Tag: basketball

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Cincinnati “Ready” for Memphis Tonight

There’s a story that sounds like a bit of wishful thinking on the Cincinnati Enquirer website today. It’s all about how the University of Cincinnati is better prepared for the Memphis Tigers tonight than they were last year. Uh huh. Sure.

A sample: Things got so out of hand last season when the University of Cincinnati basketball team played Memphis that ESPN2 broke away to show another game.

The Bearcats, 4-5 and losers of three straight games – all on the road – hope to make a better showing tonight against the No. 2 Tigers.

Last year’s game at Memphis was one of the low points of the season for UC. The Tigers took an 11-0 lead on the way to an 88-55 victory.

“When we played Cincinnati, we started hitting our stride,” Memphis coach John Calipari said.

“That was when we went on a 25-game win streak. Cincy caught us at a bad time for them, a good time for us. We started realizing we were better than we thought.”

Read more from the Enquirer here.

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A Title Team?

The University of Memphis men’s basketball team currently sits at 8-0 and ranks second in the nation. Everything you hear and see in town suggests this team is poised to make a run for the national championship. And, despite a few good early wins against Oklahoma, UConn, and USC, that campaign kicks into gear this week: a road contest against Cincinnati followed by games against fifth-ranked Georgetown and 21st-ranked Arizona.

But does this Tiger team really fit the profile of a national champ? The NCAA tournament may be known for its exciting upsets, but history has shown that talent usually wins out in the end, and that typically means NBA-level talent. The teams with the most (and best) future pros have proven to have a significant advantage over their competition in the drive for the college hoops title.

Tiger fans have taken to lauding the talent on this year’s team, but how does it match up with other recent title winners as well as other teams competing for this year’s title?

The U of M currently has three players solidly on the NBA radar: Freshman point guard Derrick Rose is a consensus Top 5 pick. Junior swingman Chris Douglas-Roberts is projected to be anywhere from a mid-first-rounder to a second-rounder. Senior center Joey Dorsey — too short and too old for his college production to mark him as a top-notch pro prospect — could go anywhere from late-first (a long shot) to falling out of the draft completely.

By comparison, look at the NBA pedigree of recent champs. The Florida team that won the past two NCAA tournaments sent five players into the NBA, including three Top 10 picks — Al Horford, Corey Brewer, and Joakim Noah. The 2005 North Carolina title team sent six of its players into the NBA draft, including four players in the Top 15 and two players (Marvin Williams and Raymond Felton) in the Top 5. The previous year’s victorious Connecticut squad had a whopping seven players from its title-team roster drafted into the NBA, including three Top 10 picks (Emeka Okafor, Ben Gordon, and Charlie Villaneuva).

This recent stretch of college champs littered with pros isn’t a fluke: Eleven of the past 13 college champions had at least four players drafted into the NBA, a number this Memphis team is unlikely to match. The two exceptions are the upset-special Syracuse team of 2003, which boasted two draftees (Carmelo Anthony and the Grizzlies’ Hakim Warrick, picked third and 19th, respectively) and was only a number-three seed heading into that year’s tournament, and the 1999 Connecticut team in which Rip Hamilton was a Top 10 pick and Khalid El-Amin and Jake Voskuhl were high second-rounders.

So, even if you take an optimistic view of the pro prospects of Rose, Douglas-Roberts, and Dorsey — that Rose goes very high, Douglas-Roberts goes in the middle of the first round, and Dorsey gets drafted — this Tiger team would barely match the profiles of those exceptions to the rule.

If Douglas-Roberts and Dorsey instead meet their low-end expectations — falling to the late-first or early-second round and going undrafted, respectively — then you’d have to go all the way back to the 1994 Arkansas Razorbacks, from which only Corliss Williamson was drafted, to find an NCAA champion with a less impressive stable of pro prospects than this year’s Tiger team.

Tiger fans may think their team is outrageously talented, but NBA prospect lists don’t agree. In fact, several current college teams — particularly North Carolina, Kansas, UCLA, and Arizona — boast a more impressive array of pro prospects than John Calipari’s team.

It is true that the act of winning can help get players drafted, but second-tier Tigers such as Antonio Anderson and Robert Dozier are too marginal in skill for a good tournament run to boost their pro prospects much.

Basically, if the Tigers win a title this season, it will mean one of two things: that Dorsey and Douglas-Roberts have enhanced their status as pro prospects or the team itself has bucked a very strong trend.

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Grizzlies Waive Guard Tarence Kinsey

The Memphis Grizzlies announced today that they have requested waivers on guard Tarence Kinsey.

Kinsey, a 6-6, 189-pound guard, was averaging 3.6 points and 1.1 rebounds in 8.7 minutes in 11 appearances this season.

An undrafted free agent out of South Carolina, he averaged 7.7 points and 2.0 rebounds in his rookie season with the Grizzlies in 2006-07. Kinsey came on strong late in the season when he was named the NBA’s Western Conference Rookie of the Month after averaging 18.8 points, 5.0 rebounds, 3.0 assists and 2.63 steals last April.

For more, go to Beyond the Arc, the Flyer‘s GrizBlog.

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Grizzlies Lose to Golden State, 125-117

After falling behind by as many as 20 points in the third quarter, the Memphis Grizzlies staged a fourth-quarter comeback before losing to the Golden State Warriors, 125-117, at FedExForum Monday night.

After shooting 1-16 beyond the 3-point line in the first three quarters, the Grizzlies got hot behind Mike Miller, Rudy Gay, and J.C. Navarro to close within five in the final minute, making 8 of 13 from beyond the arc.

Golden State withstood the late Memphis charge and held off the Griz to win. Rudy Gay led the Grizzlies with 32 points for the second consecutive game. For stats and boxscore, go to SI.com.

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Tigers Beat Middle Tennessee State, 65-41

(AP) John Calipari knows opponents will try to frustrate Memphis with every junk defense possible, working to slow down games and hoping the Tigers can’t shoot.

Well, his second-ranked Tigers are showing they can win that way, too.

Joey Dorsey , Robert Dozier and Shawn Taggart scored 11 points apiece, and the second-ranked Tigers shook off the rust from an 11-day break by beating Middle Tennessee 65-41 Saturday night in the opening game of the Sun Belt Classic doubleheader.

The Memphis coach complimented Middle Tennessee’s effort.

“They did what a lot of teams are trying to do to us, which is pack it in, junk it up, hold the ball, try to make shots at the buzzer, try to keep it close, try to get fouled,” Calipari said. “And you know, the only thing I keep telling my team is we have to see if they can do that for 40 minutes. Let’s make it very difficult.”

With the victory, the Tigers improved to 8-0 and matched their best start since the 1995-96 season and their fourth such start since World War II.

Memphis had not played since holding off Southern California 62-58 in overtime on Dec. 4 in New York. The Tigers needed someone to play before visiting Cincinnati and hosting No. 5 Georgetown on Dec. 22 back in Memphis.

Middle Tennessee (3-6) offered the perfect opponent and allowed the Tigers to fulfill the third and final game of their contract without having to visit Murfreesboro, approximately 30 miles southeast of Nashville.

The Tigers outshot (49 percent to 27) and outrebounded (38-30) Middle Tennessee in a game they never trailed and was tied only once at 16. Dorsey also had a team-high 12 rebounds.

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Pre-Game Notes for Grizzlies-Clippers

The Grizzlies are in the midst of a season-long five-game losing streak with the team’s confidence and chemistry looking particularly shaky. But, if there’s any good news in the middle of the bad it’s that this losing streak also happens to be when the team’s two best players — Pau Gasol and Rudy Gay — have played their best combined basketball of the season. That the Grizzlies are losing anyway is mostly because of everything else falling apart …

Flyer Grizzlies’ writer Chris Herrington has some thoughts about tonight’s contest between the Griz and the L.A. Clippers.

Read his analysis at Beyond the Arc, the Flyer’s GrizBlog.

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Anfernee “Penny” Hardaway Cut by Heat

Former University of Memphis star Anfernee “Penny” Hardaway, probably the most dynamic basketball player to find his way from Memphis to the NBA (remember “Li’l Penny”?), has been released by the Miami Heat.

The 36-year-old Hardaway was attempting a comeback after missing the entire 2006-07 season. A two-time All-NBA player with Orlando in the mid-1990s, Hardaway was an All-America for the Memphis Tigers in 1992-93.
More info, and a look at Hardaway’s career here.

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Grizzlies Lose to Pistons, 113-103

The Grizzlies fell behind by 15 points in the first quarter and were never able to catch up in losing to the Detroit Pistons Tuesday night at the FedExForum.

The Pistons led by as many as 24, before the Griz closed the gap to 8 in the fourth quarter. But Detroit made its free throws and held off a late Memphis charge.

Rudy Gay led Memphis with 20 points, while Richard Hamilton scored 30 for Detroit and Chauncey Billups had 28. For complete stats and boxscore, go here. For chat and analysis, see Beyond the Arc, the Flyer’s Grizblog.

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Grizzlies Lose to Hornets,

Chris Paul set a new career high with 43 points, including a 2-pointer in the lane with 1.8 seconds left to send the New Orleans Hornets to a 118-116 victory over the Memphis Grizzlies in New Orleans Friday night.

The Grizzlies made a late run but fell short, despite 31 points by Rudy Gay and 26 by Pau Gasol and Mike Miller. A final in-bounds pass went off the hands of Gasol, and the Hornets were able to stave off the Griz in the final seconds.

For stats, box score, etc., go to CBS Sportline.com.

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Gay and Gasol

Before the Grizzlies moved to Memphis, I lived in St. Paul, Minnesota, where I followed the recently established Minnesota Timberwolves through a transition that is relevant to the current state of the Grizzlies.

I can remember former Wolves coach Flip Saunders saying once that, in basketball, “chemistry” means having a pecking order and having players buy into it.

When Saunders said that, he was reflecting, in part, on an earlier period in Wolves history, when the team underwent a dramatic reordering of its pecking order via the drafting of preps-to-pros pioneer Kevin Garnett, who quickly challenged incumbent frontman Christian Laettner’s status on the team. Laettner bristled at Garnett’s swift elevation and was traded before the end of Garnett’s first season.

That situation in Minnesota isn’t entirely analogous to what’s happening with the Memphis Grizzlies right now: Second-year forward Rudy Gay isn’t a talent of Garnett’s magnitude, while incumbent team star Pau Gasol is both a better player and better teammate than Laettner was.

But make no mistake: This season represents a shift at the top of the team’s pecking order for the first time since Gasol’s unexpected rookie-of-the-year campaign in 2001-’02. Gasol has been the team’s leading scorer every season of his career, but, through 17 games this season, it’s been Gay leading the way. The 21-year-old Gay is leading Gasol in points per game (18.1 to 16.6), minutes per game (34.2 to 33.8), and field-goal attempts per game (14.3 to 12.7). And, fewer than 100 games into his NBA career, Gay is still on a steep upswing.

Unlike in Minnesota, this seems to be a case of Gay joining Gasol rather than jettisoning him. Unselfish and accommodating, perhaps to a fault, Gasol is unlikely to resist sharing leading-man status with Gay the way former teammates Jason Williams, Bonzi Wells, and James Posey resisted playing a supporting role to Gasol. In fact, Gasol’s personality probably makes him better suited to being “1-A” in the pecking order than clear-cut top dog.

Fans have been clamoring for the Grizzlies to add another player as good as or — preferably — better than Gasol. Now that the team finally seems to have that player, the dissatisfaction with Gasol is unabated. It’s as if fans have gotten so accustomed to only having one all-star-caliber player on the roster that they struggle to conceive of a roster with two (or more!).

Of course, Gasol hasn’t helped with the longest stretch of mediocre play in his career. A couple of recent Commercial Appeal articles have done a good job of describing how new coach Marc Iavaroni’s more free-flowing offense has served to reduce Gasol’s previously central role in the offense: how the team doesn’t revolve around Gasol’s post play anymore and how this impacts the numbers Gasol is putting up.

But this analysis understates how poor Gasol’s recent play has been. The shrinkage in his per-game scoring and rebounding averages aren’t as important as his declining efficiency. Gasol is still getting plenty of touches in the post or on the move; he just isn’t converting them at the same rate he has throughout his career. Gasol no longer appears hurt, but I suspect his ankle and back problems from preseason are having a lingering effect — a confluence of poor conditioning, confidence, and timing seem to be holding Gasol back more than the new offense.

Unless Gasol is traded — and that doesn’t seem likely — it’s imperative that the team’s two best players play well and play well together.

The Grizzlies’ recent two-game homestand was encouraging in this regard: Half of Gasol’s eight assists came on passes to Gay. Meanwhile, Gay was more deferential to Gasol without sacrificing his own production. The ability of Gay and Gasol to maximize and mesh their respective talents could be the story of the season, and their ability — or inability — to do this may be the key to whether the current core of this Grizzlies team is one to build on or eventually tear apart.