2020-21 College Basketball thread

The last time we had March Madness UK went to overtime in the Elite Eight, so decline might be a bit much. But it seems like Cal doesn’t put enough emphasis on recruiting pure shooters, and he runs against the prevailing trends putting more emphasis on 3-pointers. A lot quietly depends on the grad transfers he brings in to patch up holes, and he didn’t do enough legwork to realize the Sarr kid from Wake Forest was baby shit soft in the post.

 

Austin Reaves is trying to take over the game and instead he's taking Oklahoma right out of it.

He's been brutally bad over the past few minutes.

 

So long, UCLA. Thanks for playing. I think Cronin is a good coach but has any program done less with more than UCLA in recent memory?

 

They should've given LaVar a job so they could get all the Balls for 3 years to win multiple titles.

Actually they may have underachieved, but they haven't had an overabundance of talent. If you look at how many UK guys are in the NBA,
it can be argued they've done less with more. Anyone can make the Elite 8 or Final Four when you have a few first-rounders every year.
In the last 7 seasons, UK has played for the championship once. How many NBA starters have they had in that time span.

edit: don't feel like counting the starters, but UK has had 14 1st rounders since 2015 and they
haven't reached the title game since 2014.

 

It feels kind of like Cal’s time at Kentucky might have a short shelf life now. I have nothing really to base this on, just a feeling that he might be ready for a year in the booth and a reboot somewhere else.

 

Says a lot when none of the North Carolina publications spent a lot of time worrying about Sarr heading to Lexington.

And, in case you think I'm just making this up, the amount of hand-wringing involving John Wall eluding the ACC's grasp by going to Lexington from Raleigh was staggering.

 

This was also Cal’s first year on the bench after Kenny Payne moved on to the Knicks, and there’s a good bit of belief he was the real glue guy on staff getting kids to buy in and stay that way.

 

Not The Onion:

Michigan State announces basketball team will now be called 'MSU Spartans Presented by Rocket Mortgage'

Hopefully all legitimate news agencies, after the 8-inch brief announcing the deal, will slap an ironclad embargo on ever using the phrase.

 

Pat Forde covered this ground in his excellent feature on Kentucky schoolboy standout Reed Sheppard (hitting 33 points a game as a sophomore, and not by the usual route of throwing up lots of shots but by some very solid basketball smarts), son of UK basketball legends Jeff Sheppard and Stacey Reed Sheppard:

The path to college basketball national championships the past five years is to “get old and stay old,” to use the term currently popular with coaches. Old is 21 and 22; youngis 18 and 19. The young guys who view UK as an NBA stopover have stopped delivering Final Fours and national titles for Calipari, who last led a team to the Final Four in 2015 and whose current squad is putting the finishing touches on the school’s first losing season in 32 years. So is he willing to try a different approach? And could that different approach start with a Kentucky legacy recruit from a region of the state that has always been politically complicated for coaches of the Cats?​

The kid is good, by the way. He probably gets his basketball smarts from his mother,

“I assumed he’s typical small-town Kentucky, shoots 30 times a game to score 40 points,” says a Division I coach who has seen Sheppard play. “That’s not the case. The thing that separates him [is that] he makes every right decision, he doesn’t force and he can make every right read of the defense. And he really finishes. He’s good enough to play there.”

By there he means Kentucky. And if he’s good enough to play at Kentucky, he’s good enough to play anywhere.​

All Calipari has to do is stop recruiting an NBA G League roster and think long-term.

 

There's not enough bandwidth for a longtime UCLA fan to microanalyze this one.

As much as my alma mater worries about rivals and chases ghosts to its detriment, as long as UCLA continues to chase John Wooden's ghost, the alma mater will be only the second-worst.

 

Of note, North Laurel played its first two games from teams outside the mountains last weekend and got sandblasted by traditional powers Ashland-Blazer and Lexington Catholic. But there’s a good bit of truth in what Forde writes about the mood of the state.

 

Outbid Chico’s Bail Bonds.