It’s a new week and a new day for the Pac-12. Nothing but sunshine from now on, right? There hasn’t been a whole lot of good news to report around the conference, so we’ll take the occasion of four wins and zero losses in a single night to be grateful for. Sure, most of the wins came against teams that major conference teams should have no reason to fear, but one of the newest Pac-12 teams posted the most impressive victory of the night as Colorado came out of the halftime locker room with a 28-14 run over the first 17 minutes of the second half against Georgia. The Buffs held on to seal a 70-68 victory that was nowhere near as close as the final score. Buffalo freshman guard Spencer Dinwiddie led all scorers with 16 points and fellow freshman Askia Booker added 14, while Andre Roberson had 15/15 in his fourth double-double of the year.
Meanwhile down south, UCLA earned its first win of the season over a Division I opponent with a 62-39 victory over Pepperdine in a game whose score looks a lot more impressive than the actual play on the court. Sure, the Waves were never in this game at all, getting outscored 28-11 in the first half, but still, for UCLA, the two guys who were supposed to be the heart and soul of this team – Reeves Nelson and Joshua Smith – combined for six points and eight rebounds in 22 total minutes. Nevertheless, there were good signs for the Bruins, namely Travis Wear, who took some time off from exploring coral reefs to grab ten first-half rebounds (including five on the offensive end) and freshman guard Norman Powell, who earned 22 minutes and rewarded the coaching staff with ten points, a couple of threes and a ton of defensive energy. There’s still a long way to go, and Pepperdine is certainly no Loyola Marymount, but it is baby steps for the Bruins at this point.
Down the street from the Bruins’ temporary home, their cross-town rival, USC, got some good news Monday as their sophomore point guard Maurice Jones was named the Pac-12 Player of the Week, mostly on the strength of his 28-point outburst against South Carolina in the consolation game of the Las Vegas Invitational this weekend. Jones hit all seven of his three-point attempts in that game, getting his three-point percentage for the season back in the respectable range (he started the year 8-32 from deep) and more importantly, getting his team back within one game of .500.
Sticking around Troy for a bit, Rick Majerus was back in the Southland this weekend, taking his Saint Louis team to the 76 Classic in Anaheim, and while there he was asked to talk about his reasons for backing out of the USC job just four days after he had accepted it in 2004. Long story short, despite his claims at the time that it was his own health that caused him to back out, in fact Majerus’ mother was fighting cancer at the time and she asked him to not accept the job so that he could remain closer to her. Perhaps just as interesting was Majerus’ claim that he thought he could have won a national championship at USC. After seeing what Majerus did with Ball State, Utah and now Saint Louis, I’m inclined to trust him.
Finally, Jeff Borzello takes a closer look at the struggles that Arizona State has been going through this season and ties it back to its inability to take care of the ball. So far ASU is turning the ball over on 26.9% of its possessions, an abysmal figure good for 325th in the country. Part of the problem can be chalked up to the Sun Devils missing Jahii Carson, the heir apparent at point guard who has yet to be declared academically eligible. But Iowa State transfer Chris Colvin, who has handled most of the point guard duties so far and who the coaching staff spoke highly of in the offseason, has yet to display any comfort as the lead guard, turning the ball over 23 times thus far in 150 minutes of action. And every other starter for the Sun Devils has averaged at least two turnovers a game thus far. If Carson isn’t coming through that door, and if ASU continues to turn the ball over at this rate, this season is not going to get any better.
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As expected the news out of Minnesota on the right knee of Trevor Mbakwe was not good. The senior forward, who appeared poised to have an excellent season, is out for year with right ACL tear (here is a Twitpic from Mbakwe late last night). Mbakwe’s injury means that the Gophers will have to search to find a replacement (likely by committee) and will also probably struggle to stay out of the Big Ten cellar. According to reports, the school is seeking a sixth year of eligibility for Mbakwe, who missed one season due to another knee injury and another season after transferring from Miami after being charged with sexual assault. Prior to the injury, Mbakwe was a late first or early second round pick. Now, if he does not get an extra year of eligibility, he may not even get drafted.
Last night Billy Donovan picked up his 400th career win as Florida beat Stetson, 96-70. Perhaps, the occasion helped the Gators focus as they played well despite the game being an obvious trap game with a showdown against Syracuse looming on Friday. While the win is a nice milestone it is noteworthy for two other things: most Gator fans probably were not paying attention as they were focusing their attention on their suddenly healthy former football coach and the victory occurred at the home of the Orlando Magic, who nearly took Donovan away from college basketball a little over four years ago.
Don’t expect to see more of UCLA malcontent Reeves Nelson much in the next few games after Ben Howland stated that Nelson will not be starting for the Bruins “any time soon.” Howland kept his word last and Nelson continued to do his part to keep himself out of the line-up as he got in early foul trouble to limit his minutes. While we applaud Howland for his current stance on Nelson we get a funny feeling that if UCLA continues to struggle Howland will be more forgiving of his mercurial forward.
Seth Davis checks in after his work-related trip to the Bahamas (rough life, right?) where he got to watch Connecticut and Ryan Boatright. After spending some time watching the Huskies and seeing the change that Boatright’s insertion brought about Davis came away impressed with Boatright even if he came away less than impressed with other aspects of the Huskies right now. He also offers up his opinions on all things college basketball in his traditional Larry King-like Hoop Thoughts, which are always a good read.
Duke picked up a commitment from class of 2013 shooting guard Matt Jones, a player that many suspected was a Duke lean for quite a while. Jones should give the Blue Devils yet another long-range threat if he remains committed to Duke (at least another year until he can sign). While Duke fans are probably happy to pick up Jones, they are probably more interested in his more highly regarded AAU teammate Julius Randle. Meanwhile, the people over at KSR appear to be handling the decision by Jones well although one reader was upset with Jones for being a “trader.”
Jesse Baumgartner is an RTC columnist. His Love/Hate column will publish on Mondays throughout the season.In this weekly piece he’ll review the five things he loved and hated about the previous seven days of college basketball.
Five Things I Loved This Week
I LOVED….that classic first game of the season where you just get blindsided. With a lineup full of projected first-round picks and some much-needed experience from last season, many felt that it would take a while for top-ranked North Carolina to fall. But those Runnin’ Rebels from UNLV went Jerry Tarkanian on Roy Williams’ crew and gave us 2011’s first shocker. That was seriously out of nowhere, and just two weeks into the season we can start asking what seems to be an annual question about UNC’s ability to defend the perimeter.
UNLV RTC'd the Orleans Arena Floor Saturday Night (With Good Reason)
I LOVED….how Rick Majerus has Saint Louis rolling this early. The Billikens have already knocked off Washington, Boston College, and Villanova this season – marking them as a mid-major to deal with down the road. Majerus is a fascinating coach with plenty of supporters and detractors (see this great article from Sports Illustrated’s S.L. Price in 2008) but he’s one heck of a basketball coach.
I LOVED….Griffin Lentsch’s 89 points last week for Grinnell College against Principia College. For those not familiar with Division III Grinnell, the Iowa school plays a crazy-fast, shoot-happy style that scores boatloads of points – so this kind of outburst makes a slight bit of sense. Still, I’ve been fascinated with point totals like these ever since Kobe Byrant dropped his remarkable 81. Scoring 89 points at any collegiate level is pretty remarkable.
Andrew Murawa is the RTC correspondent for the Mountain West and Pac-12 conferences.
Reader’s Take
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Problem Children – The overriding theme in the Pac-12 thus far this season has been problems: chemistry problems, behavioral problems, injury problems, and probably problems on top of those problems. (You know how when you repeat the same word a lot you realize how weird it sounds? Problem is a weird word.) The most high-profile of all these categories has been a handful of student-athletes around the conference creating problems for their teams out of thin air. The Reeves Nelson meltdown at UCLA has been the most high profile, with Jabari Brown’s premature defection from Oregon not far behind, but elsewhere around the conference there have been issues as well. At UCLA, senior point guard Jerime Anderson, a guy who should have been in a leadership position for this team, got busted for stealing a laptop this summer, pleading guilty to a couple misdemeanors and was suspended for two games (including one exhibition game) at the start of the year. On the same squad, ultra-talented big man Joshua Smith came back to the team this year ultra-big, looking as big or bigger than the 300+ pounds he showed he was unable to play at last year, then followed a loss to Loyola Marymount loss by making a fool of himself on Twitter. Over in Arizona, Sean Miller has had troubles of his own with freshmen Josiah Turner and Sidiki Johnson. Johnson is currently suspended, while Turner has displayed some chemistry problems of his own, causing him to be banished to the bench for a game by Miller. In short, aside from some bad basketball on the court, there have been a handful of players around the league making negative headlines off the court as well.
Problem Programs – Nobody really expected the Pac-12 to be a great conference this season, but the expectation was that it would be roughly as good as last year and primed for a big upswing next year with a batch of new highly regarded freshmen joining the talented youngsters currently littering conference rosters. Instead, through Tuesday night’s games, the conference had posted a combined 30-18 record, had just one remaining team (Stanford) still sporting an undefeated record and had a handful of teams in line for the title of worst BCS conference team. UCLA’s losses to Loyola Marymount and Middle Tennessee State have been well-documented, while USC’s 36-point disaster of a performance, in which enough bricks to build several wolf-proof houses were produced, is an excellent example of basketball at its ugliest. Nevertheless, as bad as UCLA and USC have been, one could easily envision both of those teams as middle-of-the-Pac contenders in the conference. That alone should tell you how bad the bottom of the conference is, but if further explanation is needed, look no further than Arizona State and Utah. The Sun Devils dropped a game at home to Pepperdine (a team that will challenge for the basement in the WCC) while Utah squeaked by NAIA also-ran San Diego Christian College (seriously, that’s a team that was 8-22 last year and lost 15 of its last 16 games) by three points before getting drilled by Boise State and losing to Montana State. As bad as the Pac-12 is, this Utah team is far and away the worst team in the conference.
The environment in tonight’s Maui Invitational championship game was phenomenal. Duke and Kansas both had the strong support of fans passionately cheering for their teams, and it was a shame to see either one go home a loser after what was a great tournament. The ESPN-funded tournaments in Puerto Rico, Orlando and Anaheim this week are all are fine and well, but the organizers haven’t figured out that teams playing in front of crowds with more empty seats than filled ones loses much of what makes college basketball exciting and special. Sure, Maui is in a preferred situation in that it can engineer fabulous matchups like Kansas vs. Duke, but the tweets from around the country raving about the environment in Lahaina tonight suggest others should strive more to mimic what they have.
Let’s jump into some musings on the Duke-Kansas championship game first, followed by the Michigan-UCLA third-place game.
Duke 68, Kansas 61
Thornton's Biggest Shot of His Life Gave Duke Its Fifth Maui Title (Kemper Lesnik/B. Spurlock)
Tyshawn Taylor is such an enigmatic player. In the first half of tonight’s game, he was mostly spectacular, with 13 points and three assists to lead KU to a nice four-point lead over Duke. In the second half, he quite literally self-destructed, committing a ridiculous eight turnovers and only adding a single assist as Duke kept pushing forward. Think about it, in a game played in the 60s for both teams, that’s eight additional second half possessions that Taylor single-handedly gave to Duke. The most crushing error Taylor made was at just under a minute to go when he simply lost control of his dribble on a Ryan Kelly hedge with Kansas down two points. It wasn’t a disastrous turnover by itself, but it allowed Duke to gain the possession where Tyler Thornton received a pass under duress (arguably after a Seth Curry travel) and dropped in a closeout three from the corner. Kansas will once again win a lot of games this year, as they always do, but the knock on the Jayhawks coming in has been whether you can trust Taylor to get it done when the heat is on — tonight’s second half performance is highly suggestive that you cannot.
Moving back to that game-winner, what can you say about the onions on Tyler Thornton tonight? Not only did Mike Krzyzewski sub in the sophomore over his all-world freshman Austin Rivers at the end of the game, but a kid who had attempted a grand total of nine shots all season coming into tonight’s game made Coach K once again look like a genius by hitting not one, but two, contested threes from the corners. Krzyzewksi said that Thornton essentially won the game for Duke, and no doubt the image of his scissor-kick jumper will cause KU fans nightmares for years. As Bill Self said in Tuesday’s press conference, Kansas came to Maui to play the Blue Devils. KU fans probably felt like they had a pretty good chance to knock off Duke, a team that has now beaten the Jayhawks in four of the schools’ last five matchups dating back nearly two decades. But Taylor’s erratic mishandling of the basketball in combination with Thornton’s confidence in his jumper resulted in yet another crushing blow against Coach K for the school from Lawrence.
Another night, another underwhelming set of outcomes around the conference – and that’s me being generous. Let’s start things out in Kansas City, where California got absolutely drilled by Missouri in the championship game of the CBE Classic, losing by 39 points in a game that was equally mismatched in both halves. Not only could the Golden Bears not get anything going offensively, they had no chance of stopping the Tigers on the other end of the court. Mizzou held Cal to a 31.6 effective field goal percentage on the game, posting a 68.6 eFG% of their own, partly a result of some easy shots generated by the 21 turnovers the Tigers forced. Not only was Cal senior guard Jorge Gutierrez harassed into four turnovers and 4-11 shooting, but sophomore wing Allen Crabbe was held to just 1-8 from the field, and the Cal frontcourt was wholly incapable of taking advantage of an undersized Mizzou front line. The Cal loss leaves Stanford as the sole remaining undefeated team in the conference, with the Cardinal prepping for some tough matchups in New York in the NIT Season Tip-Off beginning tonight.
From the middle of the country, let’s head to the middle of the Pacific, where another preseason conference favorite was getting whooped at the hands of another Big 12 school, as UCLA fell by 16 to Kansas in the semifinals of the Maui Invitational. Unlike the Bruins’ first two losses of the year, at least this time out they showed a little bit of fight, coming back from a 20-point deficit to cut the lead to as little as five late, before the Jayhawks woke back up and strode back out to the final margin with ease. Reeves Nelson played 28 minutes, although he is still coming off the bench in the wake of his recent behavioral issues, but showed the good emotion that gets his teammates inspired rather than the negative emotion that helps deflate his teammates. And then there’s sophomore center Joshua Smith who fouled out in 13 minutes of play, scoring one point and grabbing one rebound. That’s an absolute crime for a guy as talented as he is.
The good news of the night for the conference was USC handling Morgan State at home by three and needing last minutes heroics by Maurice Jones and Aaron Fuller to seal a comeback from a 15-point deficit. It was a surprisingly efficient offensive performance for both teams, as each team shot over 50% from the floor, but the difference was the Trojans forcing Morgan State into 21 turnovers. Junior college transfer Greg Allen, a highly-regarded three-point shooter, scored 14 points for the Trojans, including 3-5 shooting from deep, accounting for his first points at the Division I level. With the limited offensive firepower on this USC team, Allen could be an important piece this season for Kevin O’Neill.
Oregon travels to Nebraska tonight for a matchup with the Cornhuskers (6:00 PM PST, Big Ten Network), and they’ll do so without freshman guard Jabari Brown, who quit the team this past weekend. Head coach Dana Altman still maintains the door is open for Brown’s return, with no deadline for a final decision from the youngster. In the meantime, however, the Ducks have a replacement for Brown’s minutes just waiting, as Devoe Joseph, a transfer from Minnesota, regains his eligibility on December 10. The irony that they’ll be replacing a guy who quit on his team in the middle of a season with another guy who quit on his team in the middle of the season isn’t lost on anybody. There was good news for Oregon, however, as X-rays on the injured right ankle of 6’11” center Tony Woods proved negative, and while Woods’ status for the Wednesday night game is still unknown, he at least is well enough to make the trip to Lincoln.
In the wake of Washington’s first loss of the season to Saint Louis on Sunday, head coach Lorenzo Romar plans to clamp down a little on the freedom he gives his players on the offensive end. After the Huskies struggled executing their halfcourt offense, Romar plans to use that game as a learning experience, saying that “offensively now guys probably won’t have get as much freedom… to take chances and experiment.” It’s a fine line for Romar, as his team’s offensive strengths are in an open court, up-tempo system, but at the same time, the Huskies need to make sure they are taking good shots, something that was obviously not the case at times on Sunday. On the injury front, junior wing C.J. Wilcox, who suffered a concussion during the loss on Sunday, did not practice with the team on Tuesday and remains a question mark for Friday night against Houston Baptist.
The second day of the EA Sports Maui Invitational was once again full of big-time names and games, featuring the two afternoon semifinals between four of the most decorated programs in college basketball history. Let’s review the two games with some thoughts in a surf and sun-infused haze…
Duke 82, Michigan 75
For a brief period in the early to mid-90s, there was no bigger rivalry in college basketball than Duke vs. Michigan. Whether true or not, the two schools at the time represented opposite ends of the college basketball landscape, with Coach K’s program signifying all that was right and just in collegiate athletics, and Steve Fisher’s program standing for undisciplined (but exciting) street ball. Of course, such thinking was then and remains intellectually lazy (not to mention subtly racist), but for college hoops fans of yore, seeing the maize and gold of Michigan tipping off against the royal blue and white of Duke this afternoon sent shock waves of giddy anticipation through our body. On to the actual game…
Duke Had Just a Little More Than Michigan Today (Kemper Lasnik/B. Spurlock)
Coach K referenced this in his post-game comments, but it was crystal clear from the opening Michigan possession. Duke’s primary objective was to deny the ball to Tim Hardaway, Jr., in hopes of frustrating him and eventually causing him to force things. It worked. We watched closely as Duke’s Andre Dawkins, Austin Rivers and Tyler Thornton put on a clinic in denying THjr the ball during the first half — especially Thornton. His usage of angles and subtle but effective positioning was outstanding; when you watch a defensive performance like that against one of the better scorers in college basketball this season, you really begin to appreciate the coaching that Krzyzewski and its staff does with their players. Hardaway was 0-6 from the field in the first half and the few shots he got were clearly rushed.
Really can’t say enough about Trey Burke for Michigan. As a freshman in just his fifth game of action, he was often Michigan’s best player on the floor today. He finished the game with 17/3/9 assts, but it was his shooting and set-up skills in the first half that kept UM from being completely blown out of the Lahaina Civic Center. With a superb backcourt in place to go along with a serviceable frontcourt and enough shooters to run John Beilein’s sets, the Wolverines are going to be just fine. Right now, we’d place them behind only Ohio State and Wisconsin in the Big Ten, ahead of Purdue, Michigan State, Northwestern and the rest. Call us a Beiliever, but we’re sold on this Michigan team.
The Pac-12 announced their weekly honors on Monday, just as we here at RTC did, and clearly the choice this week was a no-brainer as Jared Cunningham nabbed his first conference Player of the Week honor. For the week, Cunningham was 24-41 from the field and 38-47 from the line in two games, setting a career high with 35 points against Hofstra and then breaking it the next time out with 37 against Texas. But back to that free throw number again – 47 free throws attempted over three games! While Cunningham has not been a consistent jump shooter over his career, he has been solid from the line (77.9% last year). If he can continue to get to the line with anything approaching that regularity, he’ll be a conference player of the year front-runner.
Oregon State took Vanderbilt, the #17 team in the country according to RTC’s latest poll, down to the wire Monday night at the final of the Legends Classic in New Jersey. However, a Brad Tinsley jumper with five seconds remaining put the Commodores over the top and left Beaver fans cold. Vandy senior forward Jeffery Taylor harassed Cunningham all game long, limiting him to just nine field goal attempts, five trips to the line and nine total points, while forcing seven turnovers. Sophomore forward Devon Collier continued his strong early season efforts with 19 points, five rebounds and four blocks, but sophomore point guard Ahmad Starks went a little nuts, hoisting 20 shots on his way to 16 points. Nevertheless, OSU proved its mettle, showing that they are able to hang with Top 25 teams and looking for all the world like a potential NCAA Tournament team. Of course, there are still almost four months to Selection Sunday, so Craig Robinson’s team will need to continue to improve.
Bummed that you had to hunt around to find that OSU game on television tonight? Well, this is the last year you will have to do that. The Pac-12 is in the final year of its current television contract, with its new multi-billion dollar agreement kicking off next year that will include a national network and six regional networks. The Pac-12 promises that every football and men’s basketball game will be televised nationally, meaning that next year if you’re just dying to watch Morgan State at USC on a Tuesday night in November, you will be able to find that game somewhere..
After four games, USC is 1-3, despite the fact that they have held its first four opponents to 55.2 points per game, 31.3% shooting from the field (and to get a little bit more righteous with advanced stats, a 36% effective field goal percentage and 0.87 points per possession). However, the Trojans are lagging far behind on the offensive end, posting an eFG% of 41.2% (good for 291st in the nation), just 54.2 points per game (327th in the nation), 0.85 points per possession and an offensive efficiency rating that places them 274th in the nation. Obviously, head coach Kevin O’Neill is quite pleased with the defensive end of the court, calling it “about as good as it can be” and “some of the best in the country,” but they’ll need to come up with some kind of answers on the offensive end in order to start turning those losses into wins.
The season isn’t even two weeks old, and already we’ve had a boatload of behavioral problems around the conference. There are the ongoing issue with Reeves Nelson (who had one points in 11 minutes in UCLA’s unimpressive Maui Invitational win against Chaminade), the defection of Oregon’s stud freshman Jabari Brown after just two games, and some immaturity with Arizona freshman point guard Josiah Turner that led to him being benched for the Wildcats’ third game. Well, apparently Turner’s problems aren’t the only ones in Tucson, as it was announced on Monday night that Sean Miller had suspended freshman center Sidiki Johnson indefinitely for violations of team policy. Luckily the Wildcats have plenty of depth, so Miller feels free to lay down the law with his freshmen, a step I wish more coaches would take.
Twelve straight hours of hoops here in Maui can leave you a little loopy, but that’s the situation we’re facing here after 160 minutes of fairly entertaining basketball spaced out over half a day. Ok, maybe it was 140 minutes of compelling stuff until UCLA woke up against Chaminade in the first evening game, but the point is that the quality of hoops being played this year in Maui is good for so early in the season.
Here are some thoughts from the afternoon/evening games. For Act I on the morning/early afternoon games (Michigan-Memphis and Duke-Tennessee), click here.
UCLA is a conundrum surrounded by a riddle wrapped in a question mark. There’s just no figuring this team out. It’s spurious to try to draw reasonable conclusions from a game against a D-II school, but in two halves we saw a team that couldn’t impose its will against a group half its size versus a team that looked talented enough to make it into the NCAA Tournament’s second weekend. Here’s what we do know — the Bruins’ company line in the aftermath of Reeves Nelson’s latest flub (oversleeping and missing the team bus to the airport, causing him to need to take a later flight) is that his addition to the game in the second half “brought energy” and helped UCLA go on a 29-3 run to blow the game wide open.
So let’s talk about Nelson, shall we? The 6’9″ junior was forced to sit out the first half as a penalty for his transgression, but if you heard Ben Howland and his players talk about his contributions after the game, you’d have thought he went for 20/10 after the intermission. Instead, he took two shots (making neither), hit one of two free throws, grabbed five boards (all defensive), tallied a couple of assists, and got a steal and a block. For 11 minutes of action, it’s a nice hustle line — no doubt about it. But to hear Team Bruin tell it, they wouldn’t have won this game without his performance. While we love glue guys who put their all into every play, Nelson typically isn’t that guy and this situation sounded a bit too much like Intervention where everyone is afraid to tell the truth about someone for fear it’ll set him off. This UCLA team is definitely worth watching for the next few weeks, at least until the semester break.
Jeff Withey's Only Bucket of the Game Was Impressive (KemperLesnik/B. Spurlock)
Let’s face it. It has been an ugly start to the season for the Pac-12 conference. Bad losses have been piled upon off-the-court problems and injuries to create some struggles out of the gate. The UCLA losses are the poster children for this epidemic, while Utah and Arizona State, to name just two, haven’t done much to help either. All that being said, Saturday night’s USC game was a new low. It’s not just that the Trojans lost to Cal Poly, a team that is a halfway-decent, middle-of-the-road Big West team. It is the manner in which the Trojans lost. They scored 36 points in the game. They scored 16 points in the second half (which, really, was only slightly worse than the first half). It’s not like they had a ton of possessions (roughly 54), but still, that works out to 0.67 points per possession. They turned the ball over on 22% of their possessions, and when they didn’t turn it over, they posted a 32.9% eFG. They only grabbed 65.7% of available defensive rebounds and just 16.7% of available offensive rebounds. Their best player, sophomore point guard Maurice Jones hit just one out of 11 field goal attempts, and now has just a 29.7% eFG this season. The good news is that there are some good young players on this USC squad which should provide a good foundation upon which to build this program; the bad news is, Trojans fans might need eyeball replacement surgery if they watch too much of this team this season.
Washington had a bad day from start to finish on Sunday. It started out with the Huskies getting absolutely taken apart by Saint Louis in the morning, a game in which they fell behind by 25 points at the half before making a bit of a run at the end to only lose by 13. While the Billikens are a very good team and played a terrific game Sunday morning, the Huskies were exposed in their first loss. First and foremost, the relentless ball screening by SLU caused Washington all sorts of problems defensively, creating wide-open looks for threes and clean entry passes into the post. Secondly, because the Huskies were forced to take the ball out of the net so many times, they were forced to play a lot of halfcourt offense and struggled to get good looks out of their sets. Really, we know that the Huskies are going to improve as the season goes on and SLU is some good competition so this is by no means a crushing loss, but it does mean that the Huskies will be working their tails off in practice this week. Still, the long day wasn’t done for the Huskies when the final whistle blew because their flight back to Seattle was forced to make an emergency landing in Spokane and wait for an hour for the next jump back home.
Colorado wrapped up their disappointing weekend in Puerto Rico on Sunday by salvaging seventh place in the Puerto Rico Tip-Off with a win over Western Michigan. The Buffaloes were able to seal the win despite playing much of the game without sophomore forward Andre Roberson, who fouled out in just 11 minutes of game action. Senior forward Austin Dufault and sophomore center Shane Harris-Tunks picked up the slack for Roberson on the glass, each snagging eight rebounds, while senior wing Carlon Brown did the bulk of the scoring, hitting eight of his 14 field goal attempts for 23 points while adding six rebounds and four assists. The win sends the Buffs home with at least something to feel good about, despite dropping winnable games in the first two rounds against Wichita State and Maryland.
Just when you thought the Reeves Nelson soap opera at UCLA was done (at least until the next thing goes wrong on the court), Nelson missed the team bus to the airport on Saturday for the team’s flight to Hawaii for the Maui Invitational. He was allowed to take a later flight to Maui and is expected to play today when the Bruins start the tournament by playing the host, Chaminade. Head coach Ben Howland also confirmed on Sunday that the whole Nelson suspension thing was first started when he was late for a team meeting the day after the Bruins’ season opening loss to Loyola Marymount.
Oregon State is in the middle of an 11-day, three-game east coast trip, and got their travels off to a good start on Saturday night with an overtime win over Texas in the semifinals of the Legends Classic. We’ll have more on the Beavers later today, but this morning we wanted to share with you a peek inside their program from the perspective of the players, specifically senior Kevin McShane and sophomore Roberto Nelson (collectively McBert, apparently) who are keeping a blog about their road trip. The first entry gives you a glimpse at the practice and travel schedule of college athletes, while the second captures the emotions following their big win on Saturday night. Great stuff from an otherwise dismal Pac-12 landscape this weekend.
