Morning News: November 4th, 2013

This website has gone through several changes over the years, and this season brings another one. I'm going to be replacing the game recaps with daily "Morning News" blog posts, with this one being the first.

The biggest reason for this is that it will give me more time to write longer form blog posts, which are what I enjoy most and which seem to be most popular with you all as well.

To give you an idea of what these are going to look like, we're going to get a few of these in before the regular season actually starts on Friday:

Preseason hype machine, Andrew Wiggins edition: Andrew Wiggins has been named preseason Player of the Year by a number of major news outlets (CBS, for example). NBC has already decided that the contest will come down to Marcus Smart or Wiggins. Everybody has already decided that every NBA team not in contention for a playoff spot is Riggin' For Wiggins. Basically, Wiggins has been set up to fail. If everything goes right, and he turns into the next Kevin Durant, then he will only meet expectations - anything less is failure.

We saw the way that this type of pressure weighed on Harrison Barnes a few years ago, and while I would expect better play out of Wiggins than Barnes, we have to re-calibrate our expectations. If Wiggins ends up a second team All-American who gets drafted 3rd in the NBA Draft, that's a spectacular season for any true freshman, and we should recognize it as one. By the way... Marcus Smart? How about the best player in the country last season (Russ Smith)? Smart improved a lot throughout last season, and he's a very good defender, but he's awfully inefficient offensively. Basketball doesn't have style points, and it doesn't matter how good you look if your shots keep missing.

Preseason hype machine, Kentucky edition: The media is already talking about a possible 40-0 season for Kentucky. Vegas casinos set a line of 400-to-1, but so many Kentucky fans swamped the books that the odds have been dropping. Usually this sort of hype doesn't get going until some team gets out to a 12-0 or 15-0 start to the season. But even then it's stupid. Nobody is going to go 40-0. The odds are just astronomically small. I've explained this math before, but a team that is a ten point favorite in every game only has a 0.6% chance of going 40-0 (approximately 1 in 160). And no team is a big favorite in every game. And this all assumes a fact not in evidence - that Kentucky is the best team in the country. Ken Pomeroy has them a very respectable 5th in the country, and gives them a 0.03% chance of going undefeated (fewer than 1 in 3000).

The reality is that Kentucky is a big question mark. Some people have them #1 preseason, but I (and many others) have them #2, and the best laid plans of mice and men oft go awry. Kentucky was #3 preseason last season and ended up in the NIT. You just don't know until these teams play. And like I said, even if Kentucky is the clear best team in the country, they're still not going 40-0. So just stop it, Kentucky fans. There's no need to line the pockets of Vegas casinos by falling for sucker bets.

Melvin Ejim injury: This is probably the most important injury that has gone under the national radar. Ejim is Iowa State's best rebounder and also was the best interior defender on last year's team. With him out for 4-6 weeks, a lot of pressure is going to fall on Georges Niang to step up in those areas. Niang had a superb freshman season, and he's a real candidate to break out and be one of the three or four best players in the Big 12 this season, but he doesn't have the inside presence that Ejim has, despite actually being an inch taller.

It's possible that this situation will force Niang to adapt his game and become a better all-around player in time for the Big 12 regular season, but the Cyclones don't have a huge margin of error here. They look to be a bubble team this season. I have them just narrowly out of the Field of 68 at the moment.