Happy Turkey Day NIT Recap

Jabari Parker is good at basketball, you guys.

 In the place of the daily Morning News post, you're getting a "Happy Turkey Day NIT Recap".

What's that? It's called Jeff was at the NIT last night with family and has a lot of Thanksgiving-related activities and didn't have time to watch any of any of the other games last night. So rather than talk about games he hasn't seen, he's going to give you his scouting report from the two games last night. Alright? Alright.

Before getting to the games, though, let me wish you and your family a Happy Thanksgiving. Be thankful for the wonderful things that you have. Including Jabari Parker. More on him in a moment.

#4 Arizona 66, Drexel 62
Arizona obviously came into this game absolutely asleep and passive. They just weren't active at all the first few minutes. Even while they were down 19, though, it never really felt like they would lose. Even if they kept playing poorly, those shooting percentages were inevitably going to even up. But that passive play seemed to infect Aaron Gordon, who looked like the freshman he was. Aaron Gordon's raw physical talent is obvious, but he was invisible all game. On offense, he was content to jog through the key, never looking for the ball or asking for it. That was in stark contrast to Jabari Parker later in the night who would physically push himself near the paint, yell for the ball, and attack the rim. Again... more on him in a minute.

The thing about Arizona is, Gordon isn't their best player. Nick Johnson is. And he led the Wildcats offense in the second half, while the Drexel backcourt duo of Chris Fouch and Franz Massenat started to slow down and miss the shots they had been hitting in the first half.

What I came out of this game thinking most of all about Arizona is that they have a lot of untapped potential. Gordon will be better another day, and guys like Brandon Ashley and Rondae Hollis-Jefferson both look physically like really good players who just have to figure some things out. This Arizona team is clearly very good, even if they didn't really play that well here.

As for Drexel, you can go far in college basketball with a backcourt duo like Fouch and Massenat. But their front court is not particularly good, and that injury to Damion Lee certainly looked serious, though the severity hasn't been officially determined by doctors yet. The Dragons are clearly a contender to win the Colonial, but they're a player or two away from being an at-large contender.

#6 Duke 74, Alabama 64
Did I mention Jabari Parker? He was absolutely dominant in this game on both ends of the floor.  He scored in all sorts of ways in the paint, on the block and at the top of the key, with turn around jumpers, layups and everything in between. He certainly gets the superstar treatment from the refs, drawing a bunch of ticky-tack fouls, but there's absolutely no question in my mind that he could start for an NBA team right now.

Aside from Parker, the bigger picture from Duke was defense. Their defense had been fairly atrocious this season, allowing 1.39 PPP to Vermont, 1.25 to Kansas, 1.09 to Davidson and 1.02 to East Carolina. But they shut down Alabama with 0.85 PPP here, and even that is inflated by the transition baskets Alabama got once they started pressing and turning Duke over. Parker was strong in the paint, and the Duke perimeter defense mostly shut Alabama from getting into the paint to begin with. Is this a one-off performance against an Alabama team that has struggled to score in the half court this season? Maybe. But it might be a sign that Duke is finally turning into the halfway decent defensively team that they need to be to seriously contend for a 1 seed in March.

As for tor Alabama, their deficiencies were on full display here. They lack shooters and they lack ball handlers (Bama is 315th in the nation in turnover rate and 345th in A/FGM ratio), and so they couldn't hit a jump shot to save their lives and struggled to penetrate a previously soft Duke defense. Things started to turn around midway through the second half when they turned up the press and started getting buckets in transition, which made me wonder why they didn't start doing that earlier. Casual fans often see a press work for a few plays in the final minute of a game and wonder why teams don't just press all game when in reality it wouldn't work nearly as well for 40 minutes. But this Alabama team is different. Besides the fact that the press worked for the final ten minutes of this game, Anthony Grant's teams have historically had strong presses and been effective at turning teams over. And with as utterly ineffective as their half court half court game was, they needed some sort of jolt.

In the end, I think this Alabama team is a bubble team. They scream 9-9 or 10-8 SEC team. And the concern is that they're going to have to find a way to win a game like this, to beat a team like Kentucky or Florida to get that quality win for their resume to avoid the NIT. At this point, I'd bet against it.