A Quick College Chemistry Course
On this, the night the NBA yields the stage to college basketball, let's pause for a moment to examine one of the greatest differences between the two games: the importance of chemistry.
Good chemistry means so much more in college. That's about 50 percent of the reason Duke is playing for the championship Monday night. Over the weekend Mike Krzyzewski told CBS, "I love my group. They're as close as any team that I've ever coached. They enjoy being together."
If I had heard him say that before the tournament started I would have picked the Blue Devils to reach the Final Four instead of predicting they'd get bounced by the Sweet 16. I recall Coach K having similar sentiments about his 2001 team led by Shane Battier and Jay Williams, the last time Duke won a championship. Good chemistry can be worth an extra couple of victories in the NCAA tournament.
Good chemistry gets you nowhere in the NBA. Maybe it makes the team more enjoyable for the fans to watch, but it just doesn't translate into enough victories. Ask the Houston Rockets. They made a nice run, but at the pro level -- be it over the course of a season or a seven-game series -- talent prevails.
The upside of having a group of guys that gets along is limited in the pros. Horrendous chemistry can hurt an NBA team more than excellent chemistry can boost it. It's only a problem if the players hate each other so much that they won't pass to an open man. Otherwise the interaction can be as impersonal as handing a deposit slip to a bank teller, and the team will be fine as long as the players are good enough.
"Without a doubt," Phil Jackson said. "When you're professional you understand that personalities are going to be different. You have foreign players that come play on your team. There's not the same bond that's created by the college atmosphere, the fraternity kind of spirit that goes along with college sport. I've had and played on teams that had a very close-knit group, and won a championship with a team that was not close at all and had a professional relationship that was very good."
That latter team Jackson was referring to was the second Knicks championship team in 1973, but I'm sure his second Laker team fit the bill as well. For that matter, his second championship season in Chicago began with Michael Jordan and Horace Grant getting into a verbal fight on the first day of training camp.
Part of the appeal of the NCAA tournament is you get the sense the players actually like each other. You watch them link arms on the bench before crucial free throws. If Butler wins tonight you'll see a leaping, twisting chest bump between the coach and players. You won't see that stuff in the NBA. You also won't see three of the four semifinalists failing to score 60 points in 40 minutes of basketball, as you did Saturday. In the NBA, skills beat socializing.
(c)2010 ESPN Internet Ventures
Summers scores 19, Michigan State beats pesky Northern Iowa 59-52 to reach round of 8With its star player on the bench in a walking boot, Michigan State needed someone to pull it through another difficult game.
Sophomore Korie Lucious did - again.
Following up on his buzzer-beater in the second round, Lucious hit a whirling, fallaway jumper with 91 seconds left, lifting Michigan State back into the regional finals with a 59-52 win over hard-to-shake Northern Iowa on Friday night in the Midwest Regional.
"He stepping up for us and that's exactly what we need," Michigan State forward Draymond Green said.
Lucious' role became much bigger when Kalin Lucas ruptured his Achilles' tendon in the second round against Maryland. All the sophomore did in that game was hit the game-winning shot at the buzzer.
Against Northern Iowa, Lucious played 39 steady minutes, finishing with 10 points, six rebounds, four assists, four steals and one big shot that has the Spartans within one game of their sixth Final Four in 12 years.
"It's just from my teammates having the confidence in me to take that shot," Lucious said. "I just try to take it with confidence."
Michigan State had it relatively easy in its previous two trips to the Final Four, its deep, talented teams overwhelming opponents.
This year's team had to survive a whack-a-mole-like season filled with winning streaks, injuries, suspensions and benchings. The Spartans then had to get through a physically-demanding game against a Northern Iowa team that had already taken out the field favorite in Kansas.
Michigan State pulled it out behind Lucious, Durrell Summers' 19 points and by holding the Panthers to 10 free throws and no field goals over the final 10:21 to send the Heartland heroes home.
Always at their best in the NCAA tournament, the Spartans move on to play Sunday against sixth-seeded Tennessee, which beat No. 2 Ohio State 76-73 earlier Friday night.
"It feels great to be back," Michigan State forward Draymond Green said. "We've still got bigger dreams."
The Spartans crushed Northern Iowa's.
The Panthers (30-5) knocked off one college basketball giant but couldn't make it two straight, unable to contain the athletic Spartans for an entire game after stunning top-seeded Kansas in the second round.
Adam Koch had 13 points and Kwadzo Ahelegbe 12 for Northern Iowa, but Ali Farokhmanesh's run came to an end. The early round star was just 1 for 6 from 3-point range and finished with nine points as the Panthers' deepest run in the NCAA tournament came to a close.
"In some time, they'll have a lot to look back and a lot to be proud of," Northern Iowa coach Ben Jacobson said. "But not yet."
A few years back, maybe this was a mismatch: the powerhouse from the Big Ten against the scrappy mid-major.
Not this year.
Northern Iowa has done its best to shake the underdog tag, reaching the NCAA tournament five of past seven years, moving into the round of 16 this year for the first time with wins over UNLV and Kansas.
Farokhmanesh ran off the Runnin' Rebels with a 3-pointer with 4.9 seconds left in the opening round, then topped it with a no-no-no-great-shot! 3 to take out the Jayhawks. The son of an Iranian Olympic volleyball player, Farokhmanesh has become a star back in Cedar Falls, a Stephen Curry-like sensation to the rest of the country.
Of course, all the Panthers have reached a new level of fame, appearing on magazine covers, with fans from all over jumping aboard the purple-powered bandwagon.
"We've had a lot of support from our fans, from our community and we really appreciate that," Koch said.
Michigan State has been the monument of the bracket under Izzo: 13 straight NCAA tournaments, nine trips to the round of 16, seven to the regional finals, five Final Fours, a national title in 2000.
This season has been a little tougher road, punctuated by the injury to Lucas, the Spartans' leading scorer and catalyst.
Michigan State beat Maryland without him, pulled out an eveything-it-had win over Northern Iowa and can now start looking ahead.
"That Final Four, you can finally talk about it," Izzo said. "This is what you play for - at least it's what I play for. It's great when you're working this time of year."
(c) 2010 Newser, LLC
#1 Syracuse Orange Reach Sweet 16 After Blasting #8 Gonzaga BulldogsOne day after the #1 Kansas Jayhawks fell to the #9 Northern Iowa Panthers the Syracuse Orange came out on the court determined not to see their NCAA college basketball tournament end in disappointment. On Sunday it was clear that the #1 Orange weren’t taking anything for granted as they blasted the #8 Gonzaga Bulldogs 87-65 to advance to the Sweet 16.
Wes Johnson led Syracuse with 31 points and 14 rebounds while Andy Rautins added 24 points in the blowout.
Syracuse was simply unstoppable from beyond the three-point line, hitting 12-25, while Gonzaga was a miserable 3-21 from the same distance.
The win sends Syracuse to Salt Lake City where they will face Butler in the Sweet 16 on March 25.
Copyright 2010, TransWorldNews, Inc
Friday's College Basketball Scores
MIDWEST
South Dakota 76, Texas-Pan American 71
SOUTHWEST
Houston Baptist 74, N.J. Tech 64
TOURNAMENT
Atlantic 10 Conference
Quarterfinals
Rhode Island 63, Saint Louis 47
Richmond 77, Massachusetts 72
Temple 69, St. Bonaventure 51
Xavier 78, Dayton 73
Atlantic Coast Conference
Quarterfinals
Duke 57, Virginia 46
Georgia Tech 69, Maryland 64
Miami 70, Virginia Tech 65
N.C. State 58, Florida St. 52
Big 12 Conference
Semifinals
M 66
Kansas St. 82, Baylor 75
Big East Conference
Semifinals
Georgetown 80, Marquette 57
West Virginia 53, Notre Dame 51
Big Ten Conference
Quarterfinals
Illinois 58, Wisconsin 54
Minnesota 72, Michigan St. 67, OT
Ohio St. 69, Michigan 68
Purdue 69, Northwestern 61
Big West Conference
Semifinals
Long Beach State 68, Pacific 61
UC Santa Barbara 76, UC Davis 62
Conference USA
Semifinals
Southern Miss. 66
UTEP 75, Tulsa 61
Mid-American Conference
Semifinals
Akron 66, W. Michigan 64
Ohio 54, Miami (Ohio) 42
Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference
Semifinals
Morgan St. 74, Hampton 67
S. Carolina St. 70, Delaware St. 66, OT
Mountain West Conference
Semifinals
San Diego St. 72, New Mexico 69
UNLV 70, BYU 66
NCAA Division II
First Round
BYU-Hawaii 76, Seattle Pacific 72
CS San Bernardino 75, Humboldt St. 66
Cal Poly-Pomona 71, Dixie St. 62
W. Washington 84, Cent. Washington 70
NCAA Division III
Semifinals
Brandeis 76, Rhode Island Coll. 65
E. Mennonite 74, Whitworth 71
Marshall 92, St. Mary's, Md. 87
Guilford 75, Wooster 68
Illinois Wesleyan 77, Carthage 72
Randolph-Macon 68, DeSales 55
Williams 104, Utica Tech 70
Wis.-Stevens Pt. 74, Texas-Dallas 67
Pacific-10 Conference
Semifinals
California 85, UCLA 72
Washington 79, Stanford 64
Patriot League
Championship
Lehigh 74, Lafayette 59
Southeastern Conference
Quarterfinals
Kentucky 73, Alabama 67
Mississippi St. 75, Florida 69
Tennessee 76, Mississippi 65
Vanderbilt 78, Georgia 66
Southwestern Athletic Conference
Semifinals
Ark.-Pine Bluff 46, Alabama St. 44
Texas Southern 60, Grambling St. 57
Western Athletic Conference
Semifinals
Utah St. 85, Louisiana Tech 55
New Mexico State 80, Nevada 79
(c)1999-2009 TheSpread.com Inc
Duke Rips UNC to Claim Top ACC College Basketball Tournament SeedingThe number four ranked Duke men's college basketball team beat their rivals from University of North Carolina 82-50 to claim the top seed in the ACC tournament. The Duke Blue Devils routed the team with a stunning 53-26 first half score at halftime.
Nolan Smith also scored twenty points for the Blue Devils in the win Saturday.
Star player for Duke Kyle Singler scored 25 points with 19 coming in the first half. The team shot an impressive 51% in the first half leading to a rout of the UNC team.
Duke will now be seeded first in the tournament set to begin next week.
(c)Media-Newswire.com
Cavs fall to Duke, lose seventh-straight
CHARLOTTESVILLE -- No Sylven Landesberg meant no chance for Virginia against the ACC's top team.
As expected, the Duke Blue Devils dismantled the Cavs 67-49 last night in front of a full house at John Paul Jones Arena. Landesberg, the team's top scorer did not play because of a thigh bruise he sustained against Miami on Tuesday night.
He could have played sparingly if needed, but a 20-4 start by the Blue Devils kept things out of reach for the Hoos from the get go.
In Landesberg's absence junior Jeff Jones filled in, having what may have been his worst game of the season. Jones was guarding Duke's Kyle Singler, a matchup that was a mismatch from the start.
In the first half, Singler scored 15 points, while Jones did not score on three attempts from the field.
Virginia's recent shooting woes continued with a 1-for-12 performance in the game's opening minutes, and guard Sammy Zeglinski had a tough time getting started. He made a 3-pointer midway through the first half, settling in after that to score six first-half points and return to the form he'd shown during the first half of the season.
Forward Mike Scott once again struggled from the field. After going 0-for-7 against Miami, he started the game 0-for-6 last night against Duke before being brought to the bench with nine minutes to play in the second half.
After the team's loss to Virginia Tech, the start of its offensive slide, coach Tony Bennett lamented the fact that the team only had two scorers - Scott and Landesberg - and that a third option would help take pressure off them.
With Landesberg out and Scott ineffective, the team had neither of those options last night, and it showed as the offense struggled to generate any positive momentum.
The night's lone bright spot was Jerome Meyinsse, who scored 21 points, nearly as much as the rest of the team combined.
The Cavs fall to 14-13, with a 5-9 mark in ACC play. They have two games remaining, and must win one to finish Bennett's first season with a .500 mark. Alternately, they could win two games at next week's conference tournament in Greensboro.
Virginia currently sits tied for ninth in the 12-member ACC. It's tied with Boston College - the two teams meet Wednesday night.
But the Cavs are also just one game from the conference's cellar, currently a three-way tie between Miami, N.C. State and North Carolina. At stake in the final week is seeding for the conference tourney.
(c)2010 Media General Communications Holdings, LLC
Cornell basketball gets an 'A' in chemistry
Basketball coaches talk all the time about the importance of team chemistry. When a team is winning, it is always about work ethic and great kids and desire and, of course, team chemistry. Players on winning teams love one another. Players on losing teams transfer or, in the NBA, demand to be traded.
Cornell Coach Steve Donahue doesn't have to talk about team chemistry. His players live team chemistry. "If you tried to get your players to do this, ordered them to do it, no way would it happen," he said this week. "Our guys just did it. It was their idea. That's why it works."
Their idea, hatched two years ago, was to live together. All of them. In one house -- 14 college basketball players under one roof in an old house near the Cornell campus.
"The good news is it's a really big house," starting center Jeff Foote said. "We've all got our own rooms. Even so, the place does get pretty dirty a fair amount of the time."
No doubt. Donahue really doesn't care that much about his players' skills as housekeepers, though, especially given the results they've produced as basketball players the last three seasons. The Big Red has won back-to-back Ivy League titles and was 21-4 after Saturday night's 48-45 win over Princeton. It has road or neutral-site wins over Alabama, St. John's, Massachusetts, Saint Joseph's, Toledo, Davidson and La Salle. And its losses were to Seton Hall, at Pennsylvania in a slip-up Friday night, and at Kansas and Syracuse -- currently ranked No. 1 and No. 2 in the nation.
The final score of the Kansas game was 71-66, and it was closer than that. Cornell led most of the game and leading scorer Ryan Wittman had a crack at a three-point shot in the final seconds that could have tied the score.
"Because of who we were playing and where we were playing and the fact that the last six or seven minutes were on national TV [ESPN switched to the game], I think I've had more feedback on that game than on all the other games I've coached here combined," Donahue said. "I think it surprised some people to see how good we are."
Cornell is good, even though it doesn't have a single national TV appearance scheduled this season. But no one is going to call the Big Red or Donahue an overnight success. This was a long time coming.
Donahue came to Cornell in the fall of 2000 after 10 seasons as an assistant coach under Fran Dunphy at Penn. The popular thinking then, as it has been throughout most of the Ivy League's history, was that third place was about as good as any Ivy League team not named Penn or Princeton could hope for most years. Columbia shared the league title with Princeton in 1968, Brown won it in 1986 and Cornell won it in 1988. In the other 37 seasons from Columbia's co-title through 2007, Princeton or Penn won or shared each championship.
"I knew in a place like this you don't build quickly," Donahue said. "You have to get kids who fit Cornell, not just kids with talent, because if they don't like the place, their talent isn't going to matter. We were lucky we got some kids to come who went out and convinced better kids to follow them, and they convinced better kids than that to come. By the time we got this senior class [high school class of 2006] we thought we had something going.
"And then we got Foote."
The key player in that 2006 recruiting class was Wittman, the son of former Indiana star and NBA player Randy Wittman. "I liked everything about the place when I visited," he said.
It was during that season that Foote transferred from St. Bonaventure. He was not, in any way, a typical transfer. Donahue had seen him play briefly in a high school tournament at Cornell. "He was probably 6-9 or 6-10 and might have weighed 170," he said. "I remember thinking he could pass the ball but he was so gangly and awkward. There were D-3 coaches watching him that day and none of them thought he was good enough for them."
In fact, the only D-3 school that even talked to Foote was Rochester Institute of Technology, and that was as a courtesy because his brother Jesse had played there. "I went from like 6-4 as a sophomore to 6-11 as a senior," Jeff Foote said. "I lost all my coordination. Everything was hard for me."
Foote ended up at St. Bonaventure as a walk-on. During his freshman season, Donahue and his team were struck by what appeared at the time to be a genuine tragedy when Khaliq Gant, then a sophomore, went down during a drill in practice and, in one of those horrible freak accidents, never got up.
Gant was paralyzed from the neck down. Eight weeks after the accident, he could only blink his eyes. It took four months before he got movement back, but he did recover -- not to play basketball, but to graduate from Cornell and live a normal life. "Thank God he turned out to be completely okay," Donahue said. "For a long time it didn't look like he would be."
During Gant's lengthy stay at Arnot Ogden Medical Center in Elmira, N.Y., the chief nurse in the intensive care unit was Wanda Foote -- Jeff's mom.
"She got to be friendly with everyone on the team, but especially with" Zach Spiker, then a Big Red assistant, her son said. "She mentioned I was at Bonaventure not playing at all and they invited me to come and work out with them at their camp that summer. I couldn't do it but when I decided the next fall to transfer, Mom contacted Coach Spiker right away."
By then, Foote had filled out to all of about 205 pounds, but at 7 feet tall and a good student, Spiker convinced Donahue he was worth the risk. Foote transferred between semesters and became part of the class of 2010.
Foote now weighs about 240 pounds and is considered a long-shot NBA prospect, someone who will at least get to continue playing basketball overseas. He's the team's second-leading scorer (12.7 points per game) and averages close to nine rebounds in addition to being a defensive force inside. He's become something of a folk hero on campus partly because of his play; partly because he once told the student newspaper that he "hated" all squirrels because one had gotten into the house he was living in one summer and destroyed his laptop; and partly because he famously got up on a table and danced in a campus hangout the night Cornell clinched the Ivy League title in 2008.
All of that said, as much fun as the players clearly have together, they are very serious about wanting to be known as more than just a nice mid-major team. As a No. 14 seed in the NCAA tournament the past two seasons, the Big Red drew Stanford and Missouri. This year, if it continues to play well, Cornell should be a much higher seed given the quality of teams it has beaten -- and the teams it has lost to thus far.
"When we saw the schedule last summer we knew why Coach had put it together that way," Wittman said. "He wanted to challenge us, see if we could close the deal against good teams. We've been to the NCAA tournament, and our first goal is to win the Ivy League and get back there. But I don't think we'll be satisfied with that. We want to do more than that. We think we have that kind of ability."
They also have the team chemistry. And the messy house they all live in to prove it.
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