When UCLA knocked off Colorado at the Coors Events Center on Thursday night, there were pretty clearly five future pros on the court. Unfortunately, one of those five – Spencer Dinwiddie – was reduced to assistant coach, forced to the bench by an ACL torn on Sunday afternoon. Below, we’ll break down the games of all five of these guys, including Dinwiddie and his upcoming NBA decision.

Zach LaVine’s Athleticism And Shooting Accuracy Have Him In The Lottery Discussion

Zach LaVine, UCLA – While Joel Embiid has gone from a projected first-round pick in the preseason to now being in the discussion (if not atop the heap) for the first pick in the draft, it is UCLA’s freshman wing who has skyrocketed the furthest. While it was clear LaVine was talented, he’s gone from off the NBA radar to seemingly everybody’s pet pick as an NBA Lottery Pick, as soon as the 2014 Draft. Yeah, in a draft as loaded as this year’s, this guy has come out of nowhere to be mentioned right up there with stars like Marcus Smart and Willie Cauley-Stein and Aaron Gordon. And, it isn’t hard to see why. He’s got ridiculous athletic ability. He’s a 6’5” guy with some point guard past. And he is filling it up from deep this year, stroking 48.3 percent from three through Thursday night’s win at Colorado. He’s terrific running off a screen, catching a pass, squaring up and drilling a three; given his size and leaping ability, there are very few defenders who can challenge such a shot. And yeah, his jumper is nowhere near textbook, but he’s certainly knocking them down. All that said, his game still has plenty of room for improvement. His handle is weak; he doesn’t have much of a game off the bounce; he hasn’t shown the ability to go get his own; he doesn’t show much interest in defending; and at 6’5” and 180 pounds, he gets pushed around by a stiff breeze. But, consider that all of those issues are eminently fixable. And further consider that even without those things, to this point he’s been really impressive. I’ve been very slow to come around to the idea that he’s got lottery potential after his freshman season (in part because it is much more likely for players to patch up the blatant holes in their games while in college than in the NBA), but considering his upside, you can bet that – provided his production continues near this pace – there is some NBA GM who will promise him a lottery pick. In other words, UCLA fans, soak in all you can of LaVine over the next couple months, because this is it.

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Adam Butler (@pachoopsab) of Pachoops again will be joining us all year, providing us with his weekly take on our favorite conference, as we begin the March to Las Vegas.

I want to submit, if that’s possible, Nick Johnson’s name for National Player of the Year. It’s strange for me to say that – clearly not because I’m an Arizona fan – but because as someone who watches the game at a socially unacceptable level, I did not believe he would have the opportunity for such. Arizona’s system is such that I sincerely did not believe he’d have the touches or scoring veracity to garner such attention. I’ve long felt Derrick Williams’ season was an anomaly within Sean Miller’s style but a necessary “evil” for the success of the 2011 Wildcats. This season, however, Miller had constructed his perfect beast. A defense-oriented group that meshed together in such a way that it didn’t matter who scored but rather who stopped. And that would be predicated on a team effort. Thus, I was quick to believe that no one on Arizona’s roster would win any [honor] of the Year award. But we now find ourselves 18 games deep and Nick Johnson is – well – the best player on the best team in the country. Mark Titus agrees with Bill Walton on this front, and Sean Miller agrees with both of them. As do I.

Nick Johnson’s Surprising Candidacy For National Player Of The Year Earns Another Supporter

First, a little bit on Nick. Here’s a young man who arrived at Arizona as Miller’s most prized – or at least highly rated – recruit. At current pace, prized would indeed seem to be the right word in that the parallels to Sean Elliott seem obvious: local talent, first and greatest success under a new regime at Arizona, the face of the program, etc. I’m well ahead of myself but Johnson came to Tucson with his sights on big things. He was joining a Top 25 team as a part of the fourth-best recruiting class in the nation. Nick Johnson was meant for big things. But an elongated slump from Johnson and a generally underwhelming team chemistry kept his first Wildcats squad from amounting to much (which, when translated into Wildcat means: home loss to Bucknell in the first round of the NIT). Similarly, or at least to some extent, another late slump during his sophomore season would coincide with a 5-5 close to the season in which his field goal percentage dipped nearly 10 percentage points below his season average. Nick Johnson was good, but not there yet.

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1. We’re now two and a half weeks into conference play (my god, these seasons fly by don’t they) and California is inarguably the hottest team in the conference, out to a 4-0 start in league play with three of those wins coming on the road. And our friend Adam Butler of Pachoops.com points to senior big man Richard Solomon’s increased efficiency as a key for the Golden Bears’ emergence. He’s even got a pretty little chart correlating Solomon’s shots at the rim with his offensive efficiency over the past three seasons. And while Solomon is surely improved, some credit has to go to his fellow senior – point guard Justin Cobbs – for putting more emphasis on finding Solomon at the rim as opposed to his primary target last season, Allen Crabbe on the wing. Either way, there is more than enough credit to go around up in Berkeley (more evidence – check out John McLamb’s praise for the Cal bench in the comments section) and with Washington State on tap this weekend, and a road trip to USC next Wednesday, there is every reason to believe the Bears will be 6-0 when they play at UCLA next Sunday. Drool…
2. Across the bay, Stanford may be starting to play some good ball. After squeezing by Oregon in a well-played game last weekend, the Cardinal returned home and laid a hurting on an overmatched Washington State team on Wednesday night. Which is good, because that’s the type of thing this team should be doing. They had four guys in double-figures (with leading scorer Chasson Randle playing distributor) on their way to a 32-point win, but need to prove they’re capable of stringing together victories in the multiple before they’re really taken seriously. Nevertheless, they’ve found their way into NCAA Tournament conversations, sneaking into Joe Lunardi’s most recent bracket as one of the last four teams in.
3. Oregon and Oregon State will get it on Sunday afternoon while most of the rest of the country will be focusing in on an NFL Playoff game. But if you’re interested in excitement, minus all that pesky defense that just gets in the way, this might be your game. As Andrew Greif of The Oregonian points out, according to Sports-Reference.com (and we’ll have to take Greif’s word for this as I am not double-checking his facts), seven of the 20 worst Pac-12 defenders over the last four seasons will be playing in this game. Names like Jonathan Loyd, Roberto Nelson, Jason Calliste, Challe Barton and Angus Brandt are no surprise – Loyd’s height makes him a liability; the next three are completely uninterested in defense; and Brandt has all the mobility of a statue. But first and third on that bottom 20 list are OSU freshman Malcolm Duvivier and sophomore Langston Morris-Walker. This is a crime. Neither of those guys has any right to be on such a list unless they just aren’t trying. In which case, neither of those guys brings enough to the table offensively to deserve a crack at the court.
4. In advance of the bouncyball version of the Civil War, Craig Robinson took the time to offer some pointed comments regarding the current state of NCAA transfer rules. Robinson called the rules unfair to smaller schools and passive-aggressively commented about how he didn’t know how to “go out and poach guys when you really aren’t supposed to be able to talk to them.” Given Dana Altman’s success with transfers down the way in Eugene, clearly such comments can’t be taken as anything other than a direct reference to the Ducks. Altman, of course, defended his program, saying that all of the senior transfers who have wound up choosing Oregon have done so after those players had first initiated the contact with the school.
5. Lastly, Doug Haller’s Pac-12 Insider column at AZCentral.com is one of the best things covering the conference. This week, he looks at the opportunities for Arizona high school players Jaron Hopkins and Que Johnson to step up in place of injured starters, and also points out that Aaron Gordon, per hoop-math.com, leads the Pac-12 in putbacks. Want to know how dominant the Arizona front line is on the offensive glass? Gordon’s teammate Brandon Ashley is third in the conference with 23 himself. Put it this way (bonus analysis!): Gordon and Ashley between them have more putbacks than more than 160 Division I teams, including Utah (50), Stanford (46), Oregon State (43), and Arizona State (34). For what it’s worth, Kansas, a team with comparable size and athleticism to Arizona, has a total of 37 putbacks. For the entire team, the Wildcats have a total of 84 putbacks!

Believe it or not, we’re about halfway through the season right now. So, it is time to revisit our Best in the West rankings. We did this about a month back, but to remind you, here’s how we roll. We take all the schools west of the Rockies (and we’re going to be a bit generous with our geography – basically we’re looking at schools from the Pac-12, Mountain West, West Coast and Big West and then some of the schools from the Big Sky and WAC) and give you the top 20 teams. But, rather than just ranking schools #1 though #20, we’re going to divide all these teams up into tiers of similar quality. Below, you’ll see our Top 20 teams in the West (their overall rank will be in parentheses), with descriptions of what we think the teams in each tier have in common, plus brief comments on some of the teams in our list.

The Best of the Best – In a league of their own.

• Arizona (#1 overall, Pac-12 #1) – Not only are the Wildcats head and shoulders above the rest of the teams out West, the argument can be made that they’re on a tier of their own nationally as well.

Arizona Has Established Themselves As A Team Head and Shoulders Above The Rest. (Kevin Sapio, USA Today)

Contenders to the Throne – And all Top 25 teams.

• San Diego State (#2 overall, Mtn West #1) – Last time we did this, we had three teams in this tier, and the Aztecs were not among them. This time, the Aztecs are the only team aside from Arizona that should be considered a sure-fire Top 25 team.

Solid NCAA Tournament Team – Just outside the Top 25, but all with plenty of upside.

• California (#3 overall, Pac-12 #2) – These teams are all bunched together by just about any metric. While I think you can make a case for any one of them for something like the #24 or #25 spot in your national Top 25, you can make an equally valid case that all of these teams deserve to be on the outside looking in. That being said, it is likely that if you make a national top 35, every one of these squads should probably be in there. We’ll take the Golden Bears by a hair over the rest of this group on the basis of their hot streak minus a couple of key players, but really, all these teams are very tight.

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Last month we introduced our new project, which is centered around determining the top YouTube moment in Pac-12 basketball history. We continue the nomination portion with Oregon.

[ed note: These are just the top moments we could find on YouTube, which has a vast number and array of videos, but we won’t be able to cover the entire 99 years of the conference.]

1. After a dust-up last week where NBA scouts were complaining about the seats that UCLA gave them for the battle between the Bruins and Arizona, Draft Express did a poll of NBA scouts to see which schools treated them the best (i.e., gave them good seats and maybe a meal) and, perhaps unsurprisingly, UCLA was atop the heap of the schools that got negative comments. The whole article is really pointed at UCLA: You spend a ton of space in your media guides promoting your former players who are making it big at the next level, but you’re not rolling out the red carpet for the scouts and executive who determine the worth of the next round of NBA prospects. We’re not going to spend a ton of time on this, but doesn’t this whole thing seem a bit absurd? For instance, in some cases where the NBA scouts got seats that didn’t meet their needs, they had to (gasp!) ask  their multi-hundred-million dollar organizations to go onto StubHub and purchase them better tickets. The horror! Even at Arizona, which was among the schools most often mentioned as being good to NBA scouts, somebody had the temerity to complain about the price of the great seats they were given, prices which were likely considerably lower than the amount that could have been charged for those seats. In other words, forgive me if I don’t join this particular hunger strike.
2. We posted yesterday about the Spencer Dinwiddie injury (too long; didn’t read: it sucks), but that knee injury wasn’t the only one to befall a Colorado player in Seattle on Sunday. Freshman wing Tre’Shaun Fletcher also tweaked a knee in that game, and although he returned to action after the injury, it was later determined that this injury will require surgery, costing Fletcher the next six-to-eight weeks. While this injury is not an ACL injury, it is damaging to the team as Fletcher certainly would have been due for a bump in minutes without Dinwiddie in the lineup.
3. After ripping off 13 straight wins to start the season, Oregon is now riding a three-game losing streak, with a pair of those losses coming at home. Luckily, the Ducks now have a week where they can focus on just one game — their road trip to face Oregon State in Corvallis on Sunday. Confidence may be dipping, but head coach Dana Altman recalled the last time the Ducks went through a multi-game losing streak: the final two games of last season when they lost on the road to Colorado and Utah. What happened next? The Ducks went to Las Vegas, won the Pac-12 Tournament, and then advanced to the Sweet Sixteen. In other words, it would be very unwise to count out these Ducks in mid-January.
4. We’ve got another big intrastate rivalry game this week to check out as Arizona State travels to Arizona tonight. Herb Sendek was asked about trying to compete against a team that is recruiting on the elite level that the Wildcats are doing right now. And, not surprisingly, he called it a challenge, noting that what they’re doing is “absolutely astonishing” and “almost unprecedented.” Put it this way; as Adam Green of ArizonaSports.com notes, of the seven players in the rotation at Arizona, five were five-star recruits coming out of high school, while a sixth was a four-star recruit. By comparison, Jahii Carson is the only Sun Devils’ recruit to earn more than three stars coming out of high school.
5. Lastly, Utah drew rave reviews in its first weekend of conference play, taking Oregon to the wire on opening night before beating Oregon State. But last weekend on their first road trip to the Washington schools, their offense took a major step back. Tonight, as they host USC, goal number one for Larry Krystkowiak and company is to compete better on the offensive end of the court, including getting out in transition more often, something their Trojans’ opponents probably want as well. With talented offensive players like Delon Wright, Jordan Loveridge and Brandon Taylor, this shouldn’t be a problem.

Periodically throughout the next two months, the Pac-12 microsite will be taking a look at the league’s postseason outlook. We start today.

NCAA Tournament

• Arizona (#1 Seed): Arizona has been atop the national rankings for five consecutive weeks now, and while some dispute whether it should be the top overall seed, no one has the Wildcats below the one seed line right now. They currently boast quality wins against San Diego State, Duke, Michigan, Washington and UCLA, with four of those coming away from home. The Cats remain one of three unbeatens across the land and have another chance at a good win on Thursday against Arizona State.
• Colorado (#4-#6 Seed): The Buffaloes have a pair of top 10 victories going for themselves, but that’s about the only positive they have to look at right now. Head coach Tad Boyle lost his leading scorer for the remainder of the season and another member of his typical nine-deep rotation until mid-March all in 40 minutes at Washington on Sunday, so while the Buffs’ résumé currently looks in the #4-#6 seed range, anything better than a #7 come Selection Sunday would make Colorado fans very happy. Staying on that line instead of the #8 or #9 would be crucial if it hopes to advance through the opening weekend, as that’s the difference between say, Virginia and North Carolina in the opening round as well as avoiding a #1 seed in the second game.
• Oregon (#5-#7 Seed): Sure, Oregon is sliding hard and fast right now, but the Ducks will be fine so long as this three-game losing streak doesn’t go beyond that. The Ducks need to keep these losses in a vacuum, and while it will definitely be a black mark the rest of the way, wins at Washington and against UCLA back in Eugene could make this skid a distant memory by the first of February. They will need to shore up their defense some in order to remain in the upper half of the NCAA field. Oregon ranks 306th in the nation in points allowed per game, and finding a way to keep their opponents below 80 will be key.

Joseph Young Leads Oregon’s High-Flying Offense With 18.8 PPG, But The Ducks Need To Shore Up Their Defense In Order To Remain On The Eight Line Or Higher (AP)

• UCLA (#8-#10 Seed): The jury is largely still out on the Bruins, who have won 13 games but only one of which can be classified as a “quality victory.” With four of their final five games this month either against teams that are locked into the NCAAs or on the bubble, that can change in a hurry but they’ll need to be ready to take advantage of those opportunities every night out.
• California (Bubble IN): Going into conference play, California was typically a middle-of-the-road NIT team according to bracketologists around the country, and that was with some slack being cut since it had lost Ricky Kreklow and Jabari Bird for an extended period of time. Boy, what a difference two weeks can make. The Golden Bears have worked their way into the NCAA field, possibly as high as a #10 seed, thanks to three road wins to start Pac-12 play. With the three-game road trip now out of the way, and the fact they don’t leave the state of California again until February 12, things are definitely looking up for the Bears.
• Arizona State (Bubble OUT): The Sun Devils, like UCLA, have been tough to figure out so far. They only have one quality win, and while there is only one bad loss to their name, performances like the ones they put up against Creighton and Washington won’t be convincing anyone that they’re ready for the field of 68.  Read the rest of this entry »

Ever since Spencer Dinwiddie went down in a heap late in the first half Sunday afternoon and had to be carried by teammates from the floor; ever since we saw the normally stoic veteran guard team leader in tears; ever since head coach Tad Boyle confirmed our instinct to be very concerned by saying this was probably “not good”; we’ve all been careful to avoid speculation. We’ve seen before when injuries looked real bad at the time, but then upon closer inspection were not quite as horrible as feared. Still, in the back of our minds lingered three dreaded letters that we tried not to think, much less say, or write. Unfortunately on Monday Colorado’s worst fears were confirmed with those three letters: ACL. Done for the year. Surgery coming soon. Grueling minutes and hours and days and weeks and months of rehabilitation ahead. Unkind. Unfair. And plenty of well-deserved other curses that you’ll just have to imagine.

Spencer Dinwiddie’s ACL Injury Puts Him Out For The Season (Elaine Thompson, AP Photo)

This sucks, to use a technical term. It sucks when it happens to anyone. It sucks when it happens to some scrub down at the local gym having fun on the weekend. It sucks when it happens to Jernard Jarreau two minutes into the season. It sucks when it happens to Andy Brown four times before the young man is even 23 years old. And it sucks when it happens to a guy like Dinwiddie at the top of his game, a key player that his Colorado team has come to rely on, a guy who seemed to have an NBA future waiting as early as next season. That NBA future still awaits, as Dinwiddie is a gifted, skilled, hard-working and intelligent athlete who will no doubt put in the requisite blood, sweat and tears to come back from this fate, but damn, this still sucks.

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Out of the country? Living under a rock? Here’s what you missed in the ninth week of Pac-12 basketball. 

Power Rankings (as voted upon by Connor Pelton, Andrew Murawa and Adam Butler):

Arizona is once again the unanimous top choice this week, but every spot below the Wildcats saw more turmoil than usual. Check the results below.

It Was California Freshman Jordan Mathews’ Night At Matthew Knight On Thursday (Chris Pietsch/AP)

1. Arizona (17-0, 3 Points). Comment: “It seemed like there was just an overall lack of focus and too much hero ball going on early. Once everyone settled in and started moving the ball around, there was no way USC was able to get back into it, and Arizona asserted itself by finishing the game with a 25-10 run to win the game by 20.” – Jason Bartel (@jasonbartel)
2. California (12-4, 6 Points). Comment: “And so the Bears have won three straight conference road games by an average margin of eight points. Who saw that one coming? With three straight winnable games on the horizon, Cal has a sudden and unexpected opportunity to make some serious noise in the Pac-12.” – Nick Kranz (@GoldenBlogs)
3. UCLA (13-3, 10 Points). Comment: “UCLA enters the AP poll with a loss to Arizona.” – Adam Butler (@pachoopsab)
4. Colorado (14-3, 14 Points). Comment: “Damn. Dinwiddie news is terrible. Have a feeling Boyle will get this team to respond, but doubt they can make the second weekend now.” – Andrew Murawa (@AMurawa)
5. Washington (11-6, 18 Points). Comment: “Those who have complained about Romar’s offense definitely have been put to silence. The UW offense looks much improved in the second year of the high post system, as the Huskies have been using an array of screens and cuts to get Wilcox and the rest of the guards open.” – Erik Erickson (@Erik_Erickson)
6. Stanford (10-5, 19 Points). Comment: “Maybe we start a new segment in here that’s just called WHAT DOES THE STANFORD SAY? and then I just write or link to whatever I want and it’s wildly unpredictable and completely upsetting but you’re attracted to that instability by some unintelligible force that keeps telling you that they’ll change. Did I just describe my ex-girlfriend?” – Adam Butler (@pachoopsab)
7. Oregon (13-3, 21 Points). Comment: “Oregon could not capitalize on their golden opportunities to steal one from Stanford as their last two shots clanked off the rim; first Johnathan Loyd’s jumper and then a driving layup from Dominic Artis, allowing the Cardinal to escape with an 82-80 win.” – Jake Tabor (@JakeTabor541)
8. Arizona State (13-4, 22 Points). Comment: “The Sun Devils are in a tough spot going forward, too, as eight of their 14 remaining games come against Arizona, California, Colorado and Oregon. Herb Sendek’s crew has a fight on its hands just to get to .500 in the Pac-12.” – Matt Norlander and Jeff Borzello (@EyeOnCBB)
9. Oregon State (9-7, 25 Points). Comment: “The Beavers beat Stanford, 81-72! Great reward for a great week of practice. Really impressed by the team on both ends of the court.” – Connor Pelton (@ConnorPelton28) Read the rest of this entry »

Last month we introduced our new project, which is centered around determining the top YouTube moment in Pac-12 basketball history. We continue the nomination portion with Washington State.

[ed note: These are just the top moments we could find on YouTube, which has a vast number and array of videos, but we won’t be able to cover the entire 99 years of the conference.]

We open with this beauty of a game-saving block from forward D.J. Shelton. Down by one in the first game of the best-of-three CBI Championship series, Pittsburgh guard Tray Woodall caught the ball at midcourt with 3.5 seconds left on the clock. Woodall took two dribbles, drove into the lane, and attempted to throw in a reverse layup into the hoop as time expired. Only the ball never got there. Shelton bodied up the guard as he got into the paint, then swatted away the futile attempt with great force. A Panthers’ three-point attempt as time expired fell short, and the Cougars escaped with the 67-66 win.

Down one. Overtime. Two and a half seconds left. Senior Day. Against No. 14 Arizona State. That’s the scene for senior Taylor Rochestie, who then buried a three from southern Canada to spring the upset. This is what’s great about college hoops, and this is definitely the highlight of the Washington State options. Read the rest of this entry »