Tuesday, November 12, 2013

Morning News: Adam Morrison, Gary Bell, SMU, Rutgers & BYU


ESPN's "Tip Off Marathon", the 24 (29!) straight hours of hoops is underway. One of the best days of the year, in my opinion. Since the biggest games are in primetime tonight, the biggest social media buzz was probably the picture above, of a weirdly clean-shaven Adam Morrison on the Gonzaga bench. The jokes write themselves. Anyway, let's get to the real news:

Best Performance: SMU There's a lot of hype around Larry Brown's SMU program, and they absolutely eviscerated Rhode Island 89-58. As always with early season results, though, you have to remember that they're just a 40 minute sample size, and this game had the feeling of an "Everything went right/wrong" game. SMU was white hot (46% behind the arc, a 60.0 eFG%) and Rhode Island was just a mess offensively (2-for-15 behind the arc). They really seemed totally unprepared for SMU's length.

Let's not write SMU into the Tourney bracket in pen, of course. Let's see them do this again. But they certainly impressed, and Rhode Island has a lot of questions to answer about whether they're really back to the top half of the A-10.

Worst Performance: Rutgers Yeah, Miami was probably technically worse, squeaking by Georgia Southern by 1 point in overtime at home, but we already knew that Miami is terrible. I wrote about them a few days ago. So the award goes to Rutgers, for stumbling 79-76 to UAB. Coming on the back of a very unimpressive eight point win over Florida A&M, the Eddie Jordan era is basically off on the path we thought it would be. That program is just a mess now, and it's going to take a long time to rebuild.

Star Of The Night: Gary Bell Speaking of Gonzaga, Gary Bell did a Kevin Pangos impression with Pangos looking on. Pangos, of course, was introduced to America two years ago when he hit 9-for-13 behind the arc in a Gonzaga win over Washington State. Gary Bell was 8-for-13 behind the arc here, leading Gonzaga to a dominating 32 point victory over a rebuilding Colorado State. Runner-up for this award is Doug Creighton, who had 37 points against UMKC. That might seem like a better night on paper, but hey, we expect that from Dougie McBuckets.

Another Result To Know About: BYU 112, Stanford 103 Scoring has been up a few points per game so far this year almost entirely due to extra free throws, and we certainly had a little bit of that here. The two teams combined for 52 fouls and 77 free throws. But with an exciting offense and mediocre defense, we can always count on high scores out of BYU. The Cougs were led by 31 points from Tyler Haws and a strong 14 points, 9 assist, 7 rebound night from Kyle Collinsworth. And despite never leading by only around 10 points almost the entire night, this game never really felt at risk. Stanford definitely has a lack of depth that will be a concern when they start to navigate the Pac-12 schedule.

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