one of the top jobs in any sport–head coach at Duke. Perhaps Dawkins can turn things around on The Farm, but he has his work cut out for him in a Pac-10 conference that is no longer as weak as it was a few years ago.
Most of the attention in the US for the U-19 World Championships has been on Team USA and its college stars, but as Luke Winn reports college fans may want to start paying attention to the Australian team as several of their players may be heading to college campuses near you in the very near future. While some schools (St. Mary’s) dominated the Australian recruiting scene in recent years, the players have started to shift their focus to other schools and Winn reports the current favorites for the present group of Australian star U-19 players are Butler, Boise State, and New Mexico.
With the summer circuit heading up Dave Telep has ten major storylines to watch for this month. You will find a lot of talk about all the big names that you are probably familiar with from various recruiting sources online and although we love the big-time showdowns (LeBron James destroying Lenny Cooke is our personal favorite) our favorite part is waiting for the relative unknowns to emerge as major prospects. It was just a year ago when Anthony Davis went from a decent Chicago-area prospect who wasn’t even getting much attention from in-state school to the top prospect in his class in the eyes of many recruiting analysts.
UNLV legend Armen Gilliam died on Tuesday night at the age of 47 after suffering an apparent heart attack while playing pickup basketball in a Pittsburgh-area gym. Gilliam’s death occurs just nine days after NC State legend Lorenzo Charlesdied in a motor vehicle accident in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Gilliam had a great college & pro career (Credit: David Petkiewicz/Arizona Republic)
Nicknamed “The Hammer” for his physical play Gilliam led UNLV to a 93-11 record during his 3 seasons there culminating in a 37-2 season in 1987 that ended in the Final Four appearance. Gilliam was named a 2nd team All-American and Big West Player of the Year while scoring 903 points (still a single-season record at UNLV) while averaging 23.2 PPG and 9.3 RPG as a senior. Following his senior year Gilliam was the 2nd overall pick in the 1987 NBA Draft behind David Robinson. In his 13 seasons in the NBA, Gilliam averaged 13.7 PPG and 6.9 RPG while playing for 6 different NBA teams.
Gilliam’s jersey was inducted into the UNLV Athletic Hall of Fame in 1998 and had his jersey retired by the school in 2007. Upon hearing about Gilliam’s death, his former coach Jerry Tarkanian said, “He was one of the greatest Rebels ever and one of the best players we have ever had. In my ratings, I had Larry Johnson No. 1 and Armon No. 2. He was such a great person. Everybody loved him and he loved everybody. He was such a gentle person and such a caring guy. I am all shook up over it. I think the world of him and am just really shocked.”
“Get a good night’s rest.” We’ve all heard it from the time we were little kids — whether it was our parents extolling us before a big trip, our teachers warning us before a big exam, or a coach encouraging us before a big game. And while conventional wisdom in every facet of our lives suggests that sleep is a necessary building block toward high achievement, people rarely specify how much rest is enough. That is, until Stanford Medical School, using Johnny Dawkins‘ men’s basketball team as guinea pigs, decided to study that exact question. For the past two basketball seasons, Cheri Mah, a researcher focusing on the science of snoozing, tracked the sleeping habits of eleven Stanford Cardinal players, putting them through the following protocol:
Get Your Zs Using Your Very Own Cardinal Pillow
The researchers asked the players to maintain their normal nighttime schedule (sleeping for six to nine hours) for two to four weeks and then aim to sleep 10 hours each night for the next five to seven weeks. During the study period, players abstained from drinking coffee and alcohol, and they were asked to take daytime naps when travel prohibited them from reaching the 10 hours of nighttime sleep.
The results, at least in a practice setting, will undoubtedly have coaches from Orono to San Diego and everywhere in between seeking to move lights-out to an earlier time and re-think the utility of those punitive 6 AM practices some choose to employ. Mah’s team found that the players ran three full-court sprints (“suicides”) 4.5% faster with more sleep than they did at baseline, and their shooting percentages from both the foul line and the three-point arc improved by nine percent. Keep in mind that the improvements were noted in team practices rather than game settings, but players generally self-reported that they felt less fatigued and their performances at both practices and games improved as a result.
Duke will be undergoing a significant transformation after losing Kyrie Irving, Nolan Smith, and Kyle Singler and to help get the team ready they are heading to China and Duabi in August. Although we wouldn’t read too much into results for the Blue Devils playing on the other side of the planet it will be interesting to see how they integrate all the new pieces (particularly Austin Rivers and Quinn Cook with returning guards Tyler Thornton, Seth Curry, and Andre Dawkins). The Blue Devils are definitely a step below Kentucky and UNC at this point in the season, but they have enough talent to be a legitimate top 5 team later in the year. Of course, we are also looking forward to fans complaining when ESPN decides to run a month-long special feature on Duke abroad and broadcasts all of their games live.
Team USA had its biggest victory of the FIBA U-19 yesterday when it knocked off Lithuania, 107-105 in overtime, to avenge a pre-tournament loss to the Lithuanians. Jonas Valanciunas, the 5th overall pick in this year’s NBA Draft, had a huge game with 30 points and 15 rebounds, but was upstaged by Jeremy Lamb‘s 35 points including the game-winner with 2 seconds left in overtime and overcome a series of late-game miscues by several other college players on the US team. The US has one more game in the second round today against Croatia before single-elimination play starts on Friday.
Matt Doherty picked up a potential starter yesterday when Kansas State transfer Nick Russell announced that he would be heading to Southern Methodist. Russell, who was the #4 prospect in the state of Texas coming out of high school, struggled to find his niche in the Wildcats’ offense and averaged just 4.2 PPG and 1.9 RPG despite starting at times for Kansas State. The change in scenery (and the big step down in level of competition) might be enough to help Russell regain his old form and help Doherty get the Mustangs out of the middle of the Conference USA standings.
Indiana transfer Bobby Capobiano announced that he was transferring to Valparaiso yesterday. Capobiano, who averaged 2.3 PPG and 2.6 RPG as a freshman before seeing his playing time drop last season, cited the success of recent transfers Brandon Wood and Cory Johnson as a major factor in his decision. If new coach Bryce Drew can find a way to integrate Capobianco into the Valparaiso offense after Capobianco’s mandatory one-year hiatus, he could be a major factor inside for them to help develop a low-post game that they have lacked for years.
TCU will be heading to the Big East for the 2012-13 season, but it is already bringing in assistants with some pretty substantial credentials as it added Rob Evans to its staff yesterday as an assistant coach. Evans, who has been coaching in college for 42 years including time as a head coach at Mississippi and Arizona State making the NCAA Tournament at both places. Most recently Evans served as an assistant coach at Arkansas for the past four years. We highly encourage you to visit the link to take a look at his career as both a player and a coach because it is fascinating stuff (being knocked out of the NCAA Tournament in consecutive years to guys named Elvin Hayes and Lew Alcindor is just some of it).
With the completion of the NBA Draft and the annual coaching and transfer carousels nearing their ends, RTC is rolling out a new series, RTC Summer Updates, to give you a crash course on each Division I conference during the summer months. Our first update is from the West Coast Conference and comes courtesy of Will Green, an editor and writer with The Slipper Still Fits.
Readers’ Take One
Summer Storylines
Brigham Young University Joins The Conference: When this story was first reported back in September, it was largely forgotten. BYU’s move was a football one with basketball repercussions, not the other way around. If anyone was talking about the Cougars, the dialogue was centered around how much money it would receive from it slew of nationally televised football contests this coming fall, and how many years the vaunted program would remain as an independent before choosing to join another league, securing even more lucrative contracts. The move, however, might make a greater impact on the collegiate basketball landscape than the football one, competitively speaking. For one thing, resident king Gonzaga’s streak of conference championships – which is older than most of your children – or at least its general reputation as the WCC’s top dog, is seriously endangered. With Jimmer Fredette seizing all available national attention like a Venus flytrap, lost on many fans last year was the fact BYU was not merely a fortuitous program enjoying an unusually good year. The Cougars have been a top 40 RPI team since 2006, with a pair of top 20 finishes. That’s not a second Gonzaga — that’s better than Gonzaga. They also bring by far the largest student body and largest fan base that the league has ever seen. Indeed, the league can leverage BYU’s prominence to grow its influence and scope (more on that later). Despite being a “football move,” BYU’s departure from the Mountain West Conference is not, as so many of the recent realignment moves have been, a casualty of circumstance. The aforementioned “repercussions” became a mutually beneficial improvement for both the Cougars and the league. Credit alert diplomacy and geographical convenience to why commissioner Jamie Zaninovichwas able to lure a team into his league that’s also, statistically speaking, better than any team in his current league.
Brandon Davies, if Reinstated by BYU, is an X-Factor for the Cougars in 2011-12 (Getty/E. Miller)
The League Gets A New TV contract: Over the course of the 2000s, the WCC did a remarkable thing: It became the most widely televised college basketball league of all the leagues in the West, while being only the fourth highest-rated league by RPI of the six in the region. Resident behemoth Pac-12 trusted its games to the insipid hands of Fox Sports’ cluster of regional networks. The Mountain West conference was largely marooned out on “The Mtn,” a network that truncated both its name and its audience by being available in a far more limited number of homes than the heavy-hitting Pac-12. The Western Athletic Conference enjoyed the occasional ESPNU game. The WCC, on the other hand, had its most intriguing matchups beamed into peoples’ living rooms in prime time on Thursday and Saturday nights (and for a time, on Big Monday) via ESPN or ESPN2. Both sides had such a good time putting the whole mess together that when their previous contract expired on June 1, it took exactly one week to renegotiate an eight-year extension. The new deal increases the amount of ESPN games featuring WCC teams by an average of at least five per year, possibly much more, and is spread across Thursday, Saturday and select Monday nights. While some critics contend the new ESPN contract isn’t much of an improvement over the previous one, their voices were provoked loudest during the rather dwarfing aftershock of the Pac-12’s mammoth deal with the same network. While this upcoming season could mark the first time in a long while that the WCC won’t be the most-watched west coast league, the league strengthened its relationship with ESPN and is poised to showcase what should be its most successful year ever in front of its widest audience to date. In an era of scrambling realignment and a fragile economic landscape, this is a still a huge win.
The University of San Diego Suffers A Bribery Scandal: In April, this story looked crippling. San Diego had just finished one of the worst seasons by any WCC team ever when news broke that Toreros’ all-time leading scorer and current Memphis Grizzlies protégé, Brandon Johnson, was allegedly used to solicit current USD player Ken Rancifer on behalf of a delinquent named Steven Goria and several others to fix a game against the University of Portland on February 24. Also revealed was the news that Johnson himself had allegedly fixed a game during his senior season one year earlier. The good news for USD is that the story is quickly losing momentum, due in large part to the recent news that the 2011 team has largely been cleared of wrongdoing (Rancifer turned down the bribe from those attempting to fix the game) Repercussions from the 2010 game will ensue once the FBI is done investigating the entire case, and could involve recruiting sanctions or a postseason ban. Frankly, the Toreros are so deep in the throes of rebuilding that they might not enjoy any such postseason for the NCAA to ban in the first place. All told, this could have been much, much worse for USD. The true damage of the scandal is neither physical nor fiscal, but is still potentially very heavy. While it’s growing steadily, the WCC is not yet a national brand and one dominant negative story can define the WCC and USD for a large group of fans who aren’t very familiar with a non-power six league that’s on TV after they go bed. Show-stealing years from perennial contenders like Gonzaga and BYU, as well as postseason disruptiveness by the likes of St. Mary’s and Santa Clara, would be a good first step toward taking casual fans’ focus off of the scandal. Of course, if USD itself can somehow bounce back from a 6-24 record and win a few games they’re not supposed to, they just might turn themselves into national feel-good story.
