I’m courtside at the Big Ten tournament, and my eyes drift toward the players’ entrance to the Conseco Fieldhouse floor.
I wonder: If a Steve Smith or a Glen Rice or a Downtown Freddie Brown were to emerge from the tunnel, would he get into the game? If he did, would he be yanked back to the bench the first time he misfired on a questionable three-pointer or was late on a defensive switch?
I wonder.
Those guys, and dozens of other similarly inclined marksmen, shot their way to Big Ten prominence over the years. They always made for entertaining, winning basketball.
These days the Big Ten is a defensive league, and the coaches responsible are quite defensive about it, dismissing those who don’t “get” the intrinsic beauty of a 48-44 bludgeoning or see mediocrity where the coaches extol “balance” in pressing their case for, oh, 10 NCAA tournament bids.
“Look at our non-conference record,” they wail, citing a gaudy .807 winning percentage (109-26) as March evolves into Madness. But it’s 19-18 (.511) against the other five BCS “power” conferences, and 10-14 against the Atlantic Coast and the Big East, which set the agenda for any discussion of the nation’s best league, this season and most seasons.
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While we’re having fun with numbers:
Ohio State sophomore Evan Turner led the Big Ten in scoring with 17.3 points per game in conference play, the lowest figure for a league scoring champ since Bob Cook averaged 15.6 for Wisconsin in 1947.
That was before Chuck Taylor laced up his first pair of black canvas high-tops.
Rick Mount used to have 17 before breakfast for Purdue in 1970, when he averaged a conference-record 39.4, with no three-point line and no shot clock.
Turner’s former St. Joe’s teammate Demetri McCamey is the leading scorer for second-place Illinois with 11.9.
Terry Dischinger could average 11.9 if he returned to Purdue tomorrow, and he’ll be 70 later this year.
“The Big Ten has that reputation for physicality, and a lot of the coaches do embrace defense,” Minnesota’s Tubby Smith said after his Gophers traded body shots with Michigan State while falling 64-56 in a quarterfinal scrum Friday.
Smith is completing his second season at Minnesota, after 13 years in the more forgiving Southeastern Conference. No one ever accused his teams of not playing hard, albeit less maniacally.
“I prefer more of a finesse game,” he acknowledged.
I wonder if that also isn’t true of the nation’s top prospects. The Big Ten had three players picked in the NBA draft last season, all first-rounders, two of them one-and-doners, Indiana’s Eric Gordon and Ohio State’s Kosta Koufos.
NCAA champion Kansas had five players drafted off its blue-chip roster, and fellow Final Four qualifiers Memphis and UCLA had three apiece.
How the NBA regards a league’s players is a pretty good indicator of its talent level, even if the shape of the ball and the height of the goal are the only real college-to-pro-game similarities. A scouting friend tells me we might not hear a single Big Ten player’s name called in this year’s NBA draft in June.
It’s not a Big Ten coach or any college coach’s job to prepare his players for the NBA, of course, but every kid good enough to attract recruiters has NBA aspirations zipping through his wiring. Recent trends suggest the top kids are opting for schools where there’s more of a distinction between basketball and football — the North Carolina team that beat Illinois in the 2005 title game featured four first-round draft picks.
That’s not to say the Big Ten is bereft of talent, much of it quite young. Turner will play pro ball someplace. Michigan State’s Kalin Lucas and Penn State’s Talor Battle joined him as sophomores on the all-conference team, and Northwestern junior Kevin Coble has a quirky, effective game.
And everybody in the league plays really hard.
What they need is a license to thrill, at least once in a while.
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