No Fooling This Final Four Team

One basketball concept that surfaces from time to time is “fool’s gold.” It is unquestionably the reason the Connecticut Huskies are headed to the Final Four, while a Tom Izzo senior class at Michigan State will fail to reach college basketball’s holy grail for the first time (a span of 18 years).

Within the larger realm of sports analysis, an idea that has become more prominent (and happily so) in this age of analytics is that process and results are not always directly related. Bad decisions can produce good outcomes, and wise decisions can nevertheless lead to bad results. This happens; it’s part of imperfect competitions involving imperfect people, arbitrated by imperfect referees.

If you follow college basketball on a regular basis, you know that long hoists sometimes fall, giving life to the “NO NO NO NO GREAT SHOT!” dynamic. A smart decision to foul late in a game can still be minimized by the other team’s ability to hit foul shots.

What fans and pundits should be able to agree on is that teams and coaches should always be able to rest more easily if they process a game properly while fighting as hard as possible. If a team’s intelligence and effort are able to come to the fore, the lack of results at the end of the journey can always be accepted. It’s when one of those two components (thought process or intensity) are lacking that a defeat in a big-money stage such as the Elite Eight can haunt a team.

Michigan State, which did quite well to advance to the Elite Eight in light of all the roster disruptions it endured this season, should take great satisfaction in its overall NCAA tournament performance, especially Friday night’s win in a rare “defensive epic” versus Virginia. However, the Spartans will have reason to regret the way they processed the second half of Sunday’s East Regional final against the thoroughly deserving Connecticut Huskies.

Kevin Ollie of UConn might have been coaching in his first NCAA tournament and his first regional final, while Tom Izzo owned a 6-1 record in Elite Eight games before tip time inside Madison Square Garden. Yet, Connecticut was the team that approached this second half in a fundamentally superior way, and that’s why a nine-point deficit to a hungry Michigan State team was able to be wiped away.

A few aspects of this game made sense: Gary Harris of Michigan State came to play, tossing in 22 points and preventing his team from losing touch at several key stages of the proceedings. Shabazz Napier — not quite the same player as Kemba Walker, but similar enough in terms of shotmaking prowess in key situations — scored 25 to carry his team to North Texas this upcoming Saturday. Connecticut played with more raw adrenaline since it encountered a “bracket break” not commonly accorded to seventh seeds (they usually get shipped to different geographical regions). That adrenaline made it easier for UConn to play an energized 40 minutes. Michigan State had to manufacture more of its energy, often against the run of play.

Yet, for all the things about this game that were logical, many more busted the brain and cooked the cranium. The centrally mystifying dimension of the East Regional final was that the Spartans made a real choice to avoid taking the ball to the tin.

There were only 28 total fouls in this game (that’s equivalent to each team getting into the 1-and-1, but just barely, in both halves), but that was not a product of the officiating. Both sides settled for a lot of jump shots. Michigan State happened to hit a lot of them en route to a 32-23 lead early in the second half, but at that point in time, the Spartans had established nothing going to the rim.

When your offense is that imbalanced, at least some degree of proportionality must be incorporated into the attack. The failure to blend an inside game into a jumper-heavy approach is the embodiment of “fool’s gold.” An all-jumper offense without forays to the tin is an offense that’s begging for a long scoring slump.

Long story short, that’s exactly what buried the Spartans down the stretch. When trailing by 10 at 49-39 near the five-minute mark, a few threes brought them back within four and eventually within two, but the dozens of possessions without a single post touch or baseline screen gave UConn’s big men a bit of relief. Phillip Nolan and Amida Brimah, who were superb in defending the post for the Huskies all game long, only had to guard portions of the floor instead of every square inch. This enabled the 7 seed to marshal its energies much more effectively than the fourth-seeded Spartans.

At the other end of the floor, Connecticut got smarter on offense while Michigan State failed to adjust. The Huskies were able to attack the rim or at least dribble into the paint, enough to earn 22 free throws compared to only 8 for Michigan State. The plus-14 score at the foul line (21-7, UConn) loomed large in a contest that — while governed by runs on both sides — was relatively close in the bigger picture.

Kevin Ollie stared down Tom Izzo in the first Elite Eight game of his first NCAA tournament as Connecticut’s head coach. He was able to get his players to respond more prudently to an overpowering, emotional chemical cocktail of a moment inside an electric Madison Square Garden.

As a result of turning away from “fool’s gold,” Ollie and the rest of the “wisdom people” in the UConn camp will head to Texas, a state where the Huskies won the national championship in 2011 under Jim Calhoun and Kemba Walker.

It’s almost as though Calhoun never left.

Prudent in its replacement of Calhoun and prudent against one of the best Elite Eight coaches of all time, Connecticut is two wins away from a fourth national championship.

 

About Matt Zemek

Matt Zemek is the managing editor of The Student Section, covering college football and basketball with associate editors Terry Johnson and Bart Doan. Mr. Zemek is the editor of Crossover Chronicles, covering the NBA. He is also Bloguin's lead tennis writer, covering the major tournaments. He contributes to other Bloguin sites, such as The AP Party.

Quantcast