1. Arizona head coach Sean Miller is excited about the Pac-12 Tournament changing venues from Los Angeles’ Staples Center to the MGM Grand in Las Vegas this year. After 11 years in downtown LA drawing less than stellar crowds, the Pac-12 has moved the location of its postseason tournament. Miller pointed out that Las Vegas isn’t necessarily a prime destination for sporting events, but with the first basketball games ever to be played at the MGM Grand, it should be quite a compelling four days starting tonight.
2. Oregon had one of its better practices in a while Tuesday before taking off for Vegas and senior leader E.J. Singler noted that the unexpected weekend losses to Colorado and Utah are behind the Ducks. Dana Altman and his team have had time to take in the losses, and they know that they have a big weekend ahead of them. Oregon won’t play until Thursday as they are the #3 seed and have a first-round bye. They will take on the winner of the Washington-Washington State game, but Altman did not reveal if Dominic Artis, who has been slowly getting back into games after a foot injury, would start in that contest.
3. Colorado also didn’t end its season on the brightest note by getting upset at home against Oregon State, but the Buffaloes will be able to make up for that right away as they draw the Beavers again later today in their first game in the Pac-12 Tournament. Colorado’s first team all-Pac-12 star, Spencer Dinwiddie, said that the Buffs’ loss on Senior Day wasn’t an emotional letdown, but rather just a lack of execution. In that loss, however, they were without Pac-12 Defensive Player of the Year Andre Roberson. The nation’s leading rebounder will be critical for Colorado to have available in Las Vegas and Tad Boyle expects him to be back and starting today.
4. Lorenzo Romar says Washington‘s struggles this year fall on him. Romar expected his team to play better than it has this season, but the Huskies just never managed to do so. Injuries early in the year hurt Washington, and they never seemed to recover. Although Romar is taking the blame, the season isn’t over. His team squares off with its intrastate rival Washington State today in the first round of the Pac-12 Tournament. With a win, the Huskies would then play Oregon, who they have already lost closely to twice this year. Stealing an automatic bid isn’t easy, but with the depth and shooting ability that Washington possesses, it isn’t out of the question. Plus, Romar’s teams have had a great recent history in this event.
5. After Arizona State‘s late-season struggles, the Sun Devils understand what they have to do to make the NCAA Tournament: Win four games in four days. It’s not out of the question for the Sun Devils, as Colorado did it last year, but ASU isn’t using that team as motivation. Jahii Carson says his team is instead looking at the 2011 Connecticut team that won five games and five days in the Big East Tournament as inspiration. To start off a possible miraculous run, the Sun Devils will need to beat Stanford tonight. They’ll be looking to get revenge as they lost at home to Stanford earlier in the year and if want to have different results, Herb Sendek’s team  will need to better contain Dwight Powell, who had 22 points and 1o rebounds the last time these two teams played.

1. Following UCLA’s terrible performance Wednesday night against Washington State, it looked like the Bruins had tossed away their chance to win the outright Pac-12 regular season title. But with a solid win over Washington on Saturday coupled with Utah upsetting Oregon, the Bruins went down as the Pac-12 champion for the first time since 2007-08. Following the game, the team assembled in the hallway at Hec Edmundson Pavilion, borrowed Washington’s 2011-12 conference championship trophy and staged their own impromptu celebration. While the team still has plenty of goals left to chase, for a day at least, expectations have been met and the criticism can maybe not cease, but at least pause.
2. In advance of this week’s conference tournament, there is a chance that USC, already an underdog, could be playing shorthanded due to a case of late-season stupidity. There are reports out of Spokane that following USC’s Saturday night blowout loss to Washington State, “several basketball players” were “shouting anti-Spokane rhetoric” (which may well be my favorite phrase of the season) outside of a downtown bar. Fights (at least two) ensued and the end result was four people getting sent to the hospital. No names of players involved have been released as of Midnight on Sunday, but there are reports of a seven-foot, 260-pound center (there are three different USC players who could fit that general description) looking drunk and belligerent and who, according to the reports of an employee of one of the bars in the area, “basically admitted to hitting several people, including two women.” Stay tuned.
3. Colorado’s conference tournament will start off with a rematch, as they’ll face a last-place Oregon State team that just beat up on them on Saturday. But prior to that game, Tad Boyle will make sure his Buffaloes show up in Las Vegas with something to prove. With Andre Roberson apparently in a battle with mononucleosis which may well end his season, Colorado is going to have to find somebody else to step up and lead this team as tournament play begins. Another point to think about: If the selection committee is going to make choices based on their current rosters, could CU get dinged and perhaps left to the NIT if Roberson’s season is in jeopardy?
4. If Colorado can get out of that first round game with Oregon State, who will be waiting for them in the quarterfinals but their new-found rival, Arizona. The Wildcats slipped all the way to the fourth seed in this week’s Pac-12 Tournament in Vegas and we could be due for a tiebreaker. After January’s infamous Sabatino Chen monitor-reviewed shot, Colorado bounced back to easily handle the Wildcats in Boulder, but heading into the most important stretch of the season, neither team is playing particularly well.
5. Later today, we’ll unveil our Pac-12 awards, just as the conference will. But if you want a preview as to what those awards might look like, Peter Yoon of ESPN LA has your rundown. He’s got Allen Crabbe sneaking out the Player of the Year award over Shabazz Muhammad and Jahii Carson, Dana Altman taking down Coach of the Year over Ben Howland and Mike Montgomery and Muhammad squeaking out a win over Carson for Freshman of the Year. Plenty of discussions could be have over all of these picks (and the rest of the picks Yoon makes), as none of the candidates are clear winners in any of the categories.

In advance of Arizona’s senior day, Adam Butler of Pachoops.com offers up his thoughts on Arizona’s three big-time seniors getting ready to play their final home game in front of the McKale Center crowd.

I’ll never forget the first time I saw Kevin Parrom play. It was mid-December 2009 and the young New Yorker was tentatively back from a foot injury sustained during preseason practice. He’d played just two minutes in the game prior – his season debut – at NC State. There was significant hype around this one; after all, he was touted as the player Sean Miller had been recruiting the longest who had been released from his Letter of Intent to play for him at Xavier. He followed Miller to the desert and became the first Wildcat in the Sean Miller era. Back to the game, many of the details are fuzzy. I can tell you that I’d finagled phenomenal seats and that the final score was a helluva lot to a little. Jimmer Fredette scored many points and my lasting Parrom memory – one of two memories from this game – was his missing of a banked free throw. He’d go 0-of-5 from the line that night. “Indeed a freshman,” I thought. Oh, and my second memory? The four rounds of projectile vomiting I spread through multiple locations across the McKale Center as a result of a bad – nay, miserable – pastrami sandwich from earlier that day. I’d spend the following 36 hours consumption-less, motionless in bed.

Kevin Parrom Has Helped Bring A Helping Of Toughness To Sean Miller’s Program

OK, so enough about me. Kevin Parrom has lived a life of resiliency. This is the young man that has thrice sustained foot injuries that have kept him out of the lineup for extended periods. That’s rough. But it doesn’t hold a candle to Kevin off the court. The Cliff Notes version will have me tell you that in the course of just a handful of months, Kevin lost his grandmother and mother and survived a murder attempt – a  moment he’s reminded of every day with the bullet lodged in his leg. I can’t do the story its due tragic justice, so please, read this. These events were more than a curve ball. They were a Mariano cutter dealt to break this young man. But it didn’t. Kevin Parrom is still here and he plays basketball for Arizona and he plays it well. His style is a direct extension of his coach: thorough, hard nosed, direct, and competitive. An even more direct extension of the woman who raised him, Lisa Williams. Which is the backstory to one of the toughest Wildcats we’ve ever had the privilege to watch; the off court resilience just confirming the player who won’t quit on it. Parrom has played any and every role for the Wildcats, most recently being moved into the starting lineup to better capture the energy he plays with. He’s been the spark Arizona needed on countless nights and is a basketball enthusiast’s dream. One might call him a jack-of-all-trades, master of none; to which I might not argue (although he holds the 34^th highest ORtg in the nation). But he’s master of knowing which trade his team needs most and when, an asset any coach would want. Whatever Parrom’s legacy is, he’ll be remembered for his guts and his heart. What more could we have asked for from our first – new – Wildcat?

Read the rest of this entry »

From the moment it was first rumored, the relocation of the conference tournament to Las Vegas has created quite a buzz among Pac-12 basketball fans. Adam Butler (@pachoopsAB) of PacHoops will be here every week as he offers his unique perspective along our March to Vegas.

We set out on this march to get to Vegas to determine a champion. From our armchairs or the stands, we’ve watched and discussed and texted and blogged and done it all over again trying to determine the ins and outs of what’s proven to be quite the march. And if you’ll recall, it all began with Sabatino Chen’s shot. The one where he was frantically trying to not dribble out the clock of a tie game, the ball with him despite having connected on just a handful of career shots, let alone threes. He heaved the ball, right over Kevin Parrom’s outstretched arm – our eyes collectively following its trajectory, our breaths collectively held. Glass. Nylon. The officials would then see something on their monitor replays that perhaps the rest of us did not.

A Season That Started With This Suspense Has Seen Many Surprising Stories.

Which is not unlike the fact that none of us saw Oregon making a run through Pac-12 play as the wire-to-wire conference leader. Projected to finish seventh, the Ducks have spent all of, what, one day not in first place? They’ve received POY-worthy efforts from Arsalan Kazemi and COY-worthy leadership from Dana Altman. Again, if we’re looking into our own monitors, we probably wouldn’t have seen this or even E.J. Singler hitting a season-long shooting slump or Dominic Artis’ MVP value. We also would have missed Arizona’s late season implosion – perhaps a bit steep of a word – but this is a team that was once 14-0 and ranked third among more than 340 D-I teams. Today they’re not third in their own 12-team conference. Never saw that coming. Or that the Wildcats’ own vaunted class of bigs would average just 6.4 PPG and 4.9 RPG.

Read the rest of this entry »

We are down to the final week of our season-long Pac-12 Pick’em contest, with both Adam and Parker holding a slight lead over Drew and me. Yesterday’s results are included in the standings, and Drew and I took advantage of the upsets with Stanford and Washington pulling out wins. With just eight games remaining, Drew needs to make up two games on the leaders and I need three. Oregon’s visit to Colorado and Indiana’s meeting with Michigan headline the list as our games of the week.

The only difference between the co-leaders right now comes in UCLA’s visit to Seattle, where Parker takes the visiting Bruins and Adam has host Washington. Drew is unable to tie Adam since they only differ on one pick, but I could catch all three if everyone swings my way in the coming days. That would mean a road upset from Oregon would be needed, along with a UW win over UCLA and a USC loss in Pullman. If two or more competitors are tied at the top after Sunday’s action, we will have a Pac-12 Tournament pool to determine the winner.

1. Stanford and California met last night in the regular season finale for both teams, and Stanford surprised all with a 13-point road upset of the Golden Bears. The Cardinal outplayed Cal on both sides of the floor, but shooting the ball at a 53% clip from behind the arc is what got it done for Stanford. With 5:05 remaining, a massive skirmish that took over 20 minutes to sort out took place. At the end of it all, players Gabriel Harris and Richard Solomon were both ejected, while four Stanford assistant coaches and one California assistant coach were tossed as well. The Pac-12 has yet to announce any additional punishment.
2. Arizona combo guard Mark Lyons will play his final game in Tucson on Saturday, and there are mixed feelings about it among Wildcat fans. On one hand, Lyons has been Arizona’s leading scorer, confidence-provider, and has hit the game-winning shots against Florida and San Diego State. But the fact that he is not a true point guard is irksome to many, with those folks yearning for the day when T.J. McConnell takes over in the UA backcourt. They will have to wait a few more weeks, however, as Lyons looks to lead the Cats through Las Vegas and all the way to Atlanta by the beginning of April. True point guard or not.
3. Sticking in the desert, Wednesday night saw each of the three favorites in Pac-12 games helping Arizona’s case immensely to avoid playing on Wednesday in Las Vegas. The Wildcats can secure a four-seed (and a bye to Thursday) with a win over Arizona State or a Colorado loss to Oregon or Oregon State. If the opposite of all of that occurs, then UA slides down to a five-seed and would face the 12-seed in the opening round on Wednesday.
4. With just two games left in the Pac-12’s regular season, Oregon is right where it wants to be — in control of its own destiny. The Ducks sit at 12-4 and alone in first place right now, but UCLA is lurking a half-game behind them. If the Ducks drop both games this week, UCLA wins at Washington, and Arizona defeats Arizona State, mass chaos would ensue with a four-way tie atop the standings. With the Ducks facing Utah on Saturday, however, that scenario is most likely not going to happen.
5. With rumors circling regarding the future of Washington State head coach Ken Bone, the Cougars got their biggest win of the season on Wednesday, a 73-61 home upset of UCLA. WSU had lost seven straight games and was alone in last place coming into the game, and with attendance plummeting, morale around the hoops program was low. This indeed may have been a job-saving win for Bone, the fourth-year coach from Portland State.

Congratulations to UCLA, who used a terrific sweep of the Arizona schools last week to climb atop our latest Pac-12 power rankings. Oregon follows closely behind, using the return of point guard Dominic Artis to boost itself in a rivalry win against Oregon State. California comes in as a unanimous pick at the three spot. The Golden Bears won their sixth and seventh straight games last week, dominating Utah and Colorado for nearly identical 18- and 16-point victories. Colorado, Arizona, and USC make up the second tier of our rankings. The Buffaloes earned an at-large clinching split in the Bay Area, while Arizona fell hard in two games in Los Angeles. USC continued to make its case for an NIT berth as the Trojans earned back-to-back upset wins over the Wildcats and Sun Devils. Arizona State, Washington, Stanford, Oregon State, Utah, and Washington State round out the remainder of the rankings.

• Free-falling Cats. Arizona is not in a good place as we head into Championship Week and Selection Sunday. Despite its 23 victories, Arizona has dropped its last two games and fallen to fifth in this week’s rankings. They are also on the five seed line in most bracket projections, but if they close out the season with a thud, a six seed would likely be in the Wildcats’ future. That would mean a Third Round matchup with a team like Kansas State or Michigan State, something Sean Miller and company desperately would like to avoid. To do that they’ll need a Territorial Cup sweep of Arizona State and a quarterfinal P-12 Tourney win in Las Vegas.
• Rising Trojans. Fighting for their coach’s job and a backdoor bid to the NIT, USC has been playing some good hoops as of late. Eric Wise has been a force down low the past couple of weeks and he makes a great half of a one-two punch with guard Byron Wesley coming off the bench. A road sweep of the Washington schools would do the trick, but with that not likely to happen, they’ll need a win in the first round of the Pac-12 Tourney.

1. So, yeah, quickly, the top candidates for the head basketball coach at USC: something like Pittsburgh head coach Jamie Dixon, Syracuse assistant Mike Hopkins, interim head coach Bob Cantu and, um, former USC head coach Tim Floyd? Wait, run that last one by me again. Floyd is currently the head man at UTEP, a position he’s held for a few years after resigning from the USC gig (something about how he didn’t feel supported by then-USC athletic director Mike Garrett in the wake of allegations that guard O.J. Mayo accepted impermissible benefits from an agent). Floyd has long maintained a complete lack of involvement in the issue and plenty of investigations (both by USC and by the NCAA) have failed to turn up any evidence of wrongdoing on his part. Still, let’s not consider Floyd a leading candidate just yet. The meeting between Floyd and now-athletic director Pat Haden may have just been a way for the new AD to build a bridge over the bad blood in the wake of the parting, and Floyd, for his part, is using the surprising news as a way to get the word out publicly that “hey, I didn’t have anything to do with that.” Still, for a stretch there, Floyd put together four straight winning seasons including three in a row with 20-plus wins and NCAA Tournament invitations, including a Sweet Sixteen appearance.
2. Across town, UCLA head coach Ben Howland let it slip, rather innocently and honestly, that Shabazz Muhammad was in all likelihood headed for the NBA Draft. And that’s not the only opinion he has on the state of the NBA, as he mentioned on Monday that he would prefer changes to the NBA’s eligibility rules that would end the one-and-done era. Howland’s plan would be similar to the rules presently used by Major League Baseball, whereby players would have the option to go straight from high school to the pros, but that once they wind up in college, they have to stay for a few years before being eligible again. Howland also knows that there’s not a chance that change gets made, at least anytime soon.
3. Speaking of the NBA Draft, we posted our opinions here yesterday on the draft prospects of potential early entrants around the Pac-12, including Arizona State freshman guard Jahii Carson (we’re hoping he stays and develops a jumper). But Sun Devil head coach Herb Sendek claims that he hasn’t given the idea much thought, preferring instead to focus on this season. Still, we’re not buying the idea that it hasn’t even crossed his mind. Cal’s head coach, Mike Montgomery, however, was right to the point when asked about Carson’s pro prospects: “Doesn’t shoot it well enough yet.” The key there may be the word “yet.”
4. If Carson does stick around for another season in the desert, he’ll have a new competitor in the state at point guard, as Arizona will unveil Duquesne transfer T.J. McConnell as their new lead guard. The Daily Wildcat sees a parallel between McConnell’s skill set and the skills of UCLA point guard Larry Drew II. Compared to present UA point Mark Lyons, McConnell is more of the traditional pass-first, shoot-second floor general (of course, compared to Lyons, Allen Iverson is more of a traditional point guard). As Wildcat fans begin to grow weary of Lyons’ all-or-nothing style, the future is starting to look real good, even if that envisioned future is based on little more than partial information.
5. Lastly, as we look ahead to this week’s games, Washington may be out of the race for the conference title but it still has a chance for some input, as the Huskies will host UCLA on Saturday night. Head coach Lorenzo Romar is hoping that his team can finish the regular season in style. They’ve put together a 13-3 record in the final four conference games of the previous four seasons, and are well on their way to a repeat of that mark with two wins last week. But with USC and UCLA both playing well, the Huskies have their work cut out for them this week.

1. Championship Week Fortnight begins today, and the Pac-12 Tournament is right around the corner as well. This year’s tournament promises to be one of the more crazy ones in history, as any team seeded one through nine has the talent and potential to take the conference’s automatic bid. Washington is going to need that aut0-bid in order to go dancing, and rising fifth-year senior Scott Suggs looks to be an integral part of that run. The shooting guard had a streak going in February in which he only scored four points per game for four out of five games, but starting back on February 23 against Arizona State, Suggs found his stroke and no longer appeared lost within the Husky offense. He went for 16 points against the Sun Devils and for 23 points eight days later in the hardwood Apple Cup. If he can continue this kind of output through the next two weeks, the combination of he and C.J. Wilcox will make the eighth-seeded Dawgs a tough out.
   
2. As we teased yesterday, Oregon State and Nike unveiled the results of a nearly two-year long re-branding of the Beaver program. The changes to the basketball uniforms were positive but minimal, as you can see here. The Beavers now have an all-white uniform in their repertoire and have the option of having “OSU” across the front of the jersey. The shorts are simple and clean-looking, with the new logo featured on the bottom side. The back of the tops are what I think is the highlight of the whole thing, as a basketball net and “ghost beaver” logo run from top-to-bottom. Even outside of basketball, a general change for all sports uniforms is the addition of metallic bronze as an accent color. The football uniforms were the highlight of the event, and I’ll leave you with those pictures here.
3. Even if Arizona did not find a true point guard, the addition of Mark Lyons was a good one, and the right idea at the time by Arizona head coach Sean Miller. The Wildcats are in desperate need of a true point who can break down a defense and be a “pass-first, shoot-second” type of player, but that’s just not going to work with Lyons. So, UA fans will take what they can get at this point in the season. Right now, that’s a team full of shooters, and if that’s what can take them to the Sweet Sixteen and beyond, so be it.
4. California is 9-1 since it was thoroughly outplayed on a late January afternoon in Boulder. At that point in the season, the Golden Bears were playing with no heart or hustle, sported a middling 11-8 record, and were on the outside looking in for an NIT bid. But there has been a remarkable turnaround, one that will likely result in Cal’s second straight NCAA bid, as Mike Montgomery has done some of his finest work as a head coach to get them to this point. California closes out the regular season with a visit from rival Stanford on Wednesday night, where the Bears will go for their eighth straight victory.
5. UCLA may not need a Pac-12 Tournament championship to make the NCAA Tournament, but like Washington, the Bruins could use a big boost from junior forward Travis Wear in the coming weeks. Wear is still plagued by a right foot injury that sidelined him for two games stretching back to February 24, and coach Ben Howland is having to make up for his absences on the floor by playing brother David Wear for nearly the whole contest, or placing rarely-used Tony Parker in the game when Wear needs rest. The return of Travis Wear in a full capacity will be crucial for the Bruins, as it would be nearly impossible to win three games in three days without his big body on the court.

Despite dropping a game at Minnesota last week, Indiana remains the #1 team in the RTC25 for the fourth straight week. In fact, Indiana was the clear choice for the top spot by garnering six #1 votes and three #2 votes. Duke and Gonzaga both follow the Hoosiers, but their average rank was 4.00 compared to Indiana’s 1.33, showing just how confident RTC voters were in picking the Hoosiers. Interesting to note that #4 Louisville also picked up a first place vote, and the argument can certainly be made that they deserve more consideration as the #1 team. Since losing three straight in late January, the Cardinals are 8-1 with their lone loss coming in five overtimes at Notre Dame. Further down in the RTC25, North Carolina finally makes a return tied at #23. The Heels were ranked #14 in the preseason poll, but have been unranked ever since Week Three. Winners of its last five games, North Carolina is playing their best ball of the season.

More good stuff with the Quick n’ Dirty after the jump…

Quick n’ Dirty Analysis.

Read the rest of this entry »