Posts tagged ‘levance fields’

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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And in the blink of an eye, it can all change.

Pittsburgh and Louisville were very confident at various times in the last couple of weeks. Even after the Panthers lost Mike Cook in the win over Duke, Pittsburgh surely felt good about its chances in the Big East entering Saturday’s matchup at Dayton. The 25-point loss to the Flyers was stunning in and of itself, but the loss of junior point guard and floor leader Levance Fields to a broken foot is the lasting implication of a miserable night. He’s expected to miss eight to 12 weeks, putting his return somewhere between Feb. 23 and March 22 (the opening weekend of the NCAA Tournament).

Louisville has battled through its share of injuries this season, with senior Juan Palacios missing the season’s first nine games and without senior David Padgett since the season’s second weekend with a broken kneecap. Despite Rick Pitino’s claims of doom for his fifth-year center, Padgett was back in red and white on New Year’s Day for Louisville’s Big East opener against Cincinnati. Padgett is clearly still not 100 percent, but his return looked like a bonus for a team that appeared to have finally begun to put things together. Cincinnati’s 58-57 win on New Year’s Day proved that wasn’t the case.

Cincinnati had perhaps the worst start of any Big East team, losing five games in a row, and that stretch didn’t include the earlier losses to Belmont and Bowling Green. A heralded recruiting class wasn’t making much of an impact for Mick Cronin, and fans had started to lose interest. But folks who followed the Bearcats closely saw significant improvement over the last four games, despite three of them being losses. UC was in the game at Xavier until the final minute and outrebounded Memphis in a closer-than-expected loss. Cincy then had N.C. State on the run on the road but couldn’t hit enough shots or stop fouling. Then Cronin finally tasted victory again with an impressive win over Miami (Ohio), but even with the obvious improvement, it didn’t seem like a opening Big East game at Louisville would end positively. But the one-point win over a man Cronin once assisted proved that this Bearcats program has quite a bit of life left.

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