Archive for the ‘Blog Entries’ Category

Bracket Buster weekend, a made for ESPN event that is actually a pretty good idea — unlike Who’s Now? — has propelled the MVC into a position to get multiple bids to the NCAA Tournament, something that has not been the case since the projections have gotten serious.

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Picked in the bottom half of the Big East in the preseason, few expected Notre Dame to sit near the top of the Big East standings at the end of February. Picked as co-favorite with Georgetown by the coaches preseason — and picked by me as the Big East favorite and a Final Four team — it’s no surprise that Louisville is near the top of the Big East standings.

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With just 15 days between now and the start of the Big East Tournament, the ebbs and flows of the conference season continue. Marquette is now one of the hottest teams in the conference after facing a moment of crisis just weeks ago. Meanwhile, some of the negative indicators are starting to come out that may show us why Connecticut is not as much like the UConn teams of the past as we might think. In this post — which will double as a power ranking — we’re going to take a look at what the numbers have to say about the strengths and weaknesses of the five elite teams in the Big East.

1. Louisville (22-6, 12-3): Winners of seven straight, the Cardinals are playing as well as any team in the country right now, and it’s going well on both ends of the floor. Louisville is just one of two teams — Marquette is the other — that ranks in the top five in both adjusted offensive and defensive efficiency in conference games (all these rankings are based on my personal calculations). We have seen a couple of chinks in the armor in the last two games though. In the first five games of the streak, Louisville scored more than a point per possession and allowed less than a point per possession in every game. In the last two games, Louisville didn’t manage a point per possession in the first (the win over Syracuse) and didn’t keep Pittsburgh anywhere near a point per possession (1.16) in the second.

Strengths: It’s hard to imagine, but Louisville is the best shooting team in the conference. Its 52.3 percent eFG in conference games is the league-leading mark. The win over Syracuse was the only game in which UofL didn’t break the magical 50 percent eFG mark during this seven-game streak. It’s the inside shooting that is leading to the great overall shooting numbers, as the Cardinals also lead the conference in 2-point field-goal percentage (53.5). The 3-point numbers are only league average, but the Cards continue to chuck them up on 37 percent of all attempts — second in the league to Georgetown.

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The process of identifying the last teams in the field was again excruciating this week. Perhaps nauseating would be a more appropriate word to describe it. I have to choose four teams from Arizona State, Baylor, California, Dayton, Florida, Houston, Mississippi, Oregon, Rhode Island? Really? And that was to complete a field that already had nose-holders Ohio State, Syracuse, Wake Forest and West Virginia. Are my standards too high? Am I getting delusional in my old age? Am I going to end this paragraph with five consecutive questions? No, I’m not.

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There are a couple interesting stories in this bracket that I want to detail before we get to the traditional portions of this Bracket Junkie breakdown. The first is the strange journey of Arizona State. Picked almost unanimously to finish ninth in a deep Pac-10, the Sun Devils instead jumped out to a 4-0 start in conference play including wins over Oregon, Arizona and at Cal. But Herb Sendek’s team still had some growing pains to work through and immediately lost five straight games. Three of those were on the road and four of them were against teams that are in this week’s field, but a 4-5 record with a trip to Tucscon on the horizon seemed to indicate the end to ASU’s surprising season.

Arizona State went from being 10 spots from the field two weeks ago to 16 spots from the field last week and now into the field today. Since the five game losing streak, ASU went to Arizona and finished off the season sweep and then hosted red-hot Stanford and beat the Cardinal in overtime. ASU has gone from the 16th out to putting 13 teams between it and the bubble, a turnover of about 30 positions that has the Devils as the last No. 8 seed. It’s amazing to think that no team in America has more than Arizona State’s four wins against the RPI top 150.

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This is going to be one of those snippet posts with stream of consciousness and interior headlines. There is a bevy of things to cover as we inch closer to another Big East weekend, and so a coherent column would be both ambitious and too narrow. Let’s start with a battle of the top two candidates for Big East Player of the Year and end with something closer to my heart.

Luke vs. A.J.: Neither of the leading candidates for Big East Player of the Year disappointed in Connecticut’s 84-78 win over Notre Dame in Storrs on Wednesday night. Luke Harangody made 13-of-24 field-goal attempts for 32 points a month after a 5-for-23 shooting performance in his last head-to-head battle with Hasheem Thabeet. Harangody also added 16 rebounds in a game that the Irish led at the half.

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At long last, Providence College basketball fans got something approximating what they have wanted for a long time. Both Kevin McNamara and Jim Donaldson wrote frankly about the shortcomings of head coach Tim Welsh in The Providence Journal.

Kevin McNamara centered his preview of Providence’s game at Pitt on Tuesday night around an interview with Providence athletics director Bob Driscoll, a long-time supporter of his maligned coach. While Driscoll was certainly not going to go as far as saying that Welsh was in trouble or that he was at risk of being fired before the season’s conclusions, the AD is clearly disappointed in his 13-10, 4-7 Friars.

For the better part of three years, many Friars fans have wanted the only statewide daily in the nation’s smallest state to come down hard on what they see as an underachieving and uninspired era of Providence basketball. Donaldson flat-out called for an end to the Welsh era on Smith Hill, this just days after fellow columnist Bill Reynolds waved a crotchety finger at Friars fans for booing the team, namely its coach, at home games. Loyal readers of the Projo tend to find Reynolds agreeable and Donaldson disagreeable, so it would be easy to assume that the former has it right this time. But that’s not the case. Donaldson’s column was measured and accurate — I’m sure many Friars fans will say that it didn’t go far enough in dressing down the finely coiffed Welsh. Still, Donaldson concludes his column with a fair epitaph on the Tim Welsh Era in Providence: “It’s time to thank Welsh for a job, if not exactly well-done, than certainly respectably done, and bring in a coach who can do it better.”

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