Wooden Showing Love to Love
John Wooden, the legendary coach of the most storied basketball program in the nation, has been in contact with current UCLA freshman Kevin Love. According to an ESPN article by Andy Katz about the two, Love reached out to Wooden, now a 97-year-old man, for advise and assistance, and a little perspective on the history of UCLA hoops. Wooden had coached some pretty famous big men in his day, including Bill Walton and Lew Alcindor, during his career in Westwood, and presumably would have a lot of advise to give a hearalded frosh forward like Love. If you are a ULCA fan, or you admire the coaching of Wooden, then you should check out the article.
ESPN/USA today has ranked the UCLA Bruins as the number two team in the nation behind North Carolina. They will return many of the players who got them to the Final Four last season, and although Aflalo will be missed, UCLA’s recruiting class, including Love, is a big reason that people expect huge things from the Bruins. With so much pressure and hype about the Bruins this year, it’s a good thing to see a player like Kevin Love work on keeping grounded through a mentorship with a coach like Wooden.
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ACC Preview
The Atlantic Coast Conference, always one of the most compelling in college basketball, has long been the property of the Tobacco Road schools, North Carolina and Duke. Will this year be the same? You can check out what ESPN’s Jay Bilas thinks by looking at his preview of the ACC. You get brief synopsis of each team in the conference- how they did last year, the player changes that have occurred, and his predicted finish for each team. It’s a good way to get acquainted with one of the most talked-about conferences in the country. In a month or two, you’re going to have to know the players and the team perceptions by heart, so you had better start studying right now.
AS you might already know, UNC is expected by most of the experts to be one of the best four or five teams in the nation. In fact, many people believe that they will enter the season as the No. 1 in the AP Poll. After the Tar Heels, though, things in the ACC get a little messier. Will Duke still have the players down low to compete? Will BC have the answer to Dudley’s absence? Will North Carolina State live up to the hype? Decide for yourself after you read the article.
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ESPN/USA Today Top 25 Poll Released
The ESPN/USA Today Top 25 Poll has just been released, so you should check it out and start your complaining or cheering, depending on what team you follow. The North Carolina Tar Heels, who return many of their star players, are the preseason #1. UCLA, Memphis and Kansas follow as the #s 2, 3, and 4. The Pac-10 did well, getting six teams in the Top 25 plus Washington and Cal both received votes. There have been many other rankings lists that have come out already, but the USA Today is one of the most widely used and respected indicators of a team’s relative strength.
The best part about these polls is that they spark conversation, but probably the second best thing about them is that you can see how many votes the teams got in the polls. There are a total of 54 teams that showed up on the list, but 29 of them are not technically ranked. They appear on the list of teams called “Others Receiving Votes.” Basically, if you see your school’s name on that list, you know that they are waiting in the wings to get a national ranking. It’s a great motivator.
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Making Hoops Player Comparisons the Stats Way
The new website Basketball-Prospectus.com is a stats guy’s dream-come-true. If you are interested in learning more about the college or pro basketball world through the exhaustive analysis of statistics and raw data, then you should probably stop spending your time with the big guns in the sports news world, like ESPN, CBS, Fox or your local newspaper’s sports column guy. If you want to sound like a hoops genius, then you had better look at the way the guys at BP do their thing. For instance, if you look at an article by Ken Pomeroy, you might be pleasantly awarded with some really interesting perspectives on how to compare players to other players at the college ranks.
You have all made comparisons of current college hoops stars to former hoops players or other current NBA players. People compared Adam Morrison to Larry Bird, and Glen Davis to Shaq. But how much did those players actually play like each other, and how much were their appearances the most similar thing about them? To find out the answer scientifically, Pomeroy developed a clever mathematical formula, but you will have to read the whole thing to find out his methods.
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Big East Coaches Poll Out
The Big East preseason coaches poll has revealed that Georgetown and Louisville are considered to be the favorites in the conference. Georgetown has one notable departure from their team, Jeff Green, but they will return four of last year’s five starters, including one of the nation’s most recognizable centers, Roy Hibbert. Georgetown lost in the Final Four last year to Ohio State. Louisville will return their top seven scorers from last year, including sophomore Scottie Reynolds. The Big East is usually a very powerful college basketball conference, and they are once again expected to send multiple teams to the tournament this year. You should read the short announcement that CBS Sportsline has made about the preseason poll, because you can get a sense of how the guys on the inside feel about the way the conference is headed this season.
One of the most interesting things about the poll is that not only does it rank the best teams in the conference as determined by the perceptions of the coaches, but it also lists who the coaches expect to be the All-Big East players… even before one game has taken place. The problem with reading too much into the preseason polls is that you cannot fully take into account the affect that stellar freshman will have on a program. As we all know, freshmen have seen their role in college hoops increase greatly in the past few years.
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Michigan State Spartans Basketball Reloaded with Talent
Everybody should know about Michigan State’s Senior point guard Drew Neitzel, a dynamic scorer and playmaker who might just get the Big Ten Player of the Year this upcoming season. But can you name anybody else on the team? Unless you are a Spartans basketball fan, then you probably only know Neitzel and coach Tom Izzo from Michigan State. But according to Seth Davis’ SportsIllustrated.com article, the Michigan State Spartans should be one of the deepest teams in their conference. I won’t ruin the surprise for you, so you will have to read the article to find out about all of the great recruits that the Spartans have picked up over the off season. It should be a really exciting basketball season for fans of this team.
On a lighter note, with the DVD release of the epic film “300,” do you think that high school and college basketball teams with Spartan nicknames will be overusing clips from the movie during their introduction ceremonies? Do you think that Tom Izzo will invite all of the Michigan State players over to his house before each home game for a sleep over where everyone pulls their sleeping bags and blankets over to the big TV to fall asleep watching “300”? If you have seen the movie, then you are well aware of the fact that there are several scenes that could really pump up a crowd that came to root for the Spartans. We will have to see in the next few months.
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The Scoop on ‘Nova Hoops
Fox Sports has been counting down the 25 best college basketball teams entering into the 2007 season. Making the list at No. 20 is the Villanova Wildcats, a team that always seems to garner some attention in the brackets around tourney time. Well, this year should be no exception, as Villanova is expecting to once again have a winning year. If you were worried about the departure of several of the stars from last year, you should be. But you’ll probably get rid of those fears after a few games of watching the young bloods out there refilling the ‘Nova backcourt. Many people, including the guys at Fox Sports, think that Villanova’s Corey Fisher is the new Kyle Lowry, but sometimes you have to wonder if such a player can be so easily replaced. The experts probably aren’t wrong about Fisher and his fellow frosh guards, but you should might want to reserve making bold statements about such unproven players.
A few things you can say about ‘Nova for sure is that they well have experience in the frontcourt. You probably haven’t heard of the players who will be playing the bulk of the minutes down low (that’s why you should read the article), but you should if you are going to be a Villanova fan this year. One of the best things about the Fox Sports guys is that they practically do the job of a sports tickets blogger like myself. The bottom of the article has a few key games that you should definitely try to get tickets to see.
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Pepperdine Suffering from Malibu Fires
For residents of the Southern California coast, the news all day has been about the spreading wildfires that have displaced thousands, and are still yet uncontained. One of the schools most affected by the blazes has been Pepperdine University, which had to be evacuated as the fires in Malibu came dangerously close. The sky is gray with smoke, the ground is black with ash, and the university campus itself is now nearly a ghost town as commuters and campus residents scatter to avoid the fire’s path. Of course this disaster is affecting the school greatly, especially the athletics teams, many of which are either beginning or ending their seasons. The Pepperdine cross country team has the West Coast Conference Championship Meet next Saturday, but there won’t be any running in the thick smoke around the coastal Los Angeles area.
The Pepperdine Waves basketball team, which is full of young players, is going to be missing key early-season practices indefinitely. The school has been shut down until further notice, and communicating with players is difficult, as many have returned home for the time being. This latest news comes right on the heels of some other awful basketball developments. Pepperdine’s top returning scorer, Kingsley Costain, has been dismissed from the school for a violation of university policy.
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Numbers Can (Sometimes) Lie in College Hoops
As a writer of hoops blogs, it’s easy to understand when there is the randomly misattributed stat, an occasional error, a typo or the like. When you are trying to relay the facts, oftentimes there is a slight disconnect between the actual events and the way they are recorded. There is room for error in the process, and nobody knows that more than people who cover the news… and college basketball statisticians. If you have any experience in trying to keep stats for your high school basketball team, then you might understand how difficult being accurate can be. At the college level there are more people involved in the process, but there are also more stats and the stakes are a lot higher. Millions of dollars in contracts to play professionally are on the line. That’s why making sure that the stats are correct is important. The validity of stats in college hoops is the subject of a really good read, written at BasketballProspectus.com by Ken Pomeroy.
You really have to read this one, especially if you are a fan of Acie Law, Texas A&M or New Mexico State. Those assists stats you were so impressed or disappointed with, might just be bunk. Assists are one of the most subjective stats in the three major American sports, and you can actually see what teams have “hometown scorers.” Very interesting. If you think that your stats guy might be helping your guys, you should check their stats. You can learn how to do that in this article.
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Taking a Look at Stanford
Fox Sports is counting down the top 25 teams in the nation- according to them- heading into the 2007-08 season. Every day they will review a team until they finally get down to their No. 1. Today’s focus is their No. 25 pick, Stanford. We all know about the Lopez twins, the Twin Towers, as they call them. Well, if you read this article you’ll see what problems the Cardinal have to get past to have a successful season in the tough Pac-10. If you are short on time, the article has a few short talking points at the bottom of the page that explain each side of the Stanford argument. Now you’ll have something to talk about this Thanksgiving with your brother-in-law who decided to wear his red Stanford sweater to the dinner table.
There are going to be a lot of team overviews out there in the next few weeks, so you will want to know which ones to bother with, and which ones to just skim over. If you only follow the school you graduated from, and maybe their conference, then getting your hoops news from a place like BasketballProspectus.com is a great idea, because you can get in-depth stats analysis and commentary as well. The articles are longer than you’ll find at Fox Sports, but if you would like to concentrate your studying on one team or one conference, then it’s a good bet.
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