So it’s over. Another season in the books. If you want to hear our thoughts on last night’s title game, check out our post from afterward. Briefly though, congrats to Connecticut, who played a phenomenal game making all of its free throws and making key shots when they needed to. On the other side of the ball, Kentucky made the plays they needed to stay in the game, but couldn’t make the shot that would put them over the top and never actually led in the game. In fact, they were never tied except when it was 0-0. Oh, and those free throws. Again for a Calipari team. We will have more on the season later this week as we recap the season.
The immediate future of Manhattan basketball will be determined over the next few months in Lexington as Manhattan announced that it would welcome disgraced coach Steve Masielloback to his head coaching job after he receives his degree from Kentucky. The school has decided to frame Masiello’s deceit about his education as poor judgement rather than a lie. While that might be considered as forgiving it is worth noting that the school would not be able to get a coach of Masiello’s caliber if they didn’t take Masiello back.
We are not sure what it is about South Florida that draws former NBA players and coaches to coach lower-tier teams, but we are up to two in the past five years as Florida Atlantic hired Michael Curry to be its next coach. Curry played in the NBA for 11 years and coached the Detroit Pistons for one season where he went 39-43 before being fired. Curry does not have any other head coaching experience, but apparently that was enough to beat out LaVelle Morton and Matt McCall for the job. Hopefully, Curry will have more success in South Florida than the last head coach with NBA experience (Isiah Thomas at FIU) had there.
The Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame announced its 10-member class of 2014 yesterday. The headliners for college basketball fans are Gary Williams and Nolan Richardson with Alonzo Mourning and to a lesser degree Mitch Richmond. The resumes of the first three on the college level does not need much explaining, but perhaps Richmond’s does since we noticed that the college part of his Wikipedia entry had been left blank so this might be a useful primer. The induction ceremonies will be held from August 7-9 in Springfield, Massachusetts.
We have probably seen the last of Oregon guard Johnathan Loyd on the basketball court (at least if you don’t want to watch overseas basketball), but we could see him in an Oregon jersey this fall except this time he will be a wide receiver on the Oregon football team. Thanks to a NCAA rule allowing a player to compete for a fifth year if it is in a different sport (remember Greg Paulus at Syracuse) Loyd would have another year of eligibility. Normally we would worry about how someone of Loyd’s size would survive on a football field, but perhaps Oregon’s up-tempo style might help him.
As previously mentioned on RTC (and every other decent site that covers basketball), the NBA held its draft lottery last night. Among the luminaries in attendance were the Basketball Jesus himself Larry Bird, Dwayne Wade of “Fall down 7 times, shoot 14 free throws” fame, Jay-Z, Kevin Durant, Mitch Richmond, Fred “The Mayor” Hoiberg, and some lady who has Sacramento Kings season tickets.
As most of you know by now, the Chicago Bulls defied their 1.7% odds to steal the #1 pick. Rounding out the top 3 were the Miami Heat and Minnesota Timberwolves. The losers of the draft were the Seattle Oklahoma City Supersonics who fell from the #2 spot to #4, which I think they deserved after last year (still bitter despite a NBA record 42-win turnaround and a 1-0 lead in the Eastern Conference Finals).
The top 2 are essentially set in stone although the Bulls lack of an interior scoring presence (not you Joakim) and lack of an elite point guard (sorry, Kirk) means they could go either direction. The Heat will get the “leftovers”. I’m guessing that Pat Riley (still the GM, right?) is hoping that the coachless Bulls take Michael Beasley because it seems like Beasley and Shawn Marion would clash in terms of their inside-outside styles and type of play so he would prefer Derrick Rose, who could be absolutely ridiculous paired with Wade and Marion.
We’ll be putting up draft previews over the next couple of days, but until then we’ll just offer a few thoughts:
(1) If I was the Bulls GM (if Reinsdorf or any one in the organization is reading this, please contact me), I would go with Rose. Even though they lack a great inside scoring threat, I think it’s a lot easier to find a serviceable PF than PG. I also think the impact of a great PG is bigger as Chris Paul and the other great recent vintage PGs have shown everyone the past few years. The Bulls have a lot of talented NBA-quality young guards (Chris Duhon, Ben Gordon, Kirk Hinrich, Larry Hughes, and Thabo Sefolosha) along with a couple talented unproven youngsters (JamesOn Curry and Shannon Brown). While some analysts may argue that this is a reason to get a big man, I would argue they should take Rose (better than any of the current guards) and make a big package of these young guys to try to get another inside presence to compliment Andre Nocioni, Joakim Noah, Drew Gooden, and Tyrus Thomas along with the team’s only “star” Luol Deng. I’ll have more on this in an upcoming post. . .
(2) I wonder if Mike D’Antoni is starting to think he should have asked the Knicks for more money. He could have had almost the perfect team for his offense if he went to Chicago even before they had the chance to select Rose. I also wonder how D’Antoni is going to handle being on a team that uses its draft pick to select a player instead of selling it for money.
(3) Hoiberg looked like he was going to throw the cancer patient’s teddy bear when the Timberwolves ended up with the #3 pick (falling outside of the Beasley-Rose jackpot). That would have made an even better YouTube moment than it already was (around the 2:20 mark of the clip below).
A couple quick, early links on the NBA Draft:
(1) As always, Chad Ford has a mock draft up with a brief analysis. I swear he must have enough spare time during the year to come up with mock drafts for every possible team draft order combination.
(2) Meanwhile, Jack McCallum chimes in with his own thoughts. Mostly just rambling about what D’Antoni must be thinking along with a brief breakdown of what the top teams in the draft might do.
(3) If you want to hate John Hollinger and his ridiculous unproven stats, check out his Pro Potential analysis (ESPN Insider access required). For those of you without access here are a couple of gems:
– Michael Beasley at #1 followed by. . .Blake Griffin at #2 and Danny Green at #4.
– 11 of the top 25 are freshman, which isn’t surprising, but that does not include several notable freshman who didn’t make the list: Derrick Rose, OJ Mayo, DeAndre Jordan, Donte Green, and Eric Gordon.
– The list of freshman that Hollinger considers to have more pro potential than those five heralded freshman: DeJuan Blair (Pittsburgh), Dar Tucker (DePaul), Robbie Hummel (Purdue), Andrew Ogilvy (Vanderbilt), and Matt Howard (Butler). The fact that I decided to list the schools these guys play at should tell you how far off the radar most of these guys are as NBA prospects. Hollinger offers an impassioned defense of his system, but I don’t buy it.
