Posts tagged ‘louisville’

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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You can’t go anywhere around the sporting world without hearing about the bubble. Who’s on it? Who’s safe? Who’s in trouble? It’s a bit mind-numbing, but it’s also great fodder for talk-show chatter because it can be so subjective. I try to avoid most of this talk, because I don’t want popular opinion to affect my perspective, but when the bubble lists scroll across the bottom of my television screen, they’re kind of hard to miss.

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There’s just one week left before the Big East Tournament, but so much has not been decided — at the top, bottom and middle of the conference.

We are the champions: Before the season, folks were about split about who they thought the best team in the Big East was. Four months later, and it appears that those two teams will play for the right to call itself the best when Louisville travels to Washington to play Georgetown on Saturday. Both teams are 14-3 in conference and off in this mid-week and therefore have about a week to prepare. Georgetown will have to figure out how it can get an inside game going that will earn it more than the four free throws the Hoyas shot in Louisville a month ago. Louisville will just be trying to cap a tremendous run of excellent basketball. The Cardinals have won nine straight, including a 14-point win over Villanova on Sunday.

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Here’s a look at the action in the Big East this weekend. Every team is playing, with seven conference games and one big non-conference rivalry matchup.

Connecticut at Notre Dame (Saturday, 9 p.m. ET, ESPN): The Big East’s marquee game on Saturday features a pair of teams fresh off impressive openers. Like Notre Dame, Connecticut has a short turnover and the Huskies play a second road game in three days. The big question will be whether UConn’s frontcourt will be able to defend Luke Harangody and Rob Kurz. A couple of other involve Notre Dame’s ability to take care of the ball, and UConn’s guards’ ability to hit shots.These are a couple of evenly-matched teams, but with the Irish at home and so solid offensively, Mike Brey’s team should be the pick. If Connecticut does win, then my preseason third-place prediction won’t look as farfetched as it did a couple of weeks ago. Irish by 8.

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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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