Fran McCaffery built Iowa from Big Ten bottom-feeder into NCAA tournament team in three years. The Hawkeyes have now reached the Big Dance in two straight seasons and blew out Davidson in their most recent appearance. The challenge this winter will be to replace three seniors, most notably first-team all-Big Ten selection Aaron White. Repeating last year’s 12-6 conference record will probably be difficult with White, Josh Oglesby and Gabriel Olaseni all gone. While Iowa may be a notch below a slew of teams with legitimate Big Ten title aspirations, it’s still a threat in the league that shouldn’t be taken lightly. Here’s the recipe for Iowa to reach March Madness without its superstar, White.

Iowa seniors (from left) Jared Uthoff, Adam Woodbury and Mike Gesell will be a major part of the team’s core this year after the loss of Aaron White. (Photo: AP)

• An experienced, talented frontcourt: White is gone, but Jared Uthoff became a star playing next to him and earned a third-team all-conference selection last year. Now, the former Wisconsin forward is ready to be the go-to scorer. Last season, he shot a higher percentage from three than White (37.2 to White’s 35.6), tied for the team lead in blocks per game (1.6) and turned the ball over a minuscule 10 percent of the time. Frontcourt running mate Adam Woodbury may not score a lot, but the 7-footer is a tough defender who cleans up on the glass well (5.2 rebounds per game in just 20.5 minutes in 2014-15). Junior college transfer Dale Jones will provide depth off the bench, filling the role that Olaseni did last season.

Read the rest of this entry »

Thad Matta’s entire career can be summed up in one word — winner. Think of it this way: The 48-year old has won at least 20 games in each of his 15 seasons as a head coach. He’s missed the NCAA tournament only twice, and he ended up as the NIT champion in one of those two years. In the other year — his first season at Ohio State — he took over a team that finished below .500 in Big Ten play and was ineligible for the 2005 postseason and led it to a 20-12 record that included an upset of top-ranked and then-undefeated Illinois on the regular season’s final weekend. Doubt him if you dare.

Thad Matta is a proven winner, but leading a freshmen and sophomore-laden team through the Big Ten is a tough task. (USA TODAY Sports)

While Matta has proven his knack for winning year in and year out, he has a big challenge ahead of him this season. He’s got plenty of talent but not much experience on this year’s team. Seven of Ohio State’s scholarship players have never played a minute of college basketball in Columbus; six are freshmen; one is a junior. There are no seniors. Departed players from last year’s Round of 32 squad accounted for 65 percent of the scoring, 87 percent of the assists and 61 percent of the rebounding. The bottom line is that Matta will have to rely on a group of freshmen and sophomores to replace star guard D’Angelo Russell and four seniors.

Russell is the glaring loss. The wunderkind freshman accounted for 26 percent of the team’s scoring, took 26 percent of the shots and logged a usage rate of 30.2 percent, per KenPom. He was the go-to scorer for a team that didn’t have a consistent second scoring option and really hasn’t since the Jared Sullinger/William Buford days. The good news for Ohio State is that beside Russell (and Shannon Scott’s terrific on-ball defense), no one else did anything completely irreplaceable. No other player averaged more than 10.2 points per game and no departing player had a usage rate higher than Scott’s 21 percent, a relatively average rate. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the course of two seasons at Nebraska, Terran Petteway established himself as one of the Big Ten’s best scorers. His 18.1 points per game led the league in 2013-14, and only Wisconsin’s Frank Kaminsky (1,308) and Penn State’s D.J. Newbill (1,262) outpaced Petteway’s 1,143 points in the last two years. For a Nebraska team coming off a very disappointing 13-18 season (including a 5-13 mark in the Big Ten), head coach Tim Miles’ task of finding a suitable replacement isn’t easy. But here’s the twist: Nebraska’s offense might be better without him.

Terran Petteway could score, but his below-average efficiency numbers hurt Nebraska’s offense. (Bruce Thorson/USA TODAY Sports)

Petteway shot only 39.6 percent from the floor and 31.3 percent from three last season. His 217 three-point attempts tied him for most in the Big Ten and represented 46.6 percent of his total field goal attempts. Four of the Big Ten’s top 12 scorers had three-point attempts account for at higher percentage of their total field goal attempts than Petteway, but the lowest three-point percentage among that group was 36.6 percent (Travis Trice), a full 5.3 percent higher. The other three came in at 38.7 percent (James Blackmon Jr.), 40.8 percent (Yogi Ferrell) and 41.8 percent (Denzel Valentine) — all considerably better than Petteway.

The junior also posted a 94.8 offensive rating last season, good for fourth on his own team but also the second-lowest offensive rating among the 47 players who averaged at least 18 points per game. To his credit, he posted a solid 22.4 percent assist rate, drew 5.7 fouls per 40 minutes, and got to the free throw line nearly six times per contest. But his usage rate was 32.3 percent, an alarmingly high number for a player who doesn’t shoot the ball very well. Petteway’s high number of low-percentage shots manifested in him leading the Big Ten in missed three-pointers with 149. All of these statistics amount to a single conclusion: Petteway may have scored a lot of points, but he wasn’t a very efficient scorer.

Read the rest of this entry »