Joe Alexander – Rush The Court

Stanford’s NIT Title: So What?

AMurawa — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 16:11:53 +0000

On Thursday night, Stanford earned the right to be one of the handful of teams in Division I basketball to end its season with a win, storming to a 24-point win over Minnesota in the NIT Final. While plenty of people will write that off (with some reason) as just showing that the Cardinal are the 69th best team in college hoops, what exactly does the win mean for Johnny Dawkins and his budding program?

Stanford Took Home The NIT Title, But What Does It Mean For Next Year? (Frank Franklin II/AP Photo)

Conventional wisdom says that an NIT win [...]

Final Four Game Analysis

rtmsf — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 00:31:36 +0000

RTC will break down the Final Four games using our best analytical efforts to understand these teams, the matchups and their individual strengths and weaknesses. Our hope is that you’ll let us know in the comments where you agree, disagree or otherwise think we’ve lost our collective minds. Here are Saturday evening’s national semifinals…aka…THE FINAL FOUR!

6:07 pm – #5 Michigan State vs. #5 Butler The winner of this game will have a built-in motivational mechanism, since this game is popularly considered the “Who will lose to West Virginia or Duke on Monday?” game. Best be careful, [...]

Set Your Tivos: 01.06.09

nvr1983 — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 12:15:44 +0000

With most conference schedules starting to get into full swing, I thought I would start doing Set Your Tivos daily with a weekend edition to cover the games on Saturday and Sunday.

7 PM – #5 UConn at #22 West Virginia on ESPNU: Just another night in the Big East for the Huskies, who responded to last week’s loss to Georgetown with a 80-49 beatdown over an exhausted Rutgers team. Tonight, Jim Calhoun’s Huskies go to Morgantown, WV to face Bob Huggins and the Mountaineers. Joe Alexander is gone, but Alex Ruoff and Da’Sean Butler have stepped up to fill the [...]

2008-09 Conference Primers: #1 – Big East

rtmsf — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 06:13:27 +0000

Rob Dauster of Ballin is a Habit is the RTC correspondent for the Big East Conference.

Predicted Order of Finish (from the coach’s pre-season poll, released at Big East media day):

Connecticut (9) Louisville (3) Pitt (3) Notre Dame (1) Villanova Marquette Georgetown Syracuse West Virginia Providence Cincinnati Rutgers Seton Hall St john’s DePaul South Florida

WYN2K. You hear that? You know what that is? That’s the sound of RTC stealing my thunder. I’m not much of a statistician myself, but just by looking at that pre-season poll I can tell you this – the Big East is loaded. If you live outside of Big East country, then you are probably sick of hearing about how good [...]

2008 NBA Draft Live Blog

nvr1983 — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 21:36:39 +0000

Well this is sort of unplanned, but rtmsf asked me to do this and I’ve got nothing else to do tonight so I figured I would throw up a live blog of the events.

7:30 PM: Everybody’s favorite commissioner/megalomanic David Stern walks to the stage. Pretty weak response from the crowd. Minimal booing and almost no response to a mention of the WNBA. I think Isiah and Dolan have broken the New York fans.

7:38 PM: Stern announces the Bulls’ selection of Derrick Rose. Kind of anti-climatic, but surprising how quickly the consensus swung from Michael Beasley to Rose in such a [...]

DJ Augustin Has Little Wee Arms

rtmsf — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 18:59:53 +0000

Apologies in advance for the small text on the table below. You can see the entire cache of numbers here on a document we saved at Google Docs (fully sortable). Alternatively, check the list (also sortable) over at DraftExpress, who we owe our eternal thanks to for providing these initial numbers.

So what we’ve done here is color code highlight the best five (light green) and worst five (beige) performances in each category. For basketball purposes, we’re assuming that height, weight and length are good things, body fat is a bad thing, and athletic ability in terms of vertical jump, agility and sprint [...]

05.27.08 Fast Breaks

rtmsf — Wed, 28 May 2008 03:29:19 +0000

Some post-Memorial Day items of interest…

Former Georgetown guard Jeremiah Rivers will transfer to Indiana (perhaps he sees immediate PT awaiting in 2009-10?). Who’s coming back? Memphis guard Antonio Anderson, Marquette guard Jerel McNeal and Alabama guard Alonzo Gee declared their intentions to return to school, ensuring that Memphis will have at least one starter back from its national runner-up team. One intriguing name who is still undecided, WVU’s Joe Alexander, described his daily routine in Vegas getting ready for the pre-draft camp. Speaking of which, the Orlando Pre-Draft Camp begins tomorrow. Here is the list of players invited. Frank Burlison at Scout.com has [...]

NBA Draft Preview Version 1.0

nvr1983 — Mon, 19 May 2008 14:38:12 +0000

Lost in the huge O.J. Mayo scandal and the smaller Darrell Arthur scandal is the upcoming NBA Draft, which is a little over 1 month away. Unlike last year, where there was a ton of hype regarding the Draft Lottery (Note: This may have just been because I live in Boston), the day has snuck up on us. I just noticed that it would be happening on May 20th in contrast to last year where I had the time of the lottery programmed into my Treo by mid-March (thanks to an 18-game losing streak). Teams that failed to make the playoffs [...]

04.09.08 Fast Breaks

rtmsf — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 21:52:01 +0000

More declarations of independence from the shackles of college today…

West Virginia’s superhero Joe Alexander will test his draft status but will not sign with an agent Syracuse forward Donte Greene (18/7) will also make himself available for the draft Texas A&M’s DeAndre Jordan, who averaged all of 8/6 this year – but hey, you can’t teach size goes the saying, and he’s a legit 7’0 – will also test the waters to see where he stands

Elite 8 Preview: UCLA-Xavier & UNC-Louisville

nvr1983 — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 04:54:39 +0000

– #1 UCLA vs. #3 Xavier (6:40 PM): Both teams are coming off hard-fought victories in the Sweet 16. Xavier obviously was challenged by West Virginia, who took them into OT and may very well have won if Joe Alexander had been able to hit a FT at the end of regulation (81% FT) or not foul out early in OT. The Bruins were challenged by Western Kentucky, who came back from 21 down at half as Tyrone Brazelton scored 31 pts abusing Darren Collison (before Collison fouled out with 5:39 to play). The Bruins held strong at the end [...]

Sweet 16 Preview: West Region

nvr1983 — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 18:47:25 +0000

– #1 UCLA vs. #12 Western Kentucky (9:40 PM): Already more than one analyst has declared that WKU is going to pull off the monumental upset in this game. And one UCLA blog is seriously tempting the Weauxfgods with its rather brazen mocking of the Hilltoppers’ chances in tonight’s game. (Retracted strikethrough: rtmsf thinks he is the Dennis Miller of the college basketball blog world). So we ask ourselves – is this possible? Could UCLA lose to a double-digit seed in the Sweet 16?

One thing we know for certain is that the Bruins will not score enough points [...]

Day In Review: March 22, 2008

nvr1983 — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 02:34:19 +0000

The story of the day was UCLA surviving an upset bid by Texas A&M. We (like a lot of other analysts) thought that UCLA had a clear path to San Antonio. With the 2 (Duke) & 4 (UConn) seeds in the West going down in the past 24 hours, things looked pretty easy for the Bruins. Instead, Texas A&M opened up a 10 pt lead in the 2nd half. After falling behind 36-26, Ben Howland rode Kevin Love and Darren Collison back to a tie at 45 with 2:53 left. The final 2 minutes were filled with both teams [...]

Predictions for today’s games

nvr1983 — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 14:51:46 +0000

We’ll be updating this throughout the day so we can get the predictions out before the games start.

2:10 PM tip: – West Virginia vs. Duke – If the Blue Devils want to get to the second week, they will have to play much better than they did in their opening round game versus Belmont. The key for Duke (as it has been for every game this year) is whether they will hit they 3. If they do, they can beat anybody because well 3 points > 2 points. For the Mountaineers to win, they will need to play solid [...]