After a tournament full of the buzzer-beaters, overtimes and upsets, the number of men’s college basketball teams in the hunt for the national title has dwindled to four. March Madness will conclude this weekend as Connecticut, Florida, Kentucky and Wisconsin battle to be the last one standing.
UConn: Often, the leading scorer on a team gets too much attention, at the expense of his teammates getting the accolades they deserve. But if there is anything that cannot be overhyped, it’s Shabazz Napier. Only one player leads a premier team in points, rebounds and assists. Even better, his name is Shabazz.
Since Kemba Walker’s title run in 2011, the Huskies’ go-to offense has been to give the ball to their best player and let him create his own shot. This is generally considered terrible basketball. UConn is not a very efficient offensive team, especially for one with such skilled guards. The squad’s success this season has been primarily due to a surprisingly effective defense, which improved drastically from last year. UConn could probably do better on offense if it worked harder at getting other guys open looks and gave Napier the chance to attack when defenses are scrambling. But why should they? A contested three by Napier is nearly as good as an open shot by anyone else, and watching his hero-ball has been one of the best things about this tournament.
The real downside is that it leads to ball-hogging by some of UConn’s lesser stars. When DeAndre Daniels and Ryan Boatright get touches, they’re more likely to be aggressive knowing that they probably won’t get another opportunity in that possession. Boatright especially has been an inefficient scorer all season, and UConn is much better when he distributes the ball. He and Daniels together will use as many possessions as Shabazz does, and likely with similar one-on-one moves. But with the game on the line, Shabazz is getting the ball. And he’s not going to pass.
Florida: Shabazz, meet Scottie Wilbekin, the best on-ball defender in the country. There’s a possibility that Florida Head Coach Billy Donovan gives the assignment of containing Napier to someone else to avoid his best offensive threat tiring or getting in foul trouble, but chances are Wilbekin will be guarding Shabazz for a significant chunk of Saturday’s game. How much that matters is up for debate.
To basketball strategists, it seems intuitive that defending the point guard is of the utmost importance. After all, the point guard runs the offense. Defending him should be a team’s first priority. But some basketball statisticians believe they have proven that frontcourt defenders are far more important than guards. Fortunately for Florida, they also have Patric Young, the SEC Defensive Player of the Year. Centers are frequently recipients of that award, but Young earned it for different reasons than most. At 6 feet 9 inches, he is short for a center on a major college team and therefore not an elite shot-blocker, though he is a very good one. Young’s value comes from his quickness relative to others in his weight class.
Young, even more than Wilbekin, is responsible for the success of Donovan’s aggressive defensive schemes. He can help liberally, hedge hard on screens or double-team a player on the baseline and still get back to his man. He is as good or better in the post, where his success is no mystery. The dude is jacked. In every Florida game I’ve watched this year, the announcers have mentioned Young’s biceps, and I still wish they would cut to him more. If there are two things that cannot be overhyped, the second is Young’s sculpted body.
Kentucky: The story line for Kentucky this year is that a team full of first-years finally figured it out. After struggling all year, they learned how to play together just in time for the tournament. That explanation makes some sense. After all, first-years typically have less experience, so we might expect a young team to have a steeper learning curve than others and perform better at this point in the year than it did the rest of the season.
But remember just two weeks ago when Mercer beat Duke or Stanford beat Kansas or Dayton beat Syracuse? The announcers raved about how those senior-laden teams knew how to perform in big moments, and the first-year phenoms who led their teams to great regular-season records could not come through in the clutch. If we used the same reasoning for Jabari Parker and Tyler Ennis that explained Kentucky’s success, we would expect their teams to thrash the lowly mid-majors they played. The truth is that the experience gained over the last three months probably doesn’t matter as much as we think. Kentucky did not suddenly become good — they were always good. When announcers claim that Kentucky is playing their best basketball of the season right now, they’re correct. But any team that makes the Final Four is playing their best basketball of the season. Even Florida has played better than ever, and they were the top seed coming into the tournament.
Every Final Four team is playing better than ever, and the most likely explanation for this is random chance. Some teams will overperform and some will underperform. The ones that overperform will go on in the tournament. Kentucky’s success suggests that it overperformed in the tournament and underperformed in the regular season. But we knew that already. A team that can start all future NBA first-round picks and barely wins two-thirds of its games is clearly underperforming.
Wisconsin: Kentucky is eighth in the country in blocks per game. That’s great news for the Badgers. In the last week, Kentucky coach John Calipari has almost certainly shown his team hours of film on Wisconsin and said the phrase “Don’t leave your feet” a hundred times. It doesn’t matter. Kentucky is going to bite on the pump fake. Everyone the Badgers have played this year has fallen into that trap, and Kentucky is ill-equipped to break that trend.
Wisconsin will need to use that, because they are at a severe athletic disadvantage. Several announcers have noted that this is the most athletic Badger team Head Coach Bo Ryan has ever had, but they’re really only talking about forward Sam Dekker. Dekker was supposed to be the star of this year’s team, and he does play a key role, but this team has hardly deviated from Ryan’s traditional style of play. Wisconsin’s ball movement is outstanding, and they do a great job playing inside-out once they have gotten the ball in the post. Center Frank Kaminsky scored 28 points in their last match-up against Arizona, and his scoring ability has been highly touted, but one of the reasons he scores so easily is because he is a great passer. Arizona refused to double-team Kaminsky in the post, even when he was scoring half of Wisconsin’s points. Everyone who plays for Wisconsin can shoot, and Kaminsky will find the open man.
Kaminksy is the Badgers’ best player, but point guard Traevon Jackson may be the most important. He’s the only guy on the team who can create his own shot. Wisconsin is a patient offensive team, and when they inevitably run out of time on the shot clock, their best bet is to put the ball in Jackson’s hands. Jackson has a tendency to take contested shots when Wisconsin doesn’t need them, but his one-on-one skills make him a necessary asset.
Derek Levinson ’17 wants to talk more about Patric Young’s biceps. Join the conversation at derek_levinson@brown.edu.
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