Midwest Breakdown

Almost a year since my last post, and I haven't watched nearly as much college basketball this season as I have in previous years, but Championship Week gave me the itch, so I'm going to try to keep this going throughout the tournament, then keep this going a bit better next year, or find a way to consolidate all my basketball writing into one place (in case you don't know, I have a Celtics/NBA blog called Rhymes With Hondo).

So, to that end, I'll be breaking down each of the four regions, one per day, for the next four days. I'm not necessarily going to go team-by-team or even game-by-game. I don't actually have a format in mind. I just want to rap a little bit about some of the stuff I've seen.

Might as well start in the Midwest region, home of the tournament's top overall seed, the Kansas Jayhawks:

* Kansas was my pick to win it all at the beginning of the year, and I'm standing firm. Frankly, I haven't been overwhelmed by what I've seen of the Jayhawks, but no team has really impressed me this year. I'll mention the other contenders' flaws when I write about them and their regions, but, in a bit of foreshadowing, I like the Jayhawks' veteran leadership. Not that Bill Self's club is terribly long in the tooth -- the Morris kids are sophomores and Xavier Henry is a freshman -- but it does have Sherron Collins, the person not named Mario Chalmers who is most responsible for Kansas' win in the 2008 national championship game. (Remember his steal/three combo that cut a seven-point lead to four with less than two minutes to go?) Collins gives Kansas a definitive place to go with the ball in crunch-time, and that sets them apart from other title contenders. Kentucky and Syracuse have shown recent chinks in the armor in that regard (more on that when I tackle their respective regions), and I'm not convinced that Duke's Jon Scheyer is the same caliber of player in terms of both scoring and creating for others. On the two-line, Ohio State's Evan Turner and West Virginia's Da'Sean Butler have proven over and over that they are as "go-to" as can be, but their respective supporting casts aren't as strong as Collins'.

* Not that the Jayhawks won't have plenty of competition on their way to Indianapolis. Many analysts feel that the selection committee didn't do the tourney's top team any favors by giving them the toughest draw of any of the top seeds. In addition to Ohio State, which some felt heading into Sunday would have had a chance at a #1 seed if the Big11Ten final was played earlier (a notion somewhat dispelled by the fact that the committee gave Duke the third overall seed and make Syracuse -- which had been in line for a #1 for months -- the fourth overall), the Midwest also has the tournament's top #3 seed (Georgetown), top #6 (Tennessee), and a #5, Michigan State, that was on everyone's short list of national title contenders at the start of the year.

* I think Georgetown is the team most likely to trip up the Jayhawks. The Hoyas had kind of an up-and-down year, caused at least in part by playing a conference schedule which included four road games at teams ranked in the top ten at the time. The Big East was loaded this year, and so every team played some degree of a killer schedule, but it doesn't get any tougher than a slate that included two games against both Syracuse and Villanova, plus road trips to West Virginia and Pittsburgh.

Georgetown entered the Big East tournament losers of four of their last six, then played their way to a 3 seed by beating South Florida, Syracuse, and Marquette, before losing at the horn to West Virginia in the championship game. There's something of an unwritten rule among bracketologists to be wary of a team whose low seed is a result of a late stretch of strong play. I'm choosing to ignore that in this case, because I feel Georgetown's ascension was a result not of hot shooting and the like, but a real transformation. Early in the Hoyas' victory over Syracuse in the Big East quarters, ESPN's announcing crew noted that coach John Thompson III was riding his guys more than usual, and he kept it up throughout the tournament. His charges responded, most notably point guard Chris Wright, who took charge of the offense in a way that reminded me of Derrick Rose at Memphis two years ago.

My favorite Wright play of the four games actually came after he made a stupid one; giving a foul in the final minute of the championship game with his team tied with West Virginia (he must have thought the Hoyas were behind). After the Mountaineers hit two free throws, Wright simply took the ball, powered past the very powerful Joe Mazzulla, and banked in an off-balance shot. Butler would break Georgetown's hearts on the next trip, Wright's was a new-found confidence, one we hadn't consistently seen and one his team desperately needed.

Not that he's alone in Hoya grey. Far from it. The marvelously-skilled Greg Monroe is the perfect big man for JT3's Princeton-inspired offense, and is garnering a lot of attention from pro scouts despite the fact that said system doesn't exactly showcase big guys doing the kind of things NBA types like to see out of post players. There are question marks surrounding Austin Freeman -- he's been good, but not as good as he had been, since he was diagnosed with diabetes at the beginning of the month -- but he's the kind of player who can put on a virtuoso scoring performance any time he steps on the floor. Depth is a concern, but with Jason Clark (42.6 percent) and Hollis Thompson (42.4 percent) knocking down threes and Julian Vaughn doing the dirty work inside, Georgetown has a rotation that should be able to compete with anyone.

* I'll have my game-by-game predictions up before the tip day of, but one trap I'm pretty sure I won't be falling into is picking Georgia Tech to win anything more than their first round matchup with Oklahoma State. I haven't seen enough of the Cowboys to say whether they have enough size to counter the Yellow Jackets' bigs or the pressure defense to take advantage of GT's shaky ballhandling, but Georgia Tech looked about as unimpressive as a team can look on its way to the ACC championship game. (I actually tweeted the following during their quarterfinal win over Maryland: "If it's possible to hurt your NCAA chances in a win over the #19 team, Georgia Tech just did it.") I kinda think the committee agrees with me a little bit, awarding the Jackets only a ten seed despite their run to the championship game. While I was occupied with the A-10 and SEC finals today during Tech's late run against Duke, their inability to protect the ball against the Terrapins (25 turnovers) and their struggle to beat a very underwhelming NC State team doesn't have me very high on their chances to advance past the first weekend.

* This region has a number of teams that are more or less one-man bands. As mentioned, Turner carries Ohio State, but not as much as Greivis Vasquez carries Maryland. And while Houston beat UTEP in the Conference USA championship game despite getting only 13 points from Aubrey Coleman, the Cougars belong to Coleman, the nation's scoring leader. It's going to be a lot of fun to watch those two go at it in the first round.

Along those same lines, the Midwest bracket is something of an artistic masterpiece by the committee. There's something about it that is symmetrical, yet perfectly diverse about it. Thoroughbreds in the top and bottom half of the bracket (Kansas and Ohio State). The hot, trendy pick to make the Final Four (Georgetown). The struggling power conference team (Michigan State), the slighted power conference team (Tennessee), and the gritty, grind-it-out mid-major (Northern Iowa). Multiple teams dependent on a single individual player. Two teams (UNLV and San Diego State) from a relatively obscure, but strong this year, conference (the four-bid Mountain West. And two or three teams (New Mexico State, Houston, and maybe San Diego State) whose victories in their conference tournaments cost Mississippi State, Virginia Tech, and Illinois their bids (since Utah State, UTEP, and UNLV got at-large invitations that the Aggies, Cougars, and possibly the Aztecs wouldn't otherwise have gotten).

There's a lot going on here, and there are a lot of teams I simply cannot comment on because I haven't seen them play. For now, it suffices to say I've got Kansas coming out of the region and ultimately winning the whole thing -- the latter by default, really.

Pittsburgh 70, Georgetown 54

I'm ack in DC for a few days and checked out this one with my cousin and a few friends. After Georgetown so thoroughly outplayed UConn in Storrs earlier in the week, I was expecting a better game than I got. If it weren't for DaJuan Summers hitting some very difficult shots -- he had 15 at halftime and finished with 22 -- it wouldn't have been much of a ballgame. As it was, the Panthers had it well in hand by the last several minutes. I was sitting right by the Pitt section -- those folks travel well. And they've been rewarded -- the Panthers are the nation's new number one team for the first time in history, after North Carolina's stunning loss to Boston College in Chapel Hill last night (so much for the undefeated season I had been predicting).

Sitting up in the 400 level -- "the Hill" as its known in the Verizon Center, a nod, of course, to Capitol Hill -- it was hard to appreciate just how dominant Pitt's DeJuan Blair was, so it was something of a surprise afterward to see his stat line of 20 points and 17 rebounds. His counterpart, Greg Monroe (who I raved about recently) had a decent game by the box score with 15 points and eight boards, but Blair thoroughly outplayed him. I don't want to say that Monroe needs to become more physical because I think his future is on the wing, but for Gerogetown's purposes, I'm sure they'd like him to bang a bit more.

Speaking of Monroe and Blair, after last Monday's performance against UConn, I was curious to see where Monroe ranked on the NBA draft sites, nbadraft.net and DraftExpress. Neither site had updated its mock draft since the game when I first checked, and neither site had Monroe listed.

I kept checking, and while I didn't find Monroe on nbadraft.net right away, I did find that Monroe had moved from off the board to number three overall on DraftExpress, while UConn's Hasheem Thabeet -- the 7'3" junior who Monroe badly outplayed -- had dropped a few spots, from (I think) five to eight. I can't tell if DraftExpress has updated its mock since Saturday, but Monroe is still at three and Thabeet is still at eight, with Blair at 20. I'll keep an eye on it to see if it moves further.

Over on nbadraft.net, and again, I don't know when the update occurred, Monroe is 20th, Thabeet's third, and Blair is 29th.

These rankings really don't mean anything, but I thought it was interesting to see Monroe debut so high on the DraftExpress board and to see him jump Thabeet.

You can catch Georgetown in action tonight at 7 p.m. Eastern at Notre Dame on ESPN. The Irish were surprise losers to St. John's on Saturday.

-I want to follow up on this post: Louisville lost at home to UNLV before squeaking by Kentucky on Edgar Sosa's bomb (video in link). I still think Louisville could be in a lot of trouble, but it would be even worse without a single respectable non-conference win. Sosa might've saved the Cardinals season with that shot. Anyway, the 'ville opens conference play on Wednesday at South Florida, then enters their toughest five-game stretch of conference play: at Villanova, home vs. Notre Dame, home vs. Pittsburgh, at Rutgers, at Syracuse. This just seems like a volatile group and a bad start could really be curtains for them.

Georgetown 74, Connecticut 63

I was expecting a bit better from this one.

Still, the night wasn't a complete bust, as I got my first real look at Georgetown's 6'9" freshman, Greg Monroe. What a player! He thoroughly outplayed his much bigger, much older, much more highly-touted counterpart on the Huskies, Hasheem Thabeet.

Monroe made his impact felt early, scoring or assisting on each of the Hoyas' first six baskets. Consider this sequence from the games opening minutes:

18:10 - Monroe threads a backdoor pass to Austin Freeman for the first two points of the game.
17:09 - After a UConn miss, offensive rebound, and turnover, Monroe hits Freeman backdoor again for a 4-0 lead. He didn't get an assist on this one, but he should have.
16:57 - Monroe rebounds Jeff Adrien's missed free throw.
16:21 - After a Hoya turnover and a Thabeet missed jam, Monroe find DaJuan Summers for a three and a 7-1 lead.
16:08 - Guarding UConn point guard A.J. Price on the perimeter, Monroe pokes the ball free, picks it up, takes it to the bucket...
16:05 - ...and makes the layup while being fouled by Price.
16:05 - Monroe misses the free throw. Hey, no one's perfect.
15:42 - Monroe fights around Thabeet and knocks away an entry pass from Stanley Robinson.
15:24 - Monroe assists on another triple by Summers. 12-1.
15:04 - Robinson misses a jumper. Monroe allows Summers to grab the rebound.
14:46 - Monroe drills a three-pointer from the top of the key off a pass from Summers, staking the Hoyas to a 15-1 lead.

So Monroe, playing his first Big East game, on the road against the undefeated second-ranked team in the country basically took over for three-and-a-half minutes. Granted, he didn't keep up that ridiculous pace, finishing with a rather modest line: 16 points, four rebounds, four assists, three steals. Three of those credited assists came in the first six minutes, as did two of the steals, and his rebound numbers are low because he picked up his third foul just 80 seconds into the second half and John Thompson III subbed him out for defense and in for offense for most of the next 12 minutes or so.

Because of Monroe's height, length, and smoothness, and the fact that he shoots with the same hand that Satan does, I suppose comparisons to the Los Angeles Lakers' Lamar Odom are inevitable. But that's who he reminded me of most, particularly when he drove across the lane and threw in a six-foot running hook off the glass over Thabeet. He is a great fit for Georgetown's Princeton-style offense, given that he can pass and hit the jumper, but he also can play with his back to the basket: In the first half, he caught the ball in the lane, threw a quick fake over his left shoulder, then went, without hesitation, to a little baby hook over Thabeet. He's playing center for the Hoyas this year, but at 6'10", he projects more as a four and it looks like he could be mobile enough to play a little three, at least offensively.

I'm really excited to watch this guy for the rest of the year. ESPN has him at noon Eastern this Saturday, January 3, when the Hoyas take on third-ranked (soon to be second-ranked, if they beat Georgetown) Pittsburgh.