March Madness, Cranston Style

by Josh Wood Tuesday March 17, 2009

You’ve got another two days to fill out your brackets, but the Big Dance is a confusing tangle of Matadors, Vikings, Utes, Lumberjacks, Bearcats, Highlanders, Mocs, Hilltoppers and hornets. Who better to sort through this menagerie than Cranston native and sports analyst, Brendon Desrochers. Desrochers covers college hoops for SNY and his own basketball analysis blog, Baseline Stats. He has painstakingly matched a list of Rhode Island landmarks, personalities and products to some of this year’s tourney teams to make this March a little less… maddening.

The Independent Man

Memphis, again achieving a high seed without any help from its league, is the Independent Man of this Tournament. Many, including myself, thought that the Tigers would get a No. 1 seed ahead of Connecticut, but the two teams will be able to settle this grievance on the court, if they’re both able to navigate to the Elite 8. A true maverick – unlike the manufactured ones from Arizona and Alaska that filled our newspapers in October and November – John Calipari defies the idea that a consistent big winner has to come from one of the six major conferences.

This year’s Tigers have just one challenger to the title of best defensive team, and that is former Conference USA member Louisville. With its overall length, Memphis gets in passing lanes and challenges shots better than any team in the country. The Tigers are not good offensively, but the stellar defense made a just-OK offense good enough to go undefeated in conference again. The question is whether that will be good enough to beat teams in the NCAA Tournament. Memphis’ NCAA Tournament offense will likely live and die with the play of freshman Tyreke Evans, who takes a ton of shots without great efficiency, especially behind the arc where the Philly product shot 28.6 precent on 112 attempts.

ACI

If you find watching low-scoring games the equivalent of going to prison, then I have two games you’ll want to avoid. First, on Friday afternoon in Miami, (6) Arizona State plays (11) Temple in a South Region game. Then, later that night, (5) Florida State plays (12) Wisconsin in Boise. It’s hard to find a low-scoring game without a Big Ten or Pac-10 team, so it’s not a surprise that we have one of each in these games. ASU actually has a terrific offense led by All-American James Harden, but the Sun Devils like to take it slow under former Providence College assistant Herb Sendek. Florida State is coached by Leonard Hamilton, who was known for his low-scoring defensive teams at Miami, and it’s the same at FSU. The Seminoles play Wisconsin, who like Arizona State combine efficient offensive with a very slow pace. The first team to 60 in either of these games should be the winner.

The Big Blue Bug

Pitt is this year’s Big Blue Bug for having such a simple path to the Elite 8. With perhaps the exception of conference foe Louisville, Jamie Dixon’s Panthers have the least resistance between themselves and a regional final matchup with Duke, Villanova or UCLA. Here’s the problem, though, just as Pittsburgh’s generous draw sticks out at you like a super-sized termite on the highway, so too would another loss before the Elite 8. Pitt hasn’t gotten past the Sweet 16 during this exceptional run of success under Dixon and Ben Howland, and teams like West Virginia and Providence have proven that a well-executed gameplan that involves getting DeJuan Blair in foul trouble can lead to a Pitt loss.

Powerball

If there is one team that hit the lottery with its draw, it has to be Louisville. I guess that getting the top overall seed in the Tournament comes with its benefits, but surely Rick Pitino couldn’t have expected this gift-wrapped bracket on Sunday. Look at it this way – of the 16 teams seeded 1-4, the four that turn the ball over most are Xavier, Michigan State, Kansas and Wake Forest. Of those four teams, three of them are in Louisville’s Midwest Region. Whoever beats the Cardinals will find a way to limit turnovers, and it’s unlikely that any of those teams will be able to handle Louisville’s pressure. Only bad shot selection will derail the Cardinals’ run to the Final Four.

Richard Hatch

This has to be West Virginia, since its coach Bob Huggins is the one I would least want to see naked. As long as Huggins keeps his clothes on, though, he should have the Mountaineers in position to do some damage in the NCAAs. Should it happen, a 3-6 matchup with Kansas on Sunday will be one of the games to watch in this year’s first weekend. If the Mountaineers are able to force some turnovers and get some offensive rebounds – preventing those two things are two of Kansas’ strengths – then WVU could run into Louisville for a rematch of the 2005 Elite Eight, but this time those two would meet as members of the same conference.

Del’s Lemonade

Del’s encourages you to “Stop at the sign of the lemon,” and if there is a lemon among this year’s top seeds, that team is Oklahoma. With a 27-5 record and two of those losses coming with Blake Griffin injured, the Sooners are a team that many think will threaten North Carolina in the South. In reality, Oklahoma had been underwhelming all season, even while winning. The Sooners opened up Big 12 Conference play with 11 straight wins, but six of them were single-digit victories, not the sign of a dominant team. That Oklahoma lost to Texas and Kansas without Griffin available for much of either game was just good timing on the Sooners’ part. Griffin was healthy and fit for losses to Missouri and Oklahoma State in the season’s final two weeks. Juan Patillo has added some depth to this team, but it’s still very thin. Only Arizona, Arizona State and Oklahoma’s first-round opponent Morgan State get fewer minutes from their bench than does Jeff Capel

Coffee Milk

Since coffee milk is one of the best-kept culinary delights of the great state or Rhode Island, the NCAA Tournament’s coffee-milk team is one that has been lurking just beneath the radar this season. UCLA has made the last three Final Fours, but is hardly being talked about this season because it has not met its very high standards. Still, the Bruins have a terrific offense led by Darren Collison, one of the nation’s best point guards. Jrue Holliday is a versatile freshman guard who can score and defend and rebound. Nikola Dragovic and Josh Shipp are terrific shooters, and even Alfred Aboya has developed a face-up game.

The Bruins are coached by Ben Howland, whose postseason pedigree is unquestioned. UCLA still plays good if not great defense, led by its ability to force turnovers, and there is very little that would stop me from predicting UCLA to make a deep run in March, except for one thing – UCLA’s second-round game will likely be against Villanova in Philadelphia. If the Bruins can manage to get past Villanova on its home floor, I think they have a very good shot of getting all the way to the Final Four.

Buddy Cianci

ESPN’s “Bracketologist,” Joe Lunardi has a toupee that would make even Buddy Cianci blush. It’s unclear whether he wears make-up, but he could use some to cover up another mediocre performance in his bracket projecting. He’s exalted as the authority in the field, when in fact there are many who do it much better. Check out the results of this year’s projectors. This was actually Lunardi’s best year in a while, finishing 22nd of the 61 projectors. We at BaselineStats.com finished third, something we’re quite pleased with in the first year of this site. So, next year when you’re trying to figure out where a team is likely to be seeded or whether a team is in or out, consider checking out BaselineStats.com before listening to Mr. Lunardi.

Wein-O-Rama

Michigan State is the Wein-O-Rama team of this Tournament. I grew up about a quarter mile from the greatest fast-food place man has ever known, and I always make sure to take a trip back every time I’m back in Rhode Island. I enter Wein-O-Rama, and the smells remind me of growing up and stopping by after baseball games for a few wieners “all the way.” What we forget, though, is how the wieners make us feel afterwards, and it’s the same with Michigan State.

On the surface, there is absolutely no reason to pick against the Spartans. They’re very talented, have a great point guard, are awesome on the glass and have a championship coach. And yet, whenever I decide to believe in this team again, indigestion ensues. This is a team that has been blown out by Maryland, North Carolina, Ohio State and Purdue and lost at home to Northwestern and Penn State. Still, when the Spartans are on, I can count the better teams on the fingers of one hand. It’s that potential that will convince so many to pick the Spartans to go to the Final Four, but there’s no way this team can put three good performances together, and they’ll need that to get to Detroit.

Awful Awfuls

There are so many ways I can go with this one, but I’ll head to the SEC where Sunday’s conference tournament final was simply an AWFUL AWFUL game. It had just two things going for it: 1) it was close to the end; 2) Verne Lundquist and Bill Raftery were doing the game. The referees were terrible, the clock operator was atrocious, the shooting was ridiculously bad. There was a 10-second call on Mississippi State when Tennessee wasn’t even applying any pressure. Mississippi State shot two air-ball 3-pointers on a single possession and another a possession or two later. There were plenty of bad shots, stupid passes, ugly travels – it was basically the SEC basketball season in a nutshell, one that could be entitled “At Least We’re Good at Football.”

My point is this – Mississippi State is the SEC “champion,” and the Bulldogs will play Washington in a West Region game in Portland. And, while MSU has a terrific shot-blocker in Jarvis Varnado and Rick Stansbury’s team actually shoots the 3-pointer pretty well, despite all evidence from Sunday to the contrary. The Huskies are the Pac-10 regular-season champion and, unlike Mississippi State, are actually a good team and playing close to home, so all those folks who are looking at this matchup as a chance for an upset should look elsewhere.

As Lundquist said during Sunday’s SEC debacle, “What we have here so far is a puzzlement.” The entire SEC season was puzzling, but it would be even more so if any of its members made it to the second week of the Tournament.

Brendon Desrochers, who claims to have grown up “within a driver and a 3-iron of both the ACI and Del’s ‘world headquarters,’” didn’t realize that not everyone drinks coffee milk until he went to college. He currently lives in New York and is an editorial producer Major League Baseball Advanced Media.

Photo of the Pitt Panther by Kevin Coles

[where: 02910]

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