1. There had been hope that Justin Anderson would return this weekend from a broken finger and help make Virginia a legitimate national title threat again (well as much as you can be with Kentucky this year). The Cavaliers still could end up making a run in the NCAA Tournament, but that task just got tougher as Anderson will be out for an undetermined period of time following an appendectomy on Thursday. Anderson, who had been averaging 13.4 points, 4.3 rebounds, and 2 assists per game prior to his injury, will probably miss at least part of the ACC Tournament with Virginia, but it is possible he could return for the NCAA Tournament particularly if Virginia makes it to the second weekend. The question for Virginia is what kind of shape Anderson will be in when he returns if they even make it that far.
2. Last week we linked to Luke Winn’s Power Rankings analyzing how the top teams stack up defensively. This week, Luke took a look at how they compare on offense. By this point in the year you know a decent amount about how these teams perform on offense and certainly to a much greater degree than you do about their defensive abilities, but there are still certain aspects of the offenses that Luke takes a look at that you probably missed. One example of this is for Virginia where he looks at where Anderson is most effective (ok, that might not be as relevant any more–see above) as well as how effective they are at getting put-backs ranking first in the nation in tempo-adjusted put-back scoring (still relevant even with Anderson out).
3. For years people have speculated about which teams were the “first four out”, but this year for the first time ever the NCAA will actually tell us by giving those teams #1 seeds in the NIT. We had assumed that this was usually the case but this is the first time that the NCAA will do so explicitly. The benefit for teams getting these #1 seeds is primarily that they get at least one more home game although we assume that they would have been highly seeded in the NIT under any seeding format.
4. The coaching carousel started on Wednesday with Liberty firing Dale Layer after an 8-24 season. Layer, who was 82-113 in six seasons at Liberty, led the Flames to the NCAA Tournament in 2013 with an automatic bid despite going 6-10 in the Big South regular season. Prior to his time at Liberty, he had served as the coach at Colorado State from 2000 to 2007. Given the relative anonymity of the position we suspect that this will probably be filled by a mid-major assistant or a retread since we can’t see a high-major assistant going here for his first job.
5. Indiana fans hoping for Brad Stevens a step in to save their failing program received some bad news yesterday and it wasn’t just that Stevens will never be coming to Bloomington. Athletic Director Fred Glass issued a statement in support of Tom Crean, which would seem to indicate that Crean’s job is safe for the time being. We are not going to call for Crean’s job like some columnists who don’t follow the sport and just write to get attention, but we do think that the coach of a top 10 program should be doing more than what Crean has done thus far. So although Glass may have voiced his support for Crean we wouldn’t be shocked if he looked at other big names if those names are put out there.

nvr1983 (1398 Posts)

This entry was posted on Friday, March 6th, 2015 at 6:45 am by nvr1983 and is filed under morning 5, Regular Features. Tagged: dale layer, indiana, justin anderson, liberty, tom crean, virginia. 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.