Buckle Up! Big East Basketball This Season Looks Like It Will Be the Wild West

Buckle Up! Big East Basketball This Season Looks Like It Will Be the Wild West

Big East:  Week 1

If you like to wager occasionally on college basketball, you might want to take a pass on Big East games this basketball season.

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A week or so ago, you’d be pretty safe in saying, including yours truly, that the heavyweight teams in the Big East would be UCONN, Marquette, and Creighton with DePaul and Georgetown looking up at everyone else from the bottom.  Villanova and PC would likely be fighting it out with the other middle tier schools—St. John’s, Xavier, Butler, and Seton Hall—for two or three NCAA tournament bids.

So, what happens in just the first week of Big East basketball?  UCONN, Creighton, and Marquette all get dumped in their first games, along with some other surprises:

 

--Seton Hall humbled the ever-vocal Coach Hurley and the UCONN Huskies, 75-60;

 

--Creighton blew a double-digit lead in the second half to Villanova to lose, 68-66;

 

--PC, a 5-point underdog, spanked Marquette, 72-57, holding the Golden Eagles to 23    points below their season average of 80 pts/game;

 

--PC started 15-0 against a solid Butler team, but needed a Hail Mary 3-pointer from Ticket Gaines with 2 seconds left in regulation to eventually win in overtime, 85-75;

 

--And just when you thought that Seton Hall might be a legitimate Big East power after crushing UCONN, the Pirates go to Xavier and get thrashed by 20 pts, 74-54.

 

Luckily for the pre-season Big East basketball prognosticators, Georgetown and DePaul held form and went a combined 0-3 in Week 1.

 

PC’s Early Christmas Present

Santa came early this year for PC Athletic Director Steve Napolillo, when Kim English was hired last March as the new Friar basketball coach.  I know it’s early in the Big East season and there are inevitable Providence-sized pot holes ahead in the Friars season.  But even lifer PC basketball fans have to be impressed with the job English has done so far with the 11-2 Friars.

 

Let’s look beyond the really nice 11-2 record and admire what he’s done.  He convinced the two stars from last year’s team, Hopkins and Carter, to stay at PC with him.  He convinced youngsters Jayden Pierre and Corey Floyd that they have a future with PC.  And he brought along two proven studs from George Mason—Josh Oduro and Ticket Gaines—and integrated the transfers with the existing Friars into one team with contributions from lots of players each night.

 

English’s biggest accomplishment:  he’s convinced the Friars that defense wins games.    Blessed with players with size, English has PC playing aggressive in-your-face defense that has limited easy shots from their opponents.  The Friars’ field goal defense and scoring defense are both ranked in the top 20 in the country.

 

The defense still has a way to go as witnessed by the pick-and-roll baskets and drive and dump out to the edge baskets that their opponents seem to be scoring lately against PC.  And I worry that PC’s aggressive defense might be victimized by lots of foul calls away from the friendly confines of the AMP.  In any case, defense is going to win a lot of games for the Friars this year in the Big East.

 

Friar Trivia

Last week’s questions and answers:

 

Q.  Which PC player had the longest NBA career of any PC player, scoring almost 18,000 points?

A.  Otis Thorpe, a 6’ 10’’solid player for 4 years at PC, 1980-84, thrived for 19 seasons in the NBA playing for 8 different teams and averaging 14 pts/game.  His best seasons were the 7 seasons with the Huston Rockets where he won NBA championship rings in the 1993-94 and 1994-95 seasons.

 

Q. Who is the only PC player with three NBA championship rings?

A.  Yup, nice guy 6’ 9’’ Dickey Simpkins, who enjoyed four pretty good seasons at PC, 1990-94. Have you ever been on a school project with several other people where you showed up but was a minor contributor to the project success, but you brought home an “A” for your mother?   That was Dickey Simpkins’ good fortune while winning three NBA rings with the Chicago Bulls with Michael Jordan in 1995-96, 1997-97, and 1997-98.

    

This week’s trivia question:

 

Q.  In the mid-2000s, two former PC players coached against each other in the Final Four NCAA tournament.  Who were they, and what teams did they coach?