pete newell – Rush The Court

Why Isn’t California Basketball a Monster?

RJ Abeytia — Fri, 25 Nov 2016 17:01:01 +0000

During the Glory Years of Cal basketball, Pete Newell had the Bears playing at an elite level year after year. How elite? Newell’s Golden Bears beat John Wooden’s UCLA Bruins eight straight times before Newell retired. He took the Bears to four NCAA Tournaments (1957-60), landed consecutive Final Four appearances (1959-60, and won the 1959 National Championship. Those were to be his final four years in Berkeley, and Cal hasn’t come anywhere near those highs since. In fact, Cal went nearly 30 seasons without a single NCAA Tournament appearance after Newell’s departure, and even considering a few lesser peaks through the Todd Bozeman, Ben [...]

Morning Five: 08.21.12 Edition

rtmsf — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 11:31:32 +0000

In one of the shortest collegiate careers that we’ve quite frankly ever seen, Kansas freshman Milton Doyle has already decided that he’s had enough in Lawrence. That’s right, Doyle, still some seven-plus weeks away from his first Midnight Madness, is transferring from KU due to — can you believe this? — a lack of playing time. Sure, Bill Self was diplomatic when he announced Doyle’s departure on Monday — he said, “[Doyle] thought it was better for him to go to a place where he had a better opportunity to impact a program early in his career” — but the [...]

Pac-12 Mount Rushmore

AMurawa — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 20:33:06 +0000

The history of this conference is pretty lopsided. UCLA has won 11 national championships while all the other schools in the conference combine for five titles with no other school winning more than one. UCLA has been to 18 Final Fours; Arizona and Utah are a distant second with four appearances. As such, you can expect the faces on the Pac-12 Mount Rushmore to be heavily skewed to the blue and gold. In fact, the argument could be made that the Bruins deserve all four spots on the monument to Pac-12 basketball. But, since the Arizona schools joined the conference [...]

Thoughts On The Sporting News’ Top 50 Coaches List…

jstevrtc — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 08:17:09 +0000

By now you’ve probably seen the list published earlier this week by The Sporting News naming their Fifty Greatest Coaches of All Time, across all sports. And most likely you’ve at least seen that the legendary John Wooden tops that list, a selection about which this blogger has not heard one single detractor, not even one with a bad argument. What’s interesting to me is the names from the college basketball world that follow Wooden on that list. Here they are; I added two coaches at the end who did not make the TSN list (though one would [...]

ATB: Gettin’ Chismed

rtmsf — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 06:08:49 +0000

Big East/SEC Invitational. This is so ridiculous. Tonight was the opening night of yet another conference challenge series invitational that theoretically is a great idea, but is executed all wrong by the powers-that-be. Why don’t the Pac-10, Big 12, SEC and Big East realize that interest will be much greater in these things if they’re made into week-long EVENTS, similar to the way the ACC and Big 10 do it, and they let ESPN carry all the games throughout the week. The Pac-10/Big 12 Hardwood Series is bad enough, considering nobody even knows about it; [...]

12.04.08 Fast Breaks

nvr1983 — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 03:00:16 +0000

It’s been a while since we did this consistently, but now that we actually know which games will be played more than 24 hours in advance it’s time to get back into our routine of providing you with the best college basketball links we find each day. If you find something that you think would be of interest to other college basketball fans, leave a link in the comment section and we’ll include it in the next Fast Breaks. Some of these are a few days old, but we have some catching up to do. . .

Dana O’Neil with a look at the gray [...]

Pete Newell: A Basketball Legend

rtmsf — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 23:36:16 +0000

We felt bad giving such short shrift to Pete Newell yesterday in our ATB wrapup, so we wanted to take an opportunity to give our condolences to the Newell family and also educate young readers on just how influential a figure Coach Newell was in this game. The vast majority of Newell’s career was before our time as well, but his sphere of influence reaches down through the decades to this very day. Every time a young big man utilizes a drop step or seals his defender in the post, Newell’s innovations and techniques are showing their relevance and timelessness.

Consider some of the [...]

ATB: Quiet Before the Storm

rtmsf — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 09:23:02 +0000

News & Notes. We’d like to take a moment at the beginning of tonight’s ATB to honor former Cal head coach and legendary big man guru Pete Newell, who died today at the age of 93. He led Cal to its only national championship in 1959, won a gold medal as the US Olympic team coach in 1960, and was elected to the basketball Hall of Fame in 1979. Although he was before our time, we’ve heard the stories of his legend and he is considered one of the most influential figures in basketball history. May he rest [...]

ESPN Marathon of Hoops Live Blog

jstevrtc — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 02:51:00 +0000

11/17/08

11:45pm ET — Greetings, fellow hoop lovers, and welcome to the ESPN 24-hour Marathon of Hoops Rush The Court live blog. John Stevens, here, ready to truly kick off the college hoops season in freakin’ insane style. I’ll be live-blogging the entire way — that’s right, baby, the WHOLE WAY! — so if you’re out there watching the games, by all means leave a comment.

Of course, I don’t mean to imply any connection between ESPN and RTC with the title of this post. But a while back it was posted here that ESPN really had a great idea when [...]