March 11, 2010 –
by Brendon
NEW YORK — There are many ways to skin a cat, an unnecessarily gory person once noted. Similarly, there’s more than one way to score points in a basketball game. The Bearcats showed that an offense can be effective without making many shots, because they utterly destroyed Louisville on the glass, re-gaining more than half of their misses to stun the Cardinals, 69-66, on Wednesday night.
“So the last two nights, we have had 69 shot attempts and 72 tonight,” said Cincinnati head coach Mick Cronin, whose team attempted 17 more field goals and eight more free throws than Louisville. “We can rebound the ball when we get shots off.”
In the first half alone, UC had 18 offensive rebounds. Shot after shot deflected off the hands of Louisville players and either out of bounds or into the waiting arms of Bearcats. In the first 20 minutes, though, it didn’t appear that Cincy’s backboard dominance would matter a bit, since it shot an abysmal 31.3 eFG and committed seven turnovers. Meanwhile, Louisville hit 6-of-9 3-pointers to take a 41-32 lead into intermission.
In the second half, though, Louisville went cold, and the Cards eventually succumbed to Cincinnati’s irrepressible offensive rebounding.
| Team |
Poss |
PPP |
eFG |
Turn |
Reb |
FTR |
| Cincinnati |
66 |
1.05 |
0.375 |
0.183 |
0.538 |
0.208 |
| Louisville |
66 |
1.01 |
0.527 |
0.183 |
0.257 |
0.145 |
After taking a 46-34 lead on a long jumper from Edgar Sosa with 18:38 left in the second half, UofL scored just seven points in the next 12 game minutes, a total of 19 possessions. Read More »
March 11, 2010 –
by Brendon
Four weeks ago, Notre Dame senior forward injured his right knee in the closing minutes of a loss to Seton Hall. Harangody would miss the remainder of that game and all of the next five. Notre Dame lost the first two without Harangody by a combined three points, and realistic thoughts of an NCAA Tournament berth seemed to vanish.
Notre Dame, however, went on a four-game winning streak, including wins over NCAA-bound Georgetown, Pittsburgh and Marquette. On Wednesday night in Madison Square Garden, Notre Dame’s NCAA hopes completed the full 180 from vanished to realized in a 68-54 win over Seton Hall.
There’s been ample discussion in the last week about how the Irish have changed in Harangody’s absence. Many have concluded that the Irish are better without the three-time first-team All-Big East player in the lineup. Read More »
March 10, 2010 –
by Brendon
NEW YORK — The Cincinnati Bearcats spent most of the Big East season forfeiting the benefits they should have reaped from playing so well during their non-conference schedule, and they nearly gave away their first-ever Big East Tournament win on Tuesday.
Mick Cronin’s team fought back from an early deficit to race out to an eight-point margin with three minutes to play on 14th-seeded Rutgers, but turnovers and missed free-throws led to the lead drying up in the final minutes. Mike Rosario’s difficult 3-pointer with 15 seconds left tied the score at 68, but Lance Stephenson was fouled on a powerful drive with 1.8 second left, and he knocked down a free-throw to give Cincinnati a 69-68 win and a date with Louisville on Wednesday night.
“That’s why I came to Cincinnati — to change the program around, play hard and just win games,” said Stephenson, who — along with nailing the clinching free throw — scored 13 points, grabbed nine rebounds and dished out five assists in a terrific all-around floor game. Read More »
March 10, 2010 –
by Brendon
NEW YORK — Some teams turn over a new leaf in the postseason. Take St. John’s, for instance. The Red Storm finished 15th in the Big East with a 46.1 percent eFG in conference games. On Tuesday, despite playing the conference’s best field-goal defense, St. John’s shot 58.8 percent eFG in a 73-51 win over Connecticut.
Other teams are the same in the postseason as in the regular season. That was the case with Providence on Tuesday night. The Friars were the worst defensive team in the Big East this season, and against Seton Hall, they allowed an unconscionable 55 points on 35 first-half defensive possessions to trail by 16 at the break.
The Friars, however, were also one of the highest scoring teams in the nation, which is how the Pirates ended the game with 109 points on 84 possessions but with a lump in their collective throat as well.
Somewhere between not being able to defend a cone and the final buzzer, the Friars had gotten to within a Duke Mondy 3-pointer of tying the game. The freshman’s shot was long, and, with that miss, Seton Hall escaped from an improbable classic, 109-106, in the highest-scoring 40-minute game in Big East Tournament history. Read More »
March 8, 2010 –
by Brendon
If the Big East Tournament were a United States metropolis, it would be Atlanta. The five-day, 16-team, 15-game goliath sprawls across Championship Week from noon on Tuesday until almost midnight on Saturday, giving nary a breath to the other conferences tournaments trying to grab a bit of air in the league’s stifling wake.
It’s really the perfect setup for ultimate exposure. When the Big East Tournament starts on Tuesday, the only real competition for media attention is the Horizon, Sun Belt and Summit finals (unless you fancy some Atlantic 10 pre-quarters). By Friday and Saturday, when the other big leagues are giving fans their first tastes of quality games, the Big East trumps them with matchups of top teams in its semis and final. The Big East finally relents on Sunday for a few hours, but then comes the selection show, in which Big East teams are likely to make up at least an eighth of the field. The conference may not end up owning the NCAA Tournament, but it has property rights to most of this seven-day period of college hoops gluttony.
With an unrivaled media footprint — especially now that either ESPN2 or ESPNU is carrying the games on Second Division Day (Tuesday) — what can college hoops fans expect from the Garden this week? Read More »
Posted in Big East, Reviews/Previews
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Tagged Austin Freeman, Big East, Big East Tournament, Cincinnati, Connecticut, Deonta Vaughn, DePaul, Gavin Edwards, Georgetown, Jeremy Hazell, Jerome Dyson, Jim Calhoun, Louisville, Marquette, Notre Dame, Pittsburgh, Providence, Rutgers, Seton Hall, South Florida, St. John's, Stanley Robinson, Syracuse, Villanova, West Virginia
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March 4, 2010 –
by Brendon
If you can remember back to the middle of October, you probably recall that the Big East preseason projections, courtesy of the coaches’ expectations, show only a faint resemblance to the standings on this day. Most notably, three teams — Syracuse, Marquette and Pittsburgh — have far outperformed their respective sixth-, ninth- and 12th-place projections.
It’s hard to blame the coaches for placing each team where they did. In fact, I even thought Syracuse was picked too high (not a shining moment for me). All three teams lost at least four key pieces from top-20 teams. The Orange lost its top three players in terms of minutes and usage — Jonny Flynn, Eric Devendorf and Paul Harris — plus rotation big Kris Ongenaet. Pittsburgh lost its top three players in terms of minutes and usage — Sam Young, DeJuan Blair and Levance Fields — plus another starting forward, Tyrell Biggs. Marquette lost three of its top four players in terms of minutes and usage — Jerel McNeal, Wesley Matthews and Dominic James — plus its tallest player and sixth-highest minutes man, Dwight Burke.
There are several ways a team can rebuild from that, but these three went beyond rebuilding. Despite the personnel losses, Syracuse is the best team in the conference a year after slotting in somewhere in the fifth to seventh range. Pittsburgh has merely slipped from the league’s best team — according to efficiency margin in conference last season — to its fourth or fifth. Marquette has gone from the same fifth-to-seventh mire that the Orange found itself in last year to fourth or fifth with the Panthers. And this is in a league that is probably better top to bottom than it was last season. Read More »
Posted in Big East
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Tagged Andy Rautins, Ashton Gibbs, Big East, Brad Wanamaker, Brandon Triche, Buzz Williams, Darius Johnson-Odom, David Cubillan, DeJuan Blair, Dominic James, Dwight Burke, Dwight Buycks, Eric Devendorf, Gary McGhee, Gilbert Brown, Jamie Dixon, Jerel McNeal, Jermaine Dixon, Jimmy Butler, Jonny Flynn, Junior Cadougan, Kris Joseph, Kris Ongenaet, Lazar Hayward, Levance Fields, Marquette, Maurice Acker, Paul Harris, Pittsburgh, Sam Young, Scoop Jardine, Syracuse, Tyrell Biggs, Wesley Johnson, Wesley Matthews
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February 25, 2010 –
by Brendon
The Big East Player of the Year race is one of the most interesting I can remember. I decided to put a more analytical spin to the race, and you can find my conclusions herein.
After crunching some numbers to determine which players have had the biggest impact on their teams, I narrowed down my list to eight players whom I think deserve serious consideration. Here are some of the interesting players I eliminated when paring the list to eight: Jamine Peterson (Providence), Samardo Samuels (Louisville), Jimmy Butler (Marquette), Corey Fisher (Villanova), Tim Abromaitis (Notre Dame), Jerome Dyson (Connecticut), D.J. Kennedy (St. John’s), Brad Wanamaker (Pittsburgh), and there were others.
I used full-season data for my evaluations, although I would like to put together some conference-only data once the season is over. Here are my eight finalists in tabular form: Read More »
Posted in Big East
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Tagged Big East, Da'Sean Butler, Dominique Jones, Georgetown, Greg Monroe, Jeremy Hazell, Lazar Hayward, Luke Harangody, Marquette, Notre Dame, Scottie Reynolds, Seton Hall, South Florida, Syracuse, Villanova, Wesley Johnson, West Virginia
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February 16, 2010 –
by Brendon
In a span of 72 hours, each of the Big East’s top four teams — squads that once fit neatly on the top two seedlines of most NCAA Tournament projections — lost. In and of themselves, the losses for West Virginia, Syracuse, Georgetown and Villanova won’t do anything to affect their NCAA Tournament acceptance and will do little to affect their seeding, but what they did do was reveal potentially fatal flaws, which are often overlooked as teams pile up wins.
West Virginia: The Mountaineers’ 98-95 overtime loss at Pittsburgh was the most excusable of the defeats suffered by the Big East’s top four on this holiday weekend, but it was also West Virginia’s second-straight loss. It may come as a surprise to some that it’s WVU’s defense and not its offense that has been mostly to blame in the team’s five defeats.
|
Efficiencies |
Defense |
| Opponent |
PPP |
PPP |
eFG |
Turn |
Reb |
FTR |
2PT% |
3PT% |
| at Purdue |
0.987 |
1.225 |
0.536 |
0.111 |
0.318 |
0.411 |
0.545 |
0.333 |
| at Notre Dame |
1.130 |
1.164 |
0.616 |
0.150 |
0.180 |
0.558 |
0.533 |
0.538 |
| vs. Syracuse |
1.065 |
1.080 |
0.622 |
0.300 |
0.458 |
0.578 |
0.667 |
0.333 |
| vs. Villanova |
1.044 |
1.142 |
0.618 |
0.251 |
0.460 |
0.431 |
0.600 |
0.455 |
| at Pittsburgh |
1.165 |
1.202 |
0.508 |
0.098 |
0.274 |
0.536 |
0.500 |
0.346 |
| Composite |
1.078 |
1.163 |
0.580 |
0.182 |
0.338 |
0.503 |
0.569 |
0.401 |
You can see that West Virginia is allowing 0.085 points per possession more than it is scoring in its five losses. The main culprit is field-goal defense. Despite the Mountaineers’ notable length, they are allowing opponents to make 40 percent of their 3-pointers and 57 percent of their 2-pointers in these defeats. For the season, West Virginia is ahead of only the comparatively tiny Marquette and Providence squads in 2-point defense among Big East teams. Read More »
Posted in Big East
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Tagged Andy Rautins, Antonio Pena, Arinze Onuaku, Big East, Billy Gillispie, Brandon Triche, Colorado, Corey Stokes, Georgetown, Georgia, Greg Monroe, Iowa, Jared Swopshire, Jessie Sapp, John Thompson III, Kansas State, Louisville, North Carolina, Notre Dame, Pittsburgh, Providence, Purdue, Rakeem Buckles, Rick Jackson, Rutgers, Samardo Samuels, Scoop Jardine, Sharaud Curry, Southern Cal, Southern Illinois, Syracuse, Texas A&M, Villanova, Washington, West Virginia, Western Kentucky
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