Looking Back At A Gloriously Imperfect Season
Another long college basketball season came to an end last night in perhaps the most unsatisfactory way imaginable. Connecticut head coach Jim Calhoun — one of the game’s least likeable and hardest to root for figures — walked off the floor in glory as Butler, everybody’s Cinderella, thoroughly humiliated itself in its biggest game. It’s impossible to sugarcoat just how bad the final was; it was without a doubt the poorest championship game in memory.
An odd end to what was an odd and, ultimately, probably pretty forgettable season. Here, at the end, let’s look back at some of the major moments and storylines and how they may appear to us in the future, if we bother to look back at all.
Jimmermania
It would be impossible to do a season recap without beginning with the nation’s top scoring white Mormon. Jimmer Fredette, Brigham Young’s gunning guard, captivated college hoops nerds all season long with his AAU brand of offense and penchant for shooting — and making — shots from just inside the half-court line. The college basketball punditry, predominantly white and athletically sports writer-y, took a real shine to Fredette and made him their collective man-crush for the season. Which isn’t to say that Fredette wasn’t fun to watch. Far from it. He was all fun and little else, defense and passing included.
But while Jimmer was worth the price of admission, the bigger story was that his Cougars, along with fellow Mountain West Conference member San Diego State, rose into and then rode along in the national top 10 for much of the season. For two schools in a far off small conference to be so good and so well regarded was a real rarity and made for a fascinating change of polarity in the world of college hoops, which is so often East Coast-focused. While both BYU and San Diego State had plenty of naysayers, the truth is that both proved themselves capable teams, each making the Round of 16, and BYU the Elite Eight, in the NCAA tournament. Were they really top 10 teams? Impossible to know, and who really cares, I suppose, but neither suffered an early exit from the tourney, which was the only thing that would have negated their fine regular seasons and offered fuel for their detractors. What’s clear is that Jimmer, and Aztec forward Kawhi Leonard, would have been All-American players at any school. That they plied their trades in the mid-major MWC was one of the season’s best storylines.
Kyrie Eleison
Entering the season there was really no doubt which team was the heavy favorite to win the national championship. But a season of Duke love and hate was altered dramatically when the principal reason for all that expectation went down with a toe injury. With his speed and raw talent, Blue Devils freshman Kyrie Irving was supposed to be the final piece of a repeat title-winning team. But the point guard pulled up lame in the first half of an early December matchup at Madison Square Garden against, ironically enough, Butler. At the time, no one could have guessed that of the two 2010 finalists it would be Brad Stevens’ then-struggling crew and not the mighty Blue Devils that would get another shot at the championship.
Irving’s injury didn’t appear that bad at first, but it shelved him for the entire rest of the regular season. Coach K made an executive decision to play his rehabbed freshman in the NCAA tournament, a move that looks rash in retrospect. While Irving was good on the floor, the cohesion that had led Duke to a No. 1 seed wasn’t there, particularly in the case of Duke’s best player all year, Nolan Smith. With Irving playing 31 minutes and dominating the ball on offense in Duke’s Sweet 16 loss to Arizona, Smith struggled with his shot, perhaps as a result of being moved off the primary ball-handling duties he had picked up in Irving’s absence. Of course, it’s easy to see, too, why Krzyzewski would want to compete with all his best players in the game. Irving played very well, but the result certainly raises questions about the timing of his return. You won’t see many tears of sympathy for Duke, of course. There were cheers across the land when the Blue Devils fell, and fell hard, in the Sweet 16.
Big, Bad Buckeyes
After Irving’s injury brought Duke down a notch, pundits and analysts devoted immeasurable words and hot air to telling us there were no dominant teams in college hoops. But as January became February, it became clear that Ohio State was — if not the dominant team in the land — the nation’s most complete squad. Led by freshman big man Jared Sullinger, and surrounded by a cast of ace shooters, lockdown defenders and clutch upperclassmen, Thad Matta’s Buckeyes had the look of a sure-fire Final Four team and a good bet to win the whole thing.
Ohio State rose to No. 1 and won its first 24 games before finally taking a first loss in Madison on February 12. Ohio State would only lose twice more — at Purdue two games later and to Kentucky in the Sweet 16, winning the Big Ten regular season and conference titles. After the loss to Kentucky, Sullinger announced to an incredulous media horde that he would be returning for a sophomore season, meaning Ohio State will be a preseason favorite again if that holds. It remains to be seen if the lure of NBA money proves too much for Sullinger and his family to overlook, but so far the biggest Buckeye is sticking to his pledge.
Spartan Glory Hole
Beginning the season, the Big Ten’s Michigan State was widely believed to be the second-best team in the country. Unfortunately for Spartans fans, the team proved to be only good on paper. A typically murderous schedule put together by coach Tom Izzo beat down a team whose players couldn’t ever seem to all play well on the same day. After a stretch of six losses in eight games left Michigan State at 14–11, 6–7 in what proved to be a weaker than expected Big Ten, it seemed entirely likely that the Spartans wouldn’t even make the NCAA tournament, something that was unthinkable when the season began. Izzo and Company managed to cobble together enough wins to gain entrez into the tournament, but a first-round loss to UCLA put a merciful and fitting cap on a lost season for what was the most disappointing team in college basketball.
The Enes Under the Jorts
If you had told Kentucky fans that their best recruit would never play a game for their beloved Wildcats, and that with his replacement — a kid nicknamed “Jorts” who’d played a total of 88 minutes the entire season before — the team would reach the school’s first Final Four in 13 years, they never would have believed you. I should know. I’m one of those overly critical, hyperventilating members of Big Blue Nation and I certainly wouldn’t have. But it happened.
John Calipari saw five of his players taken in the first round of the NBA Draft last summer and brought in the country’s best recruiting class to replace them. But the centerpiece of that class, a Turkish man-child named Enes Kanter, was ruled permanently ineligible by the NCAA in November for receiving benefits above and beyond basic living expenses from his Turkish club team, a ruling that was upheld on appeal in January. With three freshmen in its six-man rotation, no quality depth and relying on untested and little used Josh Harrelson as its only center, Kentucky took its lumps but slowly grew into a sterling defensive team by season’s end. Despite losing six conference road games, the Wildcats’ young core of Brandon Knight, Doron Lamb and Terrence Jones learned from its mistakes and turned in perhaps the best single team performance of the NCAA tournament by taking out overall No. 1 seed Ohio State in the Sweet 16.
Calipari is a magnet for attention and criticism, but he proved this season that, when pushed by circumstances, he can coach the hell out of a team. Depending on how long he stays in Lexington, it’s probable he’ll never have a team with less overall ability. But it’s also doubtful he’ll ever have one that gets more out of what it does have than this year’s edition.
Hey, Bulldogs
Maybe no coach in America gets more out of less right now than Butler coach Brad Stevens. After jolting college basketball’s system by coming within a prayer heave of the national title last season, Butler entered this year with expectations very much raised. For the first half of the season, the Bulldogs struggled under the weight of those expectations. Three straight conference losses, two in overtime, in late January and early February had most folks writing Butler off as a one-time mid-major fluke.
But guard Shelvin Mack, forward Matt Howard and the rest of the Bulldogs got hot at the right time, winning 14 in a row before losing to UCONN in the NCAA title game. Along the way, Stevens again showed off his coaching chops, turning running teams into plodding ones, forcing the tempo down game after game and letting his experienced players make just enough plays to win. There was some luck — there has to be some — in the NCAA tournament in getting that last-second tip-in from Howard to get out of the opening round as well as the now-mythical foul call to beat Pittsburgh in the following game. But Butler continued to grind it out and continued to win tournament games. That its final game was such an abomination shouldn’t detract from what Butler was able to do in reaching a second consecutive championship game. Stevens has built the foundation for a dynastic program in Indianapolis, and it will be fascinating to watch how the next few years play out.
Orange Crush
Tennessee coach Bruce Pearl spent the 2010–11 season with a sword of Damocles hanging over him. Before the season began, Pearl admitted to lying to investigators who were looking into potential recruiting violations committed by Pearl and his staff. The Tennessee coach’s tearful press conference was more maudlin than it was touching, and the short-term penalties ranged from loss of salary to an SEC-imposed suspension of a half-season of games.
A sense of foreboding clearly affected Pearl’s talented basketball team, a team good enough to beat Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh but flaky enough to lose to Oakland (Mi.) at home. Still, Tennessee was impossible to gauge heading into the NCAA tournament. Would they be the team that beat Pitt and Villanova or the one that lost to Oakland and College of Charleston at home? Turns out, it was neither. It was worse than either of those teams.
Tennessee’s historically bad 75–45 flame out in the first round of the tournament had a ring of finality to it, and sure enough three days later Pearl was canned by the school. Unlike Jim Calhoun, Pearl is a personable and conceivably likeable guy, but it’s impossible to feel bad for him. He did his own digging and handed the NCAA and the public the shovel after jumping in the hole on his own. His season-long mea culpa tour rang hollow, especially after it was revealed that four days after his tearful press conference Pearl committed another mild violation of recruiting rules. Pearl will probably get another coaching job, providing the NCAA doesn’t ban him in any way. But it’s unlikely he’ll ever get a chance at a major school like Tennessee, or certainly not for a long, long time. His brash style probably didn’t help him much. As any longtime basketball aficionado will tell you, if you’re going to cheat, do it quietly and never admit to anything. Just look at UCONN’s Jim Calhoun.
We All Get UCONN’d in the End
There is a certain symmetry to this weirdo basketball season. Connecticut — lightly regarded and unranked to begin the season — stormed out of the gates in November to win the Maui Invitational and rise all the way to No. 4 in the polls. Behind the prolific scoring of its star guard Kemba Walker, UCONN beat Kentucky, Michigan State, Texas, Villanova and Tennessee, all before the calendar turned to February. Still, smartypants basketball watchers like myself just didn’t see that team as complete enough, experienced enough or flat out good enough to be a real threat to win the national title.
Only after Walker and the Huskies won five games in five days to steal the Big East tournament title did it start to look like coach Calhoun’s team might just have that something that Final Four-winning teams have. Yes, UCONN got some breaks in the bracket, but they still had to win every game.
Meanwhile, off the court, the program’s NCAA troubles were a subject that played out its own shadow storyline all year. In mid-October, Calhoun had to stand before the NCAA and present his program’s case in the messy aftermath of its recruitment of Nate Miles, a recruit who never ended up playing a game for the school. At the time, it seemed there was a good chance that Calhoun’s Hall of Fame basketball coaching career would end in ignominy, perhaps even before the season ended. Then, at the end of February, UCONN was slapped with penalties for its infractions. But those penalties did not include a postseason ban, an omission that surprised many. Now, the day after watching Calhoun beaming on the Reliant Stadium floor, his third national title an ultimate middle finger salute to his detractors and to the NCAA, it’s impossible not see this as truly UCONN’s year, in good ways and very much in bad ones, too.
In all, it was a bookend made of hubris and ego and a rain of jump shots from the latest New York City point guard legend. College basketball: The pursuit of imperfection, indeed.
Originally from Kentucky, JL Weill now writes from Washington, DC. His take on politics, culture and sports can be found at The New Deterrence and on Twitter.