American, JaVale McGee, Bobby Frasor

1. The few days before Christmas is typically something of a dead time for college hoops. It wasn't this year, with a great slate of games on Saturday (including Memphis' dismantling of Georgetown and Michigan State's dominance of Texas). For me, however, it was, as I spent the weekend in Boston, watching the Celtics defeat the Bulls and engaging in all manner of debauchery with friends old and new.

That was unfortunate for me, as it meant I was away from home when my alma mater, American, beat Maryland for the first time in 81 years. Now, Maryland -- coming off a home loss to Ohio University -- is hardly the ACC power they usually are, but the 67-59 victory is still a huge win for the Patriot League program, perhaps the biggest in school history. (The other contender is a 62-61 victory over fifth-ranked Georgetown in 1982; American will be celebrating the 25th anniversary of that win when they play the Hoyas on Saturday).

Despite the fact that Maryland was clearly vulnerable heading into this game, the deck appeared stacked against AU. To begin with, let's look at the starting backcourts. American's Derrick Mercer and Garrison Carr are listed at a very generous 5'9" and 5'11", respectively (I think Mercer is shorter than me, and I'm a quarter-inch or so shy of 5'9"). Maryland's sophomore tandem of Greivis Vasquez and Eric Hayes stand 6'6" and 6'4", respective. That duo did their damage offensively -- Vasquez had 28 points and Hayes had 16 (that's 44 of the team's 59) -- but they couldn't keep Mercer from scoring a team-high 18.

Secondly, the Terps frontcourt isn't that much taller than the Eagles', but it's a lot stronger, deeper, and more talented. Yet James Gist, Braxton Dupree, Landon Milbourne, Bambale Osby, Dave Neal, and Dino Gregory combined for just 14 points on 4-for-24 shooting. Meanwhile, they gave up 17 points to Bryce Simon, 12 to Brian Gilmore, and the Terps were outrebounded 40-33.

As I said, I was out of town, so I didn't see the game, but the box score tells some of the story. Typically, when a team like American beats a team like Maryland, particularly on the road, they hold a big advantage in something like three-point shooting or turnovers. That wasn't the case Saturday. The Eagles shot the deep ball well (42.1 percent) and only turned it over 12 times, but Maryland had comparable totals (41.7 percent and 13 turnovers). The Terrapins even hit 10 triples to the Eagles' eight.

No, American beat Maryland simply by playing better all-around basketball. They outworked their bigger opponents, outrebounding them and getting to the line.

I've got a friend on the AU coaching staff, and I hope to talk to him a bit more to find out what goes into an upset like this. If and when I hear from him, I'll talk about what he said, with his permission. Until then, all hail the migh-ty AU Eagles...

2. North Carolina rolled Nevada tonight, but it was the same old song for the Tar Heels. I've written about them extensively already this season and will have the opportunity to continue to do so, so I'm going to ignore them for now. But a seven-foot sophomore from the Wolfpack named JaVale McGee caught my eye, so I'd like to devote a few words to him.

The negative first, so no one thinks I am getting carried away. He doesn't have much of a back-to-the-basket game, so he's limited in what he can do offensively. However, he also doesn't have that gangly awkwardness that 19- and 20-year-olds at his height so often have, so it's reasonable to suggest he might develop one in time.

His stats -- 14 points, 7 rebounds, and 4 blocked shots -- tell a pretty good story, but there were a few things that don't show up in the box score that are worth noting.

For one, his lone assist came on a play where he caught the ball about 18 feet from the basket on the left wing. He beat UNC's Tyler Hansbrough into the lane, jumped, then dropped a nice little pass to a teammate for an easy bucket. How often have you seen a seven-footer do that?

Secondly, he's a very quick leaper. Thanks to NBA League Pass, I've discovered just how valuable this skill is. As alluded to, I'm a big Celtics fan, and in watching the first 26 games of this NBA season, I've seen Boston center Kendrick Perkins lose countless easy baskets because he can't get off the floor when he catches the ball. He has to gather himself (bringing the ball down), bend his knees (making himself several inches shorter), and then go up. This often turns a dunk into a blocked layup or a trip to the free throw line, where Perkins is barely a favorite to make one of two.

McGee didn't get a lot of post catches against Carolina so it's not a perfect comparison, but you could tell just how athletic he is from the way he sprung off the floor to contest shots and grab rebounds (it's no coincidence that Perkins' rebounding numbers are fairly underwhelming for a guy who goes 6'10", 280).

The best specific example of McGee's athleticism that I can give was a follow-up dunk McGee had in the first half. I can't really describe it here, but what I can say is that given the position in which the big guy caught the ball, I was very surprised that he was able to jam it home, nevermind as easily as he did. I was fully expecting him to land before stuffing it.

Finally, while he was 0-for-3 from three-point land, he looked very comfortable from that range, and his misses were close -- the second one went in and out. He's hit three from deep on the season, and the fact that he can take such a shot within the flow of the Nevada offense without drawing ire from his teammates and coaches shows that he's very capable of making that shot.

Keep this kid's name in the back of your mind. He's not NBA ready, of course, but he's a prospect to watch over the next few years.

3. It wasn't all good news for Carolina, however, as Bobby Frasor tore his ACL and is out for the season. You've gotta feel bad for the kid, suffering an injury like that making a hustle play on defense deep in the second half of a blowout.

Carolina won't miss Frasor as much as Syracuse will miss Eric Devendorf or North Carolina State will miss Farnold Degand (two other players who have gone down with season-ending knee injuries in the last week or so). But don't look at Frasor's three-points-per-game average and think this is no big deal.

The Heels still have one of the best lead guards in the country in sophomore Tywon Lawson. But Lawson has been able to average just 23 minutes per game this season, in part because of how well Frasor ran the team from off the bench.

Carolina's third-string point guard is Quentin Thomas. whose three-plus years in powder blue have been something of a disappointment. He's averaging 1.8 turnovers in 10 minutes per game this year, and on Saturday, he gave up the rock five times in 13 minutes against UC-Santa Barbara.

Carolina coach Roy Williams will no doubt start out by giving Frasor's minutes to Thomas, but if the senior continues to struggle, you can expect Lawson to see more floor time. This may become a problem in March, as Lawson -- as well-conditioned as he is -- takes a lot of contact and expends a lot of energy running Williams' high-octane offense. Tar Heel fans will have to hope that Thomas is up to the task, for fear that Lawson may wear down during the season's stretch run.

Kentucky, Houston, Antoine Agudio

Been a couple of weeks between posts. I've been busy working and pretending to do law school applications, and it's been kind of a dead time for college hoops on TV, due to final exams. Some quick hit thoughts from games I've watched:

1. For Billy Gillispie's sake, I want to be able to say that Kentucky can turn it around. I know they're not at full-strength -- Derrick Jasper has been out all year, Jodie Meeks played his first game of the year tonight (a game that the team's lone post threat, freshman Patrick Patterson, missed with an ankle injury. But I'm not sure it's happening with this group.

Right now, they're starting two guys who aren't threats to score, in Mark Coury and Michael Porter. That puts tremendous pressure on their scorers, like Meeks, Joe Crawford, and Ramel Bradley. Meeks is just a sophomore so there's still hope for them, but as much as I like Bradley and as much potential as Crawford has shown, those two seniors are simply too erratic to count on the way the Wildcats are going to be forced to count on them.

They also completely collapsed when Houston put a run together towards the end of the first half, allowing the hosts to completely blow the game open in the second half. They currently lack the fighting spirit they need to turn their season around.

It looks to me like this year is going to be a wash, with some promise for next year in Meeks, Jasper, and Patterson.

2. If John Calipari's Memphis club is going to lose during the Conference USA regular season, it'll be on January 30, when they travel to Houston to play the Cougars at Hofheinz Pavilion. Saw Tom Penders' squad for the first time tonight as they moved to 10-1 with a 83-69 pasting of Kentucky. Great venue, great crowd, and Houston's up and down style is perfect for getting the max out of such a full court advantage.

I'm not sure Houston is good enough defensively to knock off the Tigers, but I do know that this game and the return date on February 13 will be two of the highest-scoring, most entertaining games of the C-USA season.

3, Antoine Agudio is a bigger, more-polished Salim Stoudamire. Not sure what that ultimately means for his pro prospects, but I've gotta think some NBA club is going to spend a second-rounder on this Hofstra senior. His duel with Charlotte's Leemire Goldwire in a 70-65 Pride win on Saturday was wonderful to watch. Agudio had 30 points on 10-of-15, including a perfect six-for-six from deep; Goldwire was far less efficient, scoring his 26 points on 22 shots, including an almost unheard of 8-for-20 from behind the arc. Agudio also had 10 boards and five assists.

Agudio has had an excellent career (he made his 300th career three-pointer on Saturday), but has been somewhat overshadowed by departed teammate Loren Stokes. Now that it's his show to run, he's making the most of it. He's quietly leading the nation in scoring at 27.4 per. Four of Hofstra's five losses have come by four or fewer points, and two of those in overtime. They've got a couple of high-profile games coming up before they get into CAA play: at Rhode Island on December 22, vs. Virginia Tech in New York in the first round of the Aeropostale Holiday Festival on the 28th, and either Marist or St. John's in the second round of that jamboree on the 29th. By the new year, I expect to hear Agudio's name a lot more than I am now.

North Carolina's Defense, Part Two

1. About a week ago, I wrote this post about how I thought North Carolina's defense was overrated by KenPom and others who advocate pace-adjusted statistics. I also posted it in the North Carolina thread on the sports board of a poker message board I post on. It got some comments, and I finally got a chance to respond tonight. My new post is below. The quoted items indicate a response that my original post got...

Rather than respond to each post that responded to me, I’m going to put all responses in this one. That way, I can jump back and forth and post my responses in something resembling a logical argument.

This comment might be a good place to start:

“I wouldn’t care if their defensive results were a byproduct of them hypnotizing the other team it is still good defense, even if their success is largely due to athleticism.”

You should care. Let’s pretend for a minute that North Carolina’s only defensive skill is that they can hypnotize their opponent. What happens when they come up against a team who is immune to hypnosis?

My argument is that Carolina’s pace acts the same way as hypnosis to falsely inflate their defensive stats. It works against most teams, but there are teams that won’t be “hypnotized,” because they possess poised and experienced guards, because they prefer to play at that fast pace as well, or both.

There’s nothing wrong with relying heavily on pace to help you defensively. But unless you are technically sound defensively, you’re not going to be good enough on that end of the court to be truly elite.

What do I mean by being technically sound defensively? Like offensive basketball, defensive basketball has fundamentals. Rotating to the open man is one I mentioned in my first post. Carolina gave Ohio St. a ton of open looks. That the Buckeyes couldn’t knock them down – and the reason why – isn’t important in the final discussion, because UNC is eventually going to run into a team that will hit those shots. Unless you’re forcing difficult shots – rushed shots due to defensive pressure, shots with a hand in the shooters face – you shouldn’t be satisfied with your defensive performance. Anything else is being results-oriented. If Carolina played a great three-point shooting team like Butler and decided that the best way to defend the Bulldogs was to pack everyone into the key and let them shoot jumpers, you wouldn’t praise the Heels’ defense even if Butler missed all their shots. You’d say that they got lucky that their opponent had an uncharacteristically poor shooting day.

Ohio St. may have missed good looks because they felt harried by the pace of the game, but there are teams who won’t be.

Another defensive skill is hedging on ball screens. This is something that Duke’s Kyle Singler does extremely well. When his man sets a screen on the man guarding the ball, Singler comes around to the side of the screen and forces the ballhandler to dribble laterally while his teammate catches up. If he decides to switch onto the ballhandler, he recognizes his height advantage and speed disadvantage, and takes a step back, without squaring his shoulders to the ballhandler. Instead, he’s at a slight angle -- always close enough to bother a shot, far enough way that he won’t get dribbled by – funneling the dribbler into the teeth of the defense.

The Carolina bigs don’t do this well. Incidentally, neither did Shelden Williams when he was at Duke. No one seemed to take advantage of it, but you could get Williams in foul trouble simply by sending the man Williams was guarding to set a screen on the ball; Williams always jumped them too far. It seemed like every game he was always getting whistled for one blocking foul by being stupidly over-aggressive hedging a screen.

“Your anecdotal evidence regarding defensive rotation is a perfect example of exactly what this article means to disprove – you don’t have to play a slow, grinding game to defend well.”

First, I think you mean that the article means to prove that you don’t have to play a slow, grinding game to defend well. That said, rotating well defensively or hedging ball screens properly has nothing to do with playing at a certain pace. Rotating well is good defense, at any tempo; leaving men open for good shots is bad defense at any tempo.
You also asked me to support my argument with something other than “I don’t agree.” I hope you see that the kinds of examples I’ve given are and were my attempt to do that.

One poster said he agreed with my general point, but disagreed with my reasoning for specific losses. He said that Carolina “had trouble containing dribble penetration.” That sounds like a great example of bad defense to me.

Speaking of my hypothesis for why Carolina lost certain games, a few of you took exception to that:

“There is a pretty big selection bias, as you are picking games they lost and then explaining why that team showed UNC had a bad defense.”

That’s not what I was doing. I was offering my hypothesis for why Carolina lost to certain teams that were hardly elite – that they are a fundamentally average defensive team whose pace of play masks that technical deficiency.

tarheeljks noted that “4 of the games UNC lost last year (Virginia Tech, Georgia Tech, N.C. State, and Maryland), were on the road, where KenPom concedes that the Heels were much weaker defensively.”

I can’t think of a good reason why a team would play significantly poorer defense on the road than they do at home. It’s not like baseball, where if you’re playing at Fenway or whatever they call Houston’s park now there are all these weird conditions you have to get used to. It’s the same court, the same ball. Sure, the home team may shoot a little bit better because the surroundings are familiar, but that only should really matter on open looks. If you’ve got a hand in a guy’s face or are forcing him to shoot a shot he doesn’t want to take, it’s just as hard to make it at home as it is on the road.

I think that the home/road discrepancy might come back to that pace thing. As we’ve already discussed, Carolina’s defense is effective if the opposition allows itself to be rattled by an unfamiliar, uptempo game. If you’re already feeling rushed, the crowd can play a big role in enhancing that feeling. On the road, when the crowd isn’t behind North Carolina to further bother the opponent, their defense suffers.

Finally, “I’m interested to hear what you think this stat is missing regarding defensive performance.”

My inability to eloquently answer this question has probably been the biggest reason I’ve now written more than 2,000 words on the topic of Carolina’s defense – if I could explain it well, I don’t know that I’d need all this other stuff.

Here’s my best attempt. KenPom’s stats are pace-adjusted, but what they don’t adjust for is the EFFECT that playing at a certain pace has. Points-per-possession stats treat every possession exactly the same: it has the value of 1. That’s why I wanted to see these stats for individual games; it’s my belief that Carolina’s defensive points-per-possession stats would be significantly worse in games against decent opponents whose preferred style is also uptempo.

I haven’t the slightest idea how to incorporate something like this into a statistic, or if it’s even possible. And like I’ve said all along, I think these stats are more useful than traditional ones. But they aren’t anywhere close to perfect, and I find it ironic that they are treated like gospel as much as they seem to be, considering that they were developed in part to refute people who say “North Carolina sucks at defense; look at all the points they give up!” It’s funny to me that KenPom numbers seem to be given a pass on skepticism.

Donte' Greene, Georgetown's guards, West Virginia

1. I spent all of yesterday's post talking about freshmen, and I didn't even get to my favorite, my freshman of the year so far: Syracuse's Donte' Greene. His stats aren't as gaudy as Michael Beasley's -- about 19 points and nine rebounds per game before tonight's 20 and 10 performance at Virginia -- but he's got the same smooth interior game and the same comfort from three-point range. He's quicker and a better leaper than Beasley, and listed at 6' 11", he's at least an inch taller than his counterpart at Kansas State. I say "at least" because on the Jimmy V broadcast, ESPN's Dan Shulman indicated that Beasley is closer to 6'8" than his listed 6'10".

Of course, his teammates are better, and that helps his cause. Still, NBADraft.net has Greene listed as the third overall pick in their 2008 mock draft, well ahead of O.J. Mayo and Indiana's Eric Gordon (someone I'm looking forward to seeing more of so I can post about him here).

2. During the Georgetown-Alabama broadcast tonight, ESPN's Jimmy Dykes said that with last year's top pick, Greg Oden, no longer around, Roy Hibbert might be the toughest player to guard in this year's NCAA Tournament. He added a caveat: "If he gets the ball."

I'll echo Dykes here, at the risk of repeating myself, because it's been my contention since last year that Georgetown's guards don't look for the 7'2" Hibbert enough. (Prior to that, my contention was that Hibbert wasn't good enough to deserve looks on offense -- the big guy's come a long way during his college career).

Last year, they could get away with it, because they had Jeff Green, a wonderful college player and the 5th overall pick in last year's draft. Green's now starting in the frontcourt of the NBA's Seattle Supersonics, so the Hoyas' focus really needs to be on Hibbert.

It's concerning, then, that Hibbert got just four shots against Alabama. It wasn't because of foul trouble, something that's been an Achilles heel for him in the past -- it's just that Georgetown's guards weren't looking for him. During one sequence, Hoya guard Jesse Sapp launched a three-pointer after a couple of passes without Hibbert getting a touch on the possession. After no doubt being hollered at from the sideline for taking a quick shot, Sapp caught the ball on the next Hoya offensive trip and missed another three-pointer, again before Hibbert had touched the ball.

Further compounding matters is that when 'bama was playing man-to-man, Richard Hendrix, a 22 point-per-game scorer and the Tide's best offensive player, was guarding Hibbert -- and giving up six inches and 20 pounds in doing so. Yet the guards wasted the opportunity to tire opposition's star out or get him in foul trouble.

What's most maddening about this is that Georgetown's guards are nothing special. They're decidedly average for a top-division team in a power conference. Most, perhaps all (I don't know enough about Pitt yet) teams in the top ten -- Georgetown is fourth in the coaches' poll and 5th in the writers' poll -- have a significantly better backcourt than the Hoyas, but none of them have anything approaching Hibbert in the post.

Ohio State had this problem at times last year with Oden, but at least the Buckeyes' had good guards (who had grown used to playing without the big freshman, since he sat out the non-conference schedule with a wrist injury).

Georgetown's guards refusal to pass the ball to Hibbert (and Green) last year nearly cost them their Sweet 16 matchup with Vanderbilt -- only Green's controversial bucket at the buzzer allowed them to be in the position to stun North Carolina with a stirring comeback to reach the Final Four. If coach John Thompson III can't get through to them that Hibbert needs to touch the ball on basically every possession, then the Hoyas won't even make it that far.

And I want it on record that from the beginning, I've thought this year's Georgetown team is overrated. Green's presence last year hid their deficiencies in the backcourt, which will be exposed this season.

3. Michigan coach John Beilein's unique offensive attack requires a certain type of player: one who is cerebral, a skilled and willing passer, and who has a good three-point shot. That requirement makes his job this year particularly tough, as he tries to coach a team full of guys recruited by former Wolverine boss Tommy Amaker.

I think his job is easier, however, than Bob Huggins' at West Virginia, the school Beilein left to take the Michigan job. It's always tough for someone disconnected from the previous coach to take over a program, but Beilein's "type" of player make it particularly difficult to take over from him unless you're going to run the same system. (Not to mention that Huggins is a just a touch more in-your-face with his players than Beilein). Huggins' options this year are to learn and coach an offense that fits his personnel but that he's unfamiliar with (and may or may not be philosophically opposed to); coach "his" style of ball with kids unsuited to play it; or adapt a hybrid of both styles.

He's chosen to adapt, and it looked good, at least, Wednesday night against an Auburn squad that had me impressed in a win over George Washington this weekend (though in retrospect, their performance on Sunday might have been inflated by a poor GW team). The West Virgina kids surely help some -- they already know the offense, are more athletic, and have more ability to create off the dribble than past Beilein teams -- but give credit to Huggins for having his alma mater playing well this early in his first season.

What will be interesting to see is what happens next year, when Huggins' first recruiting class at the school mix with the leftovers from the Beilein era. Huggins' typical recruit is more athletic and less fundamentally sound than the kids that Beilein brought to Morgantown. And without getting too nasty about it and knowing nothing specific about Huggins' highly regarded 2008 recruiting class, let me just say that I don't remember any of Beilein's recruits having the kind of attitude and background concerns that seemed to follow so many of Huggins' kids at Cincinnati.

As challenging as this year is for the coach, meshing that group next year may be an even tougher task.

The Fabulous Three in MSG (at the Jimmy V)

Gosh, what a horrible headline.

Tuesday was a real treat: Three of the nation's premier freshman at Madison Square Garden. None of them had a particularly outstanding evening, but I've now seen Michael Beasley, O.J. Mayo, and Derrick Rose a few times each. My early-season thoughts on each of them follow.

1. Let's start with Beasley. He came into the game averaging 27 and 15 or something similarly preposterous, but that's been inflated a bit by inferior competition. Regardless, many feel he's the top pick in the 2008 NBA draft, and it's hard to argue with them. There's a lot to like. The thing I noticed immediately about him when I saw him during the Old Spice Classic was how quickly he moves once he receives the ball. This point was driven home to those seeing the kid for the first time tonight during the first possession. Beasley posted up a Notre Dame defender on the left block, caught the ball and immediately turned and drilled a ten-footer while being fouled.

He's just as comfortable pulling the quick trigger on the perimeter, as well. The stat sheet says he went 0-for-3 from three-point range tonight, but I only remember two of those attempts. Both came when he was trailing a play, and both times, he confidently stepped into the shot. Both went in and out. For the year, he's 8-for-20 from deep.

Back to his inside game, since that's where he spends most of his time on the floor. A lefty, he seems capable of scoring with both hands, but he's a little reluctant to use his right. That's the kind of thing that can be learned in time. He's scored at will at every level he's played at, so there hasn't been a pressing need to naturally switch to his right hand when the situation calls for it.

There are a few things I don't like. First, he needs to become more physical, both offensively and defensively. Secondly, I haven't seen him pass the ball particularly intelligently, although to be fair, his team isn't good; they aren't necessarily deserving of passes from Beasley, nor are they often in the right place for a pass. Third, he doesn't move without the ball with much conviction, although again, his teammates' deficiencies make it tough for him to get open.

The final thing that concerns me is that he was dragging going up and down the court tonight. If it's just conditioning, that can be improved, but he also came out of this game before the first TV timeout and appeared to signal for an inhaler. They didn't mention anything on the broadcast and I couldn't find much about it during a brief Internet search -- the most useful link came from a K-State message board thread in which someone asked if he had asthma and got no answer. If true, I certainly hope that doesn't hamper his career and there are professional athletes who have coped with asthma, but it is something to watch.

2. My opinion of O.J. Mayo has changed a lot since I first saw him. Not sure what the reason for the attitude change -- stiffer competition? The debut of his buddy Davon Jefferson? -- but he was a far more energetic player Sunday against Kansas and tonight against Memphis.

Mayo's an obviously special offensive talent with all the tools he needs at the next level. He's a terrific finisher, has a nice pull-up midrange game, and can hit the NBA three, even curling off a screen. But he's also shown a few things that have been pleasant surprises.

One is his unselfishness. He came to USC with a reputation as a gunner, but he's been more than willing to share the ball with his Trojan teammates, and he's shown wonderful flair and court vision on occasion. The one caveat here is that the bad shots I have seen him take in the last two games have come very late, in the last three minutes or so, with his team down a possession or two. That "take over the game late" mentality is one that all true stars have, and I think he'll eventually learn what's a good shot in that situation and what isn't.

The other thing that was a surprise to me is his defense. He played a huge part in shutting down Rose tonight. I don't know what his reputation was regarding defense coming into college, but if he can by and large stay in front of Rose, he can cover nearly anybody.

3. Speaking of Rose, he's the one I have the smallest read on; in part because of his unusual struggles tonight, in part because he has a much stronger supporting cast from the others.

He's lightning quick and has big-time offensive game. His hesitation dribble move comes complete with a Marbury-esque shoulder shimmy, and he doesn't even palm the ball the way the Starchild does. He's got a nice jumper, a floater in the lane, and he can be a spectacular finisher at times.

He's also stepping into a difficult situation, as point guard of a veteran team with national championship aspirations -- and one that plays an uptempo style, at that. He'll outgrow some of his questionable decision-making simply through experience.

One play from the game against USC is a little more concerning. Late in the first half, Rose had the ball in the backcourt with the shot clock off. There was no pressure on him, and this was clearly a "hold for one" situation. Nonetheless, Rose spotted teammate Chris Douglas-Roberts in the right corner and fired a 40-foot pass upcourt to him. CDR was open, but there was one problem: Rather than looking for a pass from Rose -- why would he be, in that situation? -- he was directing traffic, motioning his teammates into their proper positions for Memphis' offensive set. The pass bounced at Douglas-Roberts' feet and out of bounds.

Sure, if Douglas-Roberts had been looking, he'd have caught the pass and on this particular play, it'd have been no harm, no foul. But the issue is simply that the pass itself is just a dumb play. There was absolutely no reason for it. They were holding for one shot. There was no pressure in the backcourt. It was a totally needless pass -- at best, it accomplished nothing significant -- and in this instance, the worst-case scenario came true: it resulted in a turnover and USC got the last shot of the half.

Rose immediately took responsibility for the turnover -- though I have no way of knowing if he understood why his mistake was so bad. To be fair, that kind of hit-ahead pass is usually the right play in Memphis' uptempo offense. But a point guard needs to think the game well enough to eliminate these kinds of mistakes from his game.