- Oregon will be without sophomores Dominic Artis and Ben Carter when they open the season against Georgetown in South Korea on Friday and likely for quite a while longer after the pair were suspended indefinitely for selling team-issued apparel. Both Artis and Carter have already admitted their “transgressions” and issued apologies. They did not go into details, but based on online reports it appears that they may have sold basketball shoes specifically designed for the team. Since we do not know how much apparel they sold (and how much it was valued at) we have no idea how long they will be out for, but the Ducks will certainly miss them as Artis averaged 8.5 points and 3.2 assists last season while Carter averaged 2.4 points and 2.3 rebounds per game, but was expected to contribute much more this year with the departure of Arsalan Kazemi and Tony Woods.
- As we mentioned in yesterday’s Morning Five, we are at the high point of preseason award season. Outside of our own All-American selections that were released yesterday, the USBWA also released its Oscar Robertson Trophy Preseason Watch List. The most intriguing part of the Robertson Watch List is the class breakdown with seven seniors in the group compared to zero juniors, four sophomores, and four freshmen. Once you look through the names it isn’t that surprising, but given the amount of hype around this year’s freshmen class it is useful to be reminded of the potential impact of the more experienced players still in college basketball.
- After a period of time when we only considered it news when a five-star recruit didn’t commit to play for Kentucky, the Wildcats have struggled (for them) to land many of their targeted recruits. Yesterday, their luck appears to have turned as Trey Lyles committed to Kentucky. Lyles, a 6’9” power forward out of Indiana, will join a class that already includes Karl Towns, Devin Booker, and Tyler Ulis and according to some is the top class in the nation with two top-10 recruits although it is still early in the recruiting season. Even if the Wildcats do not hold onto their #1 recruiting class ranking we figure they should be in pretty good shape next year as their two top incoming recruits are both post players and it seems likely that at least a few of their backcourt players will return next year.
- Speaking of Kentucky, Ken Pomeroy apparently had some time to kill with the gap between releasing his preseason computer rankings and the actual start of the season so he attempted to figure out how many Kentucky players would get drafted in the first round. The math behind Pomeroy’s analysis appears to be much less complex than his algorithm to come up with his rankings as he simply went back through DraftExpress’s archives and compared where a player was predicted to be drafted against where they actually were drafted. Essentially what Pomeroy comes up with is that the most likely scenario is that either four or five Kentucky players on this year’s roster get drafted in the first round of the 2014 or 2015 NBA Draft. If that is the case (and it doesn’t sound unreasonable) instead of the sometimes outlandish predictions we have seen, we would expect to see several highly touted Kentucky players return for next season too.
- Yesterday, ESPN released its schedule for its college basketball announcing teams. Outside of being mildly disappointed that it didn’t include Jeff Goodman on there, the most interesting part of the press release was how they left Bill Raftery’s seat with Jay Bilas and Sean McDonugh unfilled and the addition of Shannon Spake to the Saturday primetime crew. Also, as Awful Announcing pointed out the team of Beth Mowins and Kara Lawson might be the first all-female team to cover a men’s sport for a major network. Overall given the amount of change that happened with conference realignment the assignments are remarkably similar to what we have seen in the past.