Frank Kaminsky is the toughest matchup in Dallas. Some players are harder to guard than others, in part because of who is likely to be assigned to guard them. It’s harder to defend a 7-footer who can move without the ball, shoot from long range, drive it and score in the low post because big men typically aren’t adept at handling all of these things and few of the opponents they encounter can manage more than one or two.
Kaminsky filled in one of the last pieces of his offensive puzzle when he faced off against Arizona’s Kaleb Tarczewski — 7-0, 260 — and was able to hold his position and score over the top. This hadn’t been something Kaminsky did much in the regular season. He was more comfortable driving the ball into the post and spinning into his moves, something he does with such great awareness that he almost never commits a charging foul.
Those drives are extremely hard for opponents to deal with because Wisconsin assures that its army of elite shooters is keeping the lane free of help defenders before Kaminsky makes his move. Wisconsin coach Bo Ryan recognizes what a unique weapon he has and runs some beautiful action to take advantage.
ESPN NBA Draft analyst Chad Ford suggested in a chat Wednesday that Kaminsky’s performance against Arizona (28 points, 11 rebounds, 11-of-20 shooting) was something of an anomaly. Ridiculous. If you’ve watched Kaminsky all year, you’ve seen the variety of ways in which he can score and understand the challenge facing Kentucky. It’s not that he can’t be stopped. It’s that it’s hard.
Kevin Ollie is not out of his depth. There aren’t a whole lot of college basketball coaches who’ve reached the Final Four with the first four tournament wins on their resumes. Steve Fisher did it for Michigan in 1989. Bob Huggins did it at Cincinnati in 1992.
Just as Huggins clearly belonged on the stage when he arrived in Minneapolis, and has Fisher has proved to detractors so many times in the years since, Ollie most certainly did not get here by accident.
The best example of this was how well the Huskies scouted Michigan State’s baseline inbounds plays. It was astounding how rarely MSU had any success generating immediate offensive opportunities in those circumstances. In most cases, the Spartans wound up having to heave the ball into the backcourt merely to get the ball in bounds.
Ollie devised an ideal game plan, as well, to take advantage of what he perceived to be a lack of confidence and strength among Michigan State’s primary ballhandlers. The UConn defenders picked up Keith Appling and Travis Trice at 30 feet and refused to permit them room to operate; those two wound up a combined 1-of-7 with five turnovers and four assists.
MSU wound up with only seven 2-point field goals and seven made free throws. If you can do that to one of Tom Izzo’s teams, you’re a talent.
Coaching a “football school” is not an obstacle. With Florida in its fourth Final Four since 2000, some want to award coach Billy Donovan special recognition for getting this done at a “football school.” Now, the relative performances of the two Gators programs might bring that terminology into question in some ways, but let’s stipulate that UF is a football-first athletic department. Of course it is.
That’s not a detriment to basketball success, however. It’s an asset.
It’s not as much of an asset as basketball tradition and passion; they continue to be the currents that carry such programs as Kansas, Louisville, Kentucky and North Carolina, for instance. But the money and possibilities that football money present to the basketball programs at schools such as Florida, Ohio State, Texas and Michigan show that success in the two sports is not mutually exclusive. Since 2000, a dozen football-first schools have reached the Final Four, including half of this year’s contingent. If you add in Michigan State, that’d lift the total to 17.
Donovan doesn’t need any sort of golf-style handicap; he’s building a Hall of Fame resume without any special considerations. And the honest truth is that football money, which has made him one of the highest-paid college coaches, has helped keep him in Gainesville.
James Young’s selectivity is a winner. The most remarkable statistic from Kentucky’s victories over No. 1 seed Wichita State, No. 4 seed Louisville and No. 2 Michigan: Young didn’t take double-figure shots in any of those games.
Young took 426 shots this season, 30 more than anyone else among the Wildcats, 51 more than star forward Julius Randle. Young make 40.6 percent of his shots, Randle made 49.9.
In the past three games, however, Young took only 24 shots combined — and converted on 54 percent.
For the season, Young has attempted fewer than 10 shots on 10 occasions. UK is 8-2 in those games. As in the past three games, he was an asset in many of those games. But the most important factor seems to be that he not does shoot UK out of games.
UConn Huskies are American heroes. It can be argued the American Athletic Conference is not a new league, that instead the new Big East is where the real change happened.
Who’s really buying that? The new Big East took seven previous members and added three new ones. Yeah, they had to get a conference office and all of that, but that’s much less a new league than the American, which got to keep the commissioner but had to add five new schools for a 10-team league.
Anyhow, we bring this up because UConn became the first team from a first-year league to make the Final Four since Cincinnati of the Great Midwest in 1992. The American also has SMU playing for an NIT championship Thursday night in Madison Square Garden.
Charting a new course. Before Billy Donovan arrived at Florida and Bo Ryan at Wisconsin, those schools weren’t exactly basketball factories.
Florida made the NCAA Tournament five times before Donovan was hired. That’s in the Gators’ entire history. Donovan has made it 14 times. So he has 74 percent of the Gators’ NCAA appearances.
Wisconsin had been there seven times before Ryan was hired away from UW Milwaukee. He's made it 13 times, every year he’s been head coach. That’s 65 percent.
To even approach the same percentage of NCAA appearances at his basketball-centric program, John Calipari would have to coach for the next 80 years and make the tournament every year. That would put him at 63 percent, up from his current 7 percent.
Gotta keep the Boatright. Perhaps the greatest mystery of Connecticut’s season is why the Huskies were so miserably overmatched in their three games against Louisville. The Cards certainly were a terrific team, but they didn’t dominate any of the other top-echelon American powers in the same way they did UConn.
It wasn’t just about forcing and scoring on turnovers, although that was a factor. It was more a matter of how Louisville refused to let Ryan Boatright be a factor in any of the three games.
He scored only 22 points combined and shot 9-of-35 in three meetings with Louisville. In the team’s four NCAA Tournament games, he shot 15-of-39 and averaged 13.8 points.
