Basketball
SEC is nation’s sleaziest basketball conference
Jul 22nd
At least that’s what other coaches think, according to ESPN’s Dana O’Neil:
As for the dirtiest, despite Mike Slive’s best efforts to clean up the image, the Southeastern Conference was perceived as the worst, with three coaches partnering the SEC with the Big East and another tossing in the Big 12 (one coach went league-by-league, counting up schools). All in all, the SEC was named by 14 of the coaches.
“Oh no, it’s not just a myth,” one coach said about the SEC. “It’s the truth.”
Most of us will read that and be unable to help ourselves for wondering how much a certain guy lends himself to that perception.
Jordan McRae on FB
Jul 12th
Tennessee freshman hoopster Jordan McRae on Facebook:
Last night in the gym Tobias [fellow freshman Tobias Harris] asked me if we was going to church I said we might not he said if not we need to have bible study in my room and I just sat there in shock. If feels so great to have a postive people on my team is going to be a GREAT YEAR.
When does the countdown to basketball start?
Jul 7th
Lost in the anticipation of the college football season (even if that anticipation is greatly tempered in Big Orange Country this year) is the possibility that the basketball Vols may be on the verge of a special season.
Tennessee advanced to the Elite Eight last year for the first time in school history. Could this year be even better? The Vols lost a lot of talent — Wayne Chism being the most important loss — but bring in what is probably the most talented freshman class of Bruce Pearl’s tenure in Knoxville.
Veterans on the UT squad are speaking openly of Final Fours and national championships, and the newcomers appear to be dedicated to the cause. UT assistant coach Tony Jones says his new players are working hard and will be special players. Knoxville News Sentinel sports reporter Mike Griffith tweeted that the new guys — Trae Golden, Jordan McRae and Tobias Harris — were in the gym until midnight Monday, back at 6:30 a.m. yesterday morning and past 11 p.m. last night.
(By the way, 119 days until basketball time in Tennessee.)
Shocked! Shocked, I tell you…
Jul 3rd
TMZ has learned the NCAA is taking an aggressive look at University of Kentucky basketball players — past and current — and their possible involvement with professional agents.
According to a source who was interviewed by an NCAA investigator, the agency is interested in at least four players — two current and two who were just drafted by NBA teams.
University of Transfers?
Jul 2nd
On the heels of punter Matt Darr (who wasn’t technically a transfer, but still…) comes some extra help for Bruce Pearl’s hoops Vols.
Knoxville, Tenn., is the place to be this week. (You listening, USC juniors and seniors?)
Calipari’s house of cards
Jun 26th
In just his first year at Kentucky, John Calipari assembled what many felt was the most talented basketball team in the history of the Southeastern Conference.
If Thursday’s NBA draft is any indication, it was. Five Wildcats were drafted in the first round, a historic night for college basketball.
And to Calipari, that’s a greater feat than winning a national championship.
“I’m not saying that winning national titles is not important; it is,” Calipari told the Lexington Herald-Leader today. “But if you told me we’d win a national title and no one gets drafted, or you go 0-for-20 against West Virginia and five guys get drafted, you tell me what you’d want. I know that makes the old guard mad that I’d even say that but, if it’s really about these kids, this would be a great day.”
West Virginia bounced Kentucky from the NCAA Tournament with a 73-66 quarterfinals win; a game that saw the Wildcats shoot just 4-of-32 from three-point range.
So what Calipari is saying, in effect, is that college basketball’s greatest achievement this year wasn’t Duke—which did indeed win the national championship and no Blue Devil got drafted—but Kentucky.
Calipari’s comment to the Herald-Leader wasn’t an isolated event. On draft night, Calipari called it the greatest day in the University of Kentucky’s history. This about a school that has won seven national championships.
Calipari’s crazy.
Crazy like a fox.
There’s a method to Calipari’s madness . . . which he must be (mad, that is) if he really thinks sending players to the pros is more important for a school than winning championships.
When Calipari says his 2010 accomplishment was greater than Mike Krzyzewski’s 2010 accomplishment, make no mistake: he’s selling his program.
Don’t lose sight of the fact that Calipari’s bachelor’s degree is in marketing. And he’s darned good at it. Selling his style and philosophies to recruits, Calipari built UMass to national prominence in the 1990s and resurrected a flailing Memphis program in the 2000s.
At Kentucky, Calipari has a better product to sell than he’s ever had in his life. And he’s selling it by seizing on every high school basketball star’s dreams of going to the NBA.
For John Calipari, it’s all about recruiting.
John Wall and DeMarcus Cousins—true freshmen who were selected first and fifth in the draft—are terrific talents. But were they heartbroken by Kentucky’s premature exit from the NCAA Tournament?
Not likely. They had nothing vested in Kentucky; Lexington was merely a stopover on their road to the NBA. They wouldn’t have been at UK or any other university if the NBA permitted players to jump straight from high school to the draft.
To the one-and-done players, making it to the NBA is greater than winning a national title. So when Calipari says Thursday was the most important day in Kentucky history, he’s sending a clear message to all those super-talented prospects who he hopes to see wearing the Kentucky blue.
He’s marketing Kentucky as the best place for the nation’s top players to prepare for the NBA; selling himself as a players’ coach and Lexington as a launching pad to the next level.
In that light, his reasoning that sending players to the NBA is more important than winning a national championship doesn’t seem quite so far-fetched.
Make no mistake: Calipari knows exactly what he’s doing. It’s all about landing the top recruits in the land, year in and year out.
Casting off regard for anything other than landing the best recruits might help explain why Calipari had Final Fours vacated at each of his two prior stops on the college coaching trail, even though NCAA investigations did not indict him personally.
It’s hard to imagine Tennessee coach Bruce Pearl or Florida’s Billy Donovan saying that sending players to the pros is more heavily weighted than winning national championships.
But John Calipari’s style isn’t the style of most other college coaches. Neither is it the style of most Kentucky fans, though the Big Blue are so euphoric over emerging from their Billy Gillespie-guided trek through the wilderness that they don’t yet realize it.
There are a couple of problems with Calipari’s style. For one, teams featuring one-and-done players are likely to under-achieve more often than not. Despite his accomplishments, Calipari has never won a national championship. This year’s “most talented team ever” couldn’t make it past the Elite Eight. For another, the very nature of aggressive recruiting is that the risks of having the bullseye of the NCAA’s compliance department on you are going to be inherently high.
And if Calipari is being truthful, if sending players to the pros is more important than hanging banners in the rafters, you have to figure that his true interests lie elsewhere…somewhere outside the college game.
Calipari’s own NBA career ended when he was fired by the New Jersey Nets midway through his third season, after his team started with a 5-17 record. Redemption is a powerful motivator.
In the meantime, how long will it be before Calipari’s house of cards falls at Kentucky? He’s already told Kentucky fans that winning SEC championships aren’t important. Now he’s essentially said that winning national championships aren’t important. More than anything else, Kentucky fans love to win. They had fun this year, but in five years, the flash-in-the-pan careers of Wall and Cousins will be nothing but a footnote in the school’s basketball history.
The big question is whether Calipari’s role at UK will be relegated to a historic footnote as well by that time.
Cal’s five
Jun 24th
So five Kentucky players were selected in the first round of the NBA draft tonight. Five! From one team.
And Coach Calipari still couldn’t lead them to the Final Four.
Oh well. At least this saves him the pain of having to vacate it in a couple of years.
But consider this: Bruce Pearl took a team that is likely to not have any players drafted (unless Wayne Chism is picked up by someone late) just as far as Calipari took a team with five first round players. And Kentucky fans think their coach is the greatest coach in basketball? Ha!
Bruce endorses Bill
Jun 11th
The man who could probably make a strong showing for governor of Tennessee has endorsed his mayor for the position.
Tennessee basketball coach Bruce Pearl is making a foray into the political realm by endorsing Bill Haslam in the gubernatorial race.
From the press release:
“I talk about raising expectations, focusing on positives and building confidence. I talk about work ethic. I talk about ethics. It’s all about leadership,” Pearl said. “Anybody can sail the ship when seas are calm and everything is favorable…You’ve got to prepare people for the worst times.”
“These are adverse times. This is not going to be an easy job, and it’s not going to happen overnight,” Pearl added. “But if there’s one thing that I know about Bill Haslam, he has an incredible work ethic.”
“What Bill has done for Knoxville he will do for the State of Tennessee,” he continued.
Tatum spices up Highlander camp
Jun 10th
Cameron Tatum doesn’t pause to think about his answers very often, fielding answers from grade school basketball players the way he knocks down treys against SEC foes. His toughest opponent? John Wall. Kobe or LaBron? LaBron. NBA dreams? Sure, but it’s a long shot.
But when asked about his points per game average, Tatum is stumped. He looks at the bright lights suspended over Highlander Gymnasium, scrunches his mouth in the universal sign of deep thought.
“I don’t guess I know,” he says. Turning to a UT manager, “How many points did I average last year?”
The manager doesn’t skip a beat. “Seven point three.”
Tatum smiles. “Seven point three,” he says to the youngster. “But what I scored isn’t what’s important. Being a team player is what’s important.”
It’s a central theme for Tatum; one he revisits often as he spices up Coach Bill Duncan’s first Future Highlanders camp at Scott High School.
“Helping your team be the best it can be is what matters most,” he says. “We made the Elite Eight last year for the first time ever. That was my favorite accomplishment.”
Tatum’s “aw, shucks” approach sells short his individual accomplishments. As a sophomore on Bruce Pearl’s squad last season, Tatum emerged as one of the SEC’s top sixth men, leading the Vols’ bench in scoring and leading the team in 3-point shooting, at 35% in SEC player. He played a pivotal role in the Vols’ record run through the NCAA Tournament, hitting 40% of his 3-point shot attempts and scoring 11 points against Ohio and Ohio State as Tennessee advanced past the Sweet Sixteen for the first time.
His emergence as a primary role player for Tennessee had a rather inauspicious start. Tatum was one of four Tennessee players arrested in a Knoxville traffic stop on New Year’s Day. Police officers found pot and a gun in a car Tatum was driving. He was suspended, along with teammates Tyler Smith, Brian Williams and Melvin Goins. It initially appeared that their Tennessee careers might be finished.
But the gun belonged to Smith, who was dismissed from the team, and the marijuana belonged to Brian Williams, who served a lengthy suspension. Tatum and Goins were eventually cleared and charges against them dropped. They rejoined the Tennessee squad just in time for a memorable run that saw the Vols knock off then-No. 2 Kentucky in preparation for their tourney run.
Tatum, described by those who know him best as a stand-up guy and a good role model for kids, doesn’t shy away from the Jan. 1 arrest. But neither does he make excuses for having the misfortune to wind up in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“That’s not the way I was raised,” he said. “My parents didn’t bring me up like that. [But] I had great coaches who stood behind me and my family stood behind me.”
Tatum molded into a consistent player last season after showing flashes of brilliance as a redshirt freshman in 2009. In his rookie season, he scored 19 points to help Tennessee to a season-opening win over Chattanooga, hit five 3-point shots in the final five minutes to propel the Vols to a win over Georgetown in the Old Spice Classic, and scored the team’s first 14 points en route to a career high 23 points in a win over Gonzaga.
Does he want to play in the NBA? Of course, he says in response to a kid’s question. “But it’s a long shot,” he admits. “Getting an education is the most important part.”
Where would he be if he wasn’t playing basketball? “My entire family works for IBM so I would probably be working with computers,” he says. “I’m a little bit of a nerd.”
Tatum, who is likely to play a major role in the Vols’ upcoming season, likes his team’s chances. “We’re going to be great,” he says. “We have two very good freshmen coming in (Trae Golden and Jordan McRae). It’s going to be a lot of fun.”
Cal speaks
May 14th
I want to address this with the Big Blue Nation one last time, I will be coaching at Kentucky next year. Now let’s finish what we started!
Sure, Coach. Everybody believes you. 
