Hoops notes: Tigers holding onto perfect season

If anyone understands the emotions John Calipari and the Memphis Tigers will be dealing with before Saturday’s game against Tennessee, it has to be Saint Joseph’s coach Phil Martelli.

Top-ranked Memphis improved to 25-0 Saturday night, rallying to defeat Alabama-Birmingham 79-78 and keeping the opportunity alive for a perfect season. Martelli’s Hawks were the last team to complete the regular season undefeated.

On the way to 27-0 in 2003-04, certain games were targeted on the Saint Joseph’s schedule and labeled dangerous. Memphis certainly knows about that. And as that memorable season progressed, Martelli was asked repeatedly if his team would be better off if it lost a game before the postseason.

“That has always baffled me,” Martelli said. “In a way, it would seem to me you would [end up] in front of a subcommittee on Capitol Hill because you would have thrown a game. I never understood the thought process where you would say to a team, ‘Do you think it would be better to lose?’ I don’t know how you go about that.”

The Hawks made it through the regular season before losing to Xavier in the quarterfinals of the Atlantic 10 tournament. Then they bounced back to advance to the NCAA regional final before losing to Oklahoma State. Martelli said the first time he noticed his team thinking about the perfect record was the game at Rhode Island that produced victory No. 26.

“My team got a little quieter and a little more pensive,” he said.  “And I’ll admit, that’s when I felt it. It was a game where we didn’t play naturally and all year that team had played the game of basketball – not necessarily to beat a Temple or to beat a Dayton. That day we played against the record. It will be interesting to watch from afar to see whether or not that’s what Memphis does against Tennessee.”

In his recently released book “Don’t Call Me Coach,” Martelli writes that his team lost focus in the A-10 tournament “because I lost perspective.” He writes that the Hawks weren’t on task and the rest of the season became more difficult.

“When we lost in the A-10 tournament it was surreal in a lot of ways,” Martelli told me. “We got waxed. We were never in the game. We had a very even keeled locker room that year. I remember there weren’t signs of despair. But when we came back from the A-10 tournament and started to prepare for the NCAA tournament, there was more of a nature of pressure. We all realized now that our next loss was going to be our last game.”

Martelli says a first loss this late in the season “takes your breath away” and forces a coach to look at his team in a different dynamic. He thinks Calipari has done a good job preparing the Tigers.

“I think he’s done an unbelievable job of making sure that everybody hears him say they’re not about an undefeated season and they’re not about the Tennessee game,” Martelli said. “They’re about going to the Final Four. He has set that goal. If they fall short, it’s going to be all right with him.

“To get to the point where Memphis is at, to get to the point where we were at, the ‘I’ has to be eliminated. Every decision those kids make during the day is part of the function of being on a team. That, to me, is extraordinary.”

PLAYER OF THE WEEK

With all due respect to the freshman class, North Carolina’s Tyler Hansbrough should be the national player of the year. Look what he did last week for the Tar Heels, who are injured, battered, and trying to keep up with Duke in the ACC standings. He had 23 points in the win over Virginia and 23 more in the win over Virginia Tech. He hit 16 of 28 field goal attempts and was 14-for-17 from the line. He only had 16 rebounds, but it is the hustle, the determination, and the floor burns that impress you most. Hansbrough did it all this week with a painful ingrown toenail. He missed practice the day before the Virginia game and spent much of his time at the hospital receiving treatments.

FRESHMAN OF THE WEEK

Arizona’s Jerryd Bayless has been on fire.  Last week we mentioned his 39-point outburst against Arizona State. His big-time offensive play continued against Cal (33 points) and Stanford (31). Too bad the Wildcats only won one of the games. Even so, Bayless has been remarkable – especially from the free throw line. He went 26 of 28 from the line in the last two games, after a 9-for-9 performance against Arizona State.                                                                                  

GAMES OF THE WEEK

Monday, Feb. 18
Georgetown at Providence
Providence put a scare into Louisville Saturday but Georgetown will be highly motivated after losing at Syracuse.

Syracuse at Louisville
Jim Boeheim’s young team is unpredictable and coming on strong. Rick Pitino’s team is trying to take control of the Big East race.

Texas A&M at Texas
The Aggies won 80-63 on their home court in the first meeting. Can the Longhorns return the favor in Austin?

Tuesday, Feb. 19
Purdue at Indiana
It’s the Indiana state championship and the battle for the Big 10 all rolled into one. Will this be Kelvin Sampson’s final game as Indiana coach?

UNC-Greensboro at Davidson
Here’s a chance to see two sensational players on the same court. Kyle Hines averages 19.3 points and 9.7 rebounds for Greensboro. Stephen Curry averages 25.6 points for Davidson.

Wednesday, Feb. 20
North Carolina at North Carolina State
N.C. State has to qualify as one of the biggest disappointments in the nation this season. If the Wolfpack could upset the Tar Heels, it would take away some of the sting.

Thursday, Feb. 21
Pittsburgh at Notre Dame
If you haven’t seen Luke Harangody of the Irish, you are missing one of life’s simple pleasures.

Massachusetts at Rhode Island
UMass is slipping in the Atlantic 10 with five losses between Jan. 23 and Feb. 14. URI is trying to stay in the race for first.

Friday, Feb. 22
UC Santa Barbara at Utah State
Utah State’s Jaycee Carroll gets a well-deserved spotlight during BracketBusters weekend. Alex Harris leads UCSB, averaging 20.7 points per game.

Saturday, Feb. 23
Connecticut at Villanova
Two Big East teams headed in different directions. Villanova needs a win desperately.

Drake at Butler
This is the premier contest in the BracketBusters series. Don’t miss it.

Marist at Cleveland State
Second-year coach Gary Waters has Cleveland State back in the news. Joe Gavin and Louie McCroskey lead Marist.

Tennessee at Memphis
This one has been circled on the schedule all year. Can the Vols spoil the drive toward perfection for Memphis?

THEY SAID IT:

“I don’t have a chart in my office ranking my embarrassing losses. You can take these and flush them down the toilet. Obviously [the coaches] will watch it, but I’m not sure John Wooden could get much out of this tape.” – Virginia Tech coach Seth Greenberg, on not forcing his players to watch tape of a 92-53 loss to North Carolina.

“It’s as simple as this, there is no other two-player combination in the country that is as excellent at making outrageous, spectacular shots, defended, deep-range shots, as those guys. They’re very, very difficult to deal with.” – Georgia coach Dennis Felton on Tennessee’s Chris Lofton and JaJuan Smith.

“They played like men, and we played like boys.” – Kentucky freshman Patrick Patterson after Vanderbilt handed Kentucky a 93-52 loss, the most lopsided Southeastern Conference defeat ever for the Wildcats.

“I hope we have a chance to cut down the nets in our facility.” – Drake coach Keno Davis after his team clinched its first Missouri Valley title since 1971 at Northern Iowa. The Bulldogs celebrated in the visitor’s locker room by dumping water on each other’s heads and pretending it was champagne.

“At first I thought I stepped out of bounds.” – Georgetown’s Jonathan Wallace, reacting to the whistle and foul called against Villanova’s Corey Stokes 70 feet from the basket with less than a second remaining and the score tied Monday night. Wallace hit the free throws to give the Hoyas a 55-53 victory.

“I’m still only 1-2. Now if I was 3-0, I’d think about retiring.” – Texas Tech coach Pat Knight, after his first career victory, an 84-75 decision over Kansas State.

NOTES:

Shame on us for not tipping our cap to Wake Forest coach Dino Gaudio earlier in the season. Gaudio, who took over for Skip Prosser after his untimely death last summer, will get plenty of recognition after knocking off Duke 86-73 Sunday night. But the Demon Deacons are 16-8 overall and 6-5 in the Atlantic Coast Conference. Given the emotional upheaval the program endured, that’s a darn good season. Wake has defeated Duke the last four times they met in Winston-Salem in February. But this was the first time that happened when Wake was unranked. Kudos to the student fans in body paint who spelled out WIN 4 SKIP. Skip was smiling down on this one, that’s for sure.
 
Conference USA announced Sunday it has launched an investigation into the ugly postgame scene following the Memphis-UAB game Saturday in Birmingham. Fans from the UAB student section rushed the floor and also pelted the top-ranked Tigers with cups, water bottles and pompons as they headed to the dressing room. The fans behaved this way despite the fact Birmingham police officers were escorting several Tigers as they walked off the court. But pictures taken by the Memphis Commercial Appeal reveal more to the story. It appears Memphis forward Pierre Niles slapped a fan on the way off the court. Here’s the link. Looks as though there’s plenty of blame to go around on both sides.

Want to know the best part about Pat Knight’s first win as Texas Tech coach? After the game, he admitted studying Jim Boeheim’s instructional video on zone defense and using that knowledge to beat Kansas State. That’s right, a zone defense. And before the game, Knight tossed rolled up T-shirts into the student seating section, an idea he credited to Roy Williams. There was no mention of anything he borrowed from his father, Bob.

During the Michigan State-Indiana game Saturday night, ESPN aired interviews with angry Hoosier fans venting that Kelvin Sampson had disgraced the university with his cheating and lying. But, in the final moments of Indiana’s victory, fans were chanting Sampson’s name. Hey, Hoosier heads, you can’t have it both ways.

The Division I men’s basketball committee will closely examine how a team does in its last 12 games, according to committee chairman Tom O’Connor. In the past, the committee used the final 10 games of the season as one tool to measure a team. “This year there are more exempt games and we just felt that [12 games] was a clearer picture of what was happening,” said O’Connor, who also is athletics director at George Mason.

Kansas held a reunion of the 1988 national championship team Saturday in Lawrence and also celebrated 110 seasons of basketball with more than 200 former players and coaches in attendance at Allen Fieldhouse. Danny Manning, who led the Jayhawks to the 1988 championship, is now an assistant coach under Bill Self. “Our championship team is nowhere near the team we have now at Kansas,” Manning said recently. “That’s not a knock on [the 1988] team. It’s just that this team has a lot of horses pulling the carriage.”

Stat of the week: Syracuse freshman guard Jonny Flynn is going for the Iron Man award. Flynn played all 45 minutes in an overtime loss to Georgetown on Jan. 21. In the six games since then, Flynn has logged 40 minutes in every game. Even more amazing: He has been whistled for only six fouls in those seven complete games.

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