Archive for the ‘Blog Entries’ Category

NEW YORK — Seeding doesn’t matter. Fatigue doesn’t matter. Getting outrebounded by 15 doesn’t matter. The only two things that seem to matter in the Big East Tournament is that Pittsburgh is playing and it’s at the Garden.

This was surely the year that Pittsburgh was not going to get back to another Big East final. As a No. 7 seed and having to play on the first day of the tournament, the odds were against Jamie Dixon’s team. But the Panthers played the odds like experienced Vegas bettors and will again play on the last day of the Big East Tournament after a 68-61 win over Marquette on Friday night.

On Saturday night, the Panthers will play in their seventh Big East Tournament final in eight seasons — an accomplishment almost impossible to imagine in and of itself, but even more so considering what Pittsburgh has been through this season.

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NEW YORK — Sometimes you need help, and sometimes you need your legs. West Virginia had neither on Friday.

For two days, Joe Alexander made Madison Square Garden his personal stage, delivering brilliant soliloquies and artistic interpretations of age-old basketball moves in eliminating Providence and Connecticut. But playing a third superb game in three days after seeing 79 minutes of action over the previous two days proved too tough a chore for the junior forward.

For West Virginia to defeat top-seeded Georgetown on Friday night in the Big East Tournament semifinals, Alexander would need help from his teammates, need them to share the offensive load so his legs would be free of some of the burden he carried in bringing the Mountaineers to this point.

But instead, his teammates’ fatigue was as evident as the pep bands. In a first half that saw West Virginia fall behind by 12 points — a margin it would never completely close — the Mountaineers shot just 35 percent en route to a 72-55 loss. With a 2-for-7 first-half performance, Alexander was the biggest perpetrator. Turnarounds and bankshots that the net beckoned on the two previous afternoons were suddenly a bit short or a bit flat.

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NEW YORK — The hackneyed expression goes that styles make fights, and that’s also true of basketball games.

Twenty-four hours after Seton Hall and Marquette spent 40 minutes in a clinch, Notre Dame gave the Golden Eagles space, and that allowed Jerel McNeal and Maurice Acker to connect on enough haymakers to land the Golden Eagles in the semifinals with an 89-79 victory on Thursday night in the Big East Tournament quarterfinals.

The first half seemed to go to form for the favored Irish. Notre Dame led by six at the break, out-rebounded Marquette by three and did all that despite Big East Player of the Year Luke Harangody playing just seven minutes after picking up a second foul with 10:35 left and sitting out the remainder of the half.

When a rare Tory Jackson 3-pointer put the Irish up, 44-34, with 18 minutes remaining, Notre Dame looked poised to take the rubber match of the season series and get back in the tournament semifinals for the second straight year.

But a funny — or perhaps disturbing, based on your perspective — thing happened on the way to a breezy victory: Marquette started knocking down shots. Seton Hall’s pressure permitted a lot of trips to the foul line for Marquette on Wednesday, but conceded few open looks. Notre Dame doesn’t play with the same defensive tenacity, and the Golden Eagles grew more comfortable from the perimeter with each passing swish.

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NEW YORK — On the last rebound of the game in which the contest’s result was still in doubt, two bench players determined the outcome.

With 1:30 left in overtime of Pittsburgh’s 76-69 win over Louisville in the Big East Tournament on Thursday, the Cardinals trailed by four. Louisville’s Andre McGee attempted a wide-open 3-pointer that went long. Two of the game’s most important players — both reserves — were in on the rebound. Louisville’s Earl Clark got it, but the Panthers’ Gilbert Brown stripped him and recovered the ball.

Seconds later, Levance Fields got the roll on a tear-dropper that gave Pitt a six-point lead with 1:08 to play, and the Panthers were on their way to eliminating Louisville from its third straight Big East Tournament. And while stars like Fields and Sam Young will grab most of the headlines, reserves like Clark and Brown would form the character of the event.

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NEW YORK — When the shots won’t fall, the best-coached teams can look more like a pack of streetballers than a trained division of athletes. When two teams not known for their aesthetic styles meet at the Big East Tournament and battle for a win for 40 minutes? Let’s just say Springfield needn’t save any space in its library for a tape of this game.

Marquette defeated Seton Hall, 67-54, in the nightcap of Big East Tournament first-round action on Wednesday night at the Garden, but the game was as close as one point with less than six minutes to play — a testament to how the Pirates can conquer a lack of talent with an utter unwillingness to relent.

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NEW YORK — Last October, at Big East preseason media day in Madison Square Garden, Pittsburgh’s players wanted to tell anyone who would listen that a Pittsburgh-metro prospect named DeJuan Blair was — all due respect to Syracuse’s Jonny Flynn and Donte’ Greene — as good as, or better, than any freshman in the conference.

The confidence Blair’s teammates showed in the 6-foot-8 big man was well-founded. Blair and Flynn shared conference Freshman of the Year honors this week. But to see the young man play in Pittsburgh’s 70-64 win over Cincinnati on Wednesday was to wonder whether this long season has taken a toll on him.

Blair’s game is built on both an unyielding energy and an uncommon on-court intelligence that allowed him to be among the conference’s leaders in both steals and blocked shots. But that energy appears to be on the wane. In recent games at Syracuse and West Virginia, he was in and out of the lineup and combined to grab just nine total rebounds — this for a player who’s averaged 9.5 per game this season.

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Our format for this show, which you can listen to by clicking on the download link at the right of this page — or by going to Itunes — is a little different, so we wanted to give you a breakdown of the layout.

1:00 - Introduction/Headlines

3:30 - Top quarter breakdown (Georgetown, Villanova, Syracuse); guest Camille Powell, Wasington Post (8:00)

19:00 - Second quarter breakdown (Connecticut, West Virginia, Providence); guest Kevin McNamara, Providence Journal (22:00)

36:30- Third quarter breakdown (Louisville, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati); guest Brian Bennett, Louisville Courier Journal (41:00)

51:30 - Fourth quarter breakdown (Notre Dame, Marquette, Seton Hall)

55:00 - Picks and close

Hope you enjoy!