Thursday, December 03, 2009

West Virginia Gives Portland A Reality Check

#8 West Virginia 84, Portland 66
Portland is going through the roller coaster that we see happen to teams every single season. They come up out of practically nowhere to pull a couple of upsets, then they start getting a bunch of hype, and then they finally take a punch from a better team and get their reality check. Portland's reality check continued after this one with a loss to Portland State. So the question now is how this team will respond, and whether they'll prove that the loss to Portland State was a fluke, or whether the wins over UCLA and Minnesota were flukes. They still have road games at Washington and Nevada before WCC conference play begins. As for West Virginia, this dominant win puts the exclamation point on an impressive 76 Classic championship. It seems pretty clear that the Mountaineers will be serious contenders for the Big East Championship. They have a few more tricky games before Big East play begins (Duquesne, at Cleveland State, vs Ole Miss), so it will be impressive if they are still undefeated when they head to Seton Hall on December 26th.

#11 North Carolina, 89, #9 Michigan State 82

It's easy to say that North Carolina has Michigan State figured out, but I just think they've been the better team. North Carolina is underranked because of that loss to Syracuse, and is probably better in terms of total talent and skill on the roster. The one surprising thing for me was the poor perimeter defense by Michigan State, which is usually a good defensive team in all aspects of the game. By breaking the defense down with their guards (Marcus Ginyard and Larry Drew in particular), the Tar Heels created opportunities down low for Ed Davis and Deon Thompson. The size and length of the Tar Heels also made things difficult for Kalin Lucas. Michigan State probably has the best backcourt in the Big Ten, so the fact that North Carolina's guards nearly fought this game to a draw tells me that by the end of the year the Tar Heels will actually have a pretty good backcourt to go with their outstandings frontcourt. As for Michigan State, it's hard to get too down about a loss to North Carolina after they were demolished by the Tar Heels last season yet still made it to the National Championship game. They have what pretty much amounts to a cream puff schedule before heading to Texas on the 22nd, so they've got time to figure out what went wrong here.

#6 Purdue 69, Wake Forest 58
The huge differential in quality between these two teams was evident here, as Purdue couldn't hit a shot all game (34% from the field, including 1-for-15 from behind the arc), yet still won by double-digits. If there is any criticism to be made of this Purdue team it's depth, because I'm not particularly impressed with what they have coming off the bench, but their starting five might be the best in the country. I've been saying since last April that I believed them to be the favorite to win the Big Ten, and I'm sticking by that projection. As for Wake Forest, I'm underwhelmed by the development of their stars: Al Farouq-Aminu, L.D. Williams, et cetera. Let's recall that this team was put together not by Dino Gaudio, but by Skip Prosser. Prosser was putting together something special, and last year Gaudio basically lived off of what Prosser had in place when he died. I think the jury is still out on whether Gaudio is the long term solution at head coach for Wake Forest, and their slow start to this season has to be worrying.

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