Utah is 17-0, off to its best start in 85 years and ranked third in the nation.
So doesn’t it stand to reason that the Runnin’ Utes are a better team than they were a year ago, when they went 29-4 and came within one victory of the Final Four?
“No, no, no, no, no,” coach Rick Majerus said Tuesday from Salt Lake City. “You need to come down to a sports bar here, and let’s watch Van Horn play some night on TV.
“In no way, shape or form are we as good as last year’s team.”
Keith Van Horn, of course, was a consensus All-American and a three-time Western Athletic Conference player of the year. Now a rookie with the New Jersey Nets, Van Horn returns to the Huntsman Center Thursday night to have his No. 44 jersey retired when the Utes meet Texas-El Paso.
Van Horn will find a team that, despite Majerus’ protests, is putting together an amazing season out in the Wasatch Mountains.
The Utes are big and intimidating, averaging about 6 feet 5 inches per starter. Their leader is 6-11 Michael Doleac, a banger with brains who plans to attend medical school. He averages 15.3 points and 7.1 rebounds per game, both team highs.
Teams can’t collapse on Doleac because he’ll dish off to 6-10 Hanno Mottola, a sophomore from Helsinki, Finland. Majerus has tinkered with moving Mottola, a 51.5 percent shooter from the floor, away from the basket to clear the inside.
But the key to shutting down the Utes might be stopping point guard Andre Miller, a senior who has 80 assists and only 34 turnovers in 17 games. “He is playing superbly, taking care of the ball,” Majerus said. “He’s that proverbial coach on the floor.”
That should be good news come tournament time, when guard play becomes so important. So, too, should the Utes’ defense; they’ve allowed 65 or more points only twice this season.
The chief threat to Utah’s winning streak comes Sunday at New Mexico. The Lobos (14-13, 4-1) are always tough in “the Pit.” And this is the first regular-season Sunday game in Utah basketball history; because of the state’s Mormon tradition, neither Utah nor Brigham Young regularly schedules games on Sundays.
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The New Mexico trip begins a stretch of four road games in 14 days across the far-flung WAC. By the time the Utes get to the end of that stretch, they’ll be tired. But they might also still be unbeaten.
Then, maybe, the question about whether this team is better than last year’s might not seem so outlandish. “Don’t get me wrong,” Majerus said. “I miss Keith Van Horn every day. But we were good before Keith and we’re pretty good now.”
Better than that, actually. After Utah swamped UNLV 67-54 last weekend in Las Vegas, Rebels coach Bill Bayno said, “That’s one excellent basketball team. When they’re on, I don’t know who’s going to beat them.”
Pick ’em: Majerus was asked to handicap Thursday’s showdown between sixth-ranked Arizona and No. 4 Stanford in Palo Alto.
“My (athletic director) just tried to censure me for betting on the Super Bowl and the Packers,” said Majerus, a native of Sheboygan, Wis. “I’m not sure I want to handicap that.”
Majerus eventually said he likes Stanford because it is at home–but only if the Cardinal can “get them into some kind of half-court grind-it-out game.”
“We play Thursday night. Otherwise I might be watching that game myself,” he said.
Wakeup call: In an extraordinary development, Wake Forest sophomore center Loren Woods has been removed from the team for the sake of his mental health.
Coach Dave Odom initially announced the move as an “indefinite suspension” but has since come up with a new term to describe a delicate situation.
“I think the word `separation’ is much better,” Odom told reporters. “It’s like separating from something that’s not good for you at that time and backing away. . . . It’s more a separation from something that’s gone awry.”
The 7-1 Woods has had a solid season–he went into last week second in the Atlantic Coast Conference in blocks (three per game) and fourth in rebounds (8.5)–but he has had a tendency to get down on himself when he makes a mistake and seemed to blame himself for Wake’s poor start.
Woods, perhaps, is burdened by the pressure of replacing campus legend Tim Duncan, last season’s national player of the year. “He never came to me and said, `Coach, I can’t live under this kind of cloud.’ But was that there? Probably so,” Odom said.
Woods has not given interviews since the “separation.”
Shoot-’em-up: A year after he led the country in scoring with 30.1 points per game, Charles Jones of Long Island University is again at the top of the chart with a 29.3-point average. Only one of 1997’s other final top 10 scorers–Texas Tech’s Cory Carr, at 25.3 points per game–is among the top 10 this year. The last player to lead the nation in scoring in consecutive seasons was Harry “Machine Gun” Kelly of Texas Southern, who averaged 29.7 points in 1982 and 28.8 in ’83.
A Cuttica above: Former Hinsdale Central standout Kevin Cuttica has started every game at point guard at Cornell University as a freshman. He’s averaging 10 points for the Big Red (5-10, 3-1 Ivy League), which visits No. 11 Princeton Thursday. “He’s just a very good guard,” Cornell coach Scott Thompson said. “And he’s getting better all the time.” Thompson, a 1976 Iowa grad, has emphasized recruiting in the Chicago area.
Free throws: UIC will announce Thursday that the Pavilion will be the site of the 1999 and 2000 Midwestern Collegiate Conference tournaments. . . . Keep an eye on Connecticut. The ninth-ranked Huskies went into Syracuse over the weekend and torched the 20th-ranked Orangemen 63-54, using a four-guard lineup without injured power forward Kevin Freeman and suspended center Antric Klaiber. “The bottom line is when you get one of those ratty, gutty wins with a small team, there’s a special feeling,” Huskies coach Jim Calhoun said. “We were playing with the hand that was dealt and we handled it wonderfully.” . . . The Big East sent four teams–Georgetown, Boston College, Villanova and Providence–to the NCAA tournament a year ago. Those four are a combined 14-22 in conference play this season after Syracuse whipped the Hoyas Monday night.
Add Majerus to the list of coaches who believe television goes too far in moving tipoff times. “It’ll be a Pacific Rim channel in Guam, but we’d probably move the game and be happy to do it,” he said. . . . UCLA is young and talented, but it is having trouble putting inferior teams away, a trend the Bruins need to correct before the postseason. The Bruins blew most of a 24-point lead over struggling Louisville over the weekend in Westwood before emerging with an 88-82 victory. That came three weeks after UCLA squandered a 19-point bulge over Illinois in an eventual 74-69 victory–also at home. . . . Georgia Tech, in danger of missing the NCAA tournament for the fourth time in five years, has lost its last three ACC games by a total of 11 points. . . . This hasn’t been a great year for Iowa State, led by possible future Bulls coach Tim Floyd. But while the Cyclones (9-10, 2-4) are 10th in the Big 12, they’re leading the league in defense for the second year in a row, allowing only 65.4 points per game.