1. Coming off Saturday night’s loss at Oklahoma State the big concern out of Lawrence was not the Jayhawks’ loss, but instead was the health of Joel Embiid. Yesterday, Kansas announced that Embiid had reinjured his back and would miss the final two games of the regular season. Embiid could be back in time for the Big 12 Tournament, but with the Jayhawks’ final two games being against Texas Tech and West Virginia it would seem that the Jayhawks are locked into a #2 seed at worst. So while they could play Embiid in the Big 12 Tournament they have no need to do that so we would expect Embiid’s next game to be in the NCAA Tournament.
2. Normally we would make a big deal out of Roscoe Smith (11 points and 11 rebounds per game) missing Wednesday’s game against San Diego State after suffering a concussion on Saturday, but with UNLV unlikely to make the NCAA Tournament it probably doesn’t affect the big picture. On the other hand, the absence of Isaiah Zierden (3.2 points per game) usually would not merit mentioning here, but with the freshman being out indefinitely after injuring the medial collateral ligament in his right knee it could be a fairly significant blow to Creighton. Zierdan played sparingly at times this year, but has shown flashes of his potential with three double-digit games this season including a 13-point performance against Villanova on February 16.
3. Like many of you when we first read Mark Cuban‘s comments about how “hypocritical” the NCAA rules for one-and-done players were we were waiting for somebody to tear his argument apart. Mike DeCourcy was happy to oblige pointing out that it was the NBA that is in charge of the one-and-done situation. On some level we can understand Cuban’s logic that there is a better way to develop basketball ability than the current NCAA system he is going about it the wrong way. If he wants to make a change he needs to go to the other owners and the players association to make a change. On a selfish level, we would prefer that he opts to push for an age minimum of 21 years, but whatever option Cuban decides to pursue we hope he will do a little more homework in the future.
4. Last week on Twitter we mentioned how Doug Gottlieb had been widely criticized for ranking Kentucky #7 in his preseason poll, but looking back on it now it is clear that he ranked them too highly. We also referenced how wrong we were in our preseason rankings with only a handful of teams being +/- 3 spots of where they are now. Dan Hanner took a deeper look into which teams are exceeding or falling short of preseason expectations. Much of his analysis  focuses on his own predictions, but it does offer some interesting insight into polls overall as Hanner analyzes his own work.
5. We are still a couple of weeks away from what should be a Black Monday for college basketball coaches, but that did not stop Tennessee-Martin from firing Jason James after his fifth consecutive losing season. James, who was an assistant at Tennessee-Martin before taking over as the head coach, finished with a 37-117 record in his five seasons there. The school’s administration commended James for leading running the program with “the highest degree of integrity,” but in the end he simply did not win enough. Although this will make for a vacancy at the Division I level don’t count on a big-name assistant heading to the Ohio Valley Conference so we would guess this job will probably go to an internal candidate or someone who doesn’t have high-major aspirations.

nvr1983 (1398 Posts)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 4th, 2014 at 7:00 am by nvr1983 and is filed under morning 5, Regular Features. Tagged: isaiah zierden, jason james, joel embiid, mark cuban, roscoe smith. 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.