Husky Women Reach Final Four

 

 

Chantel Osahor and Kelsey Plum always believed they could help make Washington a championship-caliber program.

They signed with the Huskies as out-of-state recruits even though Washington had never reached the Final Four and hadn’t won an NCAA Tournament game since 2006. Their faith was rewarded Sunday when the junior tandem led the seventh-seeded Huskies to an 85-76 victory over No. 4 seed Stanford in the NCAA Lexington Regional women’s basketball final.

“I don’t think it’s really hit us,” said Osahor, wearing a piece of the Rupp Arena net tied to her Final Four hat. “I mean, we’re in the Final Four. That’s a huge accomplishment. I think we’ve got to look back and appreciate it and soak it in because it’s an opportunity a lot of people don’t get.”

Osahor, selected the 4regional’s most valuable player, matched a career high with 24 points and had 18 rebounds. Plum, who began the day as the third-leading scorer in Division I, had 26 points and eight assists.

Their efforts made Washington the first team seeded seventh or lower to reach a Final Four since Minnesota got there in 2004. Washington (26-10) will face Syracuse or Tennessee in a semifinal April 3 in Indianapolis.

“We’re not done yet,” Washington coach Mike Neighbors said. “What’s Next?’ has been our motto. It’s going to continue to be all the way through Indy.”

This marked the first regional final between two Pac-12 schools since Stanford beat Southern California 82-62 on its way to winning the national championship in 1992, when the conference was still known as the Pac-10.

Washington scored the game’s first 12 points, had a 22-7 lead at the end of the first quarter and stayed ahead the rest of the way.

Stanford (27-8) pulled to 78-73 on Lili Thompson’s 3-pointer with 1:07 left. An offensive foul on Plum allowed Stanford to get the ball back, but Thompson missed a 3-pointer with a minute remaining.

Washington went 7 of 8 on free throws in the final minute.

“We dug ourselves too big a hole in the first quarter,” Stanford coach Tara VanDerveer said. “We just for some reason did not come out with the intensity and aggressiveness that we needed to. But I’m proud of our team. We had a great season.”

Thompson scored 19 points for Stanford (27-8), which was seeking its 13th Final Four appearance overall and seventh in the last nine seasons. Erica McCall added 17 points — all in the second half — and 15 rebounds.

This was the third meeting of the season between these two conference foes. Stanford won 69-53 at home on Jan. 29. Washington beat the Cardinal 73-65 on March 4 in the Pac-12 Tournament at Seattle.

Osahor, who had shot a combined 3 of 13 and had averaged just 4.5 points in those two previous games, was a model of efficiency Sunday.

Osahor’s physical presence early in the game also helped Washington hold McCall scoreless in the first half.

“Osahor was really the difference,” VanDerveer said.

Stanford cut Washington’s lead to 67-63 with 7:19 left after Karlie Samuelson, Thompson, Marta Sniezek and McCall hit 3-pointers on consecutive possessions.

The Cardinal had the ball with a chance to cut further into the lead when Plum made a steal and drove to the basket. Although Plum missed her layup, Talia Walton delivered a putback that made it 69-63 with 6:23 remaining.

Stanford made one more charge in the closing minutes, but Plum wouldn’t allow Washington to fold. She scored 19 points in the second half to help Washington earn that Final Four bid she always believed was a realistic goal.

“I definitely thought it was possible,” Plum said. “I think with the right pieces and the right circumstance, anything is possible. We say that today, but credit our team for really believing it. I don’t think anyone else outside our locker room believed that this could happen. And that’s OK, because inside the locker room, that’s what counts.”

Final Four Storylines

 

 

We have a classic Final Four, in a sense: One clear blue-blood favorite (North Carolina), one heavy underdog (Syracuse) and two top-10 teams that could win the whole thing (Villanova and the Oklahoma Buddies).

We have two possibilities, however remote, of a Hall-of-Famer winning a championship and retiring immediately. (That would be Boeheim and UNC’s Roy Williams.)

We have a Villanova team with the most impressive win of the tournament, over No. 1 overall seed Kansas in the South regional final. Oklahoma has the best player. North Carolina has the best team.

And Syracuse? Well, Syracuse doesn’t care about any of that. To a man, the Orange said after they came back from a 15-point deficit with less than 10 minutes remaining to beat Virginia that they always thought they could do it.

There is a lesson there, cheesy as it sounds: Sometimes belief matters more than talent. (And Syracuse has more talent than its seed indicates—freshman guard Malachi Richardson, who lit up Virginia for 21 second-half points, was a McDonald’s All-American.)

There is another lesson here, too: Hire a great coach. And if you have a great coach, keep him—and keep him happy, even if some fans complain about him.

Yes, this is easier written than done, but you would be amazed at how many athletic directors don’t make this the priority in the hiring process. They hire somebody who appeals to the fan base, or plays an “exciting style” or has established a reputation as a “great recruiter,” perhaps on dubious grounds.

When Oklahoma hired Lon Kruger five years ago, he was not the hot young coach who would get fans dreaming of a 30-year run of dominance. He was 59. He did not have ties to one of the country’s top recruits the next year, and he was not coming off a surprising NCAA tournament run that made him the talk of the nation.

But coaches knew Kruger was a great one. His teams at Kansas State, Florida, Illinois and UNLV were all well-schooled and successful. A three-year detour to coach the Atlanta Hawks in the NBA knocked him off his career trajectory for a while, and Kruger is not the kind of salesman who can keep himself in the national conversation even when he is unemployed. But as Oklahoma fans will attest, and the rest of the Big 12 knows too well now, he can build a team as well as just about anybody.

And then there is Villanova’s Jay Wright, whose teams have mostly disappointed in the NCAA tournament. That can earn a coach a bad reputation among people who pay attention to college hoops for one month a year, and it can frustrate a fan base by ratcheting up expectations from October to March, then failing to meet them.

But Villanova stayed steady with Wright. He has never had overwhelming talent—that just doesn’t happen so easily at Villanova. He recruits very well and molds terrific teams. Stay with a coach like that, and you keep getting chances, and eventually you do something like beat Kansas in the Elite Eight and everybody is happy.

The anti-Villanova is Pittsburgh, which just let Jamie Dixon go and replaced him with now ex-Vanderbilt coach Kevin Stallings. Dixon certainly wasn’t pushed out, but he seemed to realize that Pittsburgh was taking him for granted. He was right. Stallings is not a better coach or a better fit. He is just a different name.

The other two coaches in this Final Four, Williams and Boeheim, are Hall-of-Famers who supposedly couldn’t win the big one, then did.

ACC Top Conference (12-1)

 

It took, quite literally, the final seconds for Notre Dame to knock out one of this NCAA tournament’s Cinderellas, the Lumberjacks of Stephen F. Austin, to earn a Sweet 16 berth.

And though the Irish needed a little luck in the form of a Rex Pflueger tip-in, not all of their Atlantic Coast Conference brethren needed much help getting to the same place. Notre Dame became the fifth ACC team to reach the Sweet 16, tying an NCAA record, and Syracuse, about three hours later, became the record sixth, part of a banner tournament for the conference — one that comes with offseason bragging rights.

“This is unprecedented, what’s going on,” Notre Dame coach Mike Brey said. “I thought, at this year’s media day in Charlotte, that this league would show it’s the deepest and the best. It’s evolved into that. It really has. Delivering in the NCAA tournament is the ultimate.

“I’m very proud when I look back and go, ‘Wow, we were 11-7 in that league.’ ”

The six, in addition to Notre Dame and Syracuse: North Carolina and Virginia, both No. 1 seeds, Duke and Miami (Fla.)

Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim echoed Brey.

“Well, we knew it was a hard conference. We were in it all year,” he said. “And when we played outside the conference in the tournament (in the Bahamas) we had some success. We struggled in the conference for the most part because we were playing good teams, really good teams, and it’s hard to judge a conference during the year. I mean, it is hard. And you can’t just go by the NCAA tournament. But I think you have to go a little bit by what conferences do in the tournament. That’s the only thing we have to judge on because during the regular season, they’re just playing within your conference. It’s hard to tell. You’re just proving that you’re good within your conference. I think the tournament is a good measuring stick. It’s not everything.”

On whether it’s tougher than the Big East at its peak, Boeheim said: “You know I’m never going to say that. It’s a very good conference, there’s no question about it. And as I’ve said many, many times we came from a great conference before and we’re in a great conference now. And I think it’s going to get better in the future from what I’ve seen.” 

Seven ACC teams earned bids, only one, Pittsburgh is out of the tournament after two rounds.

The conference records:

ACC (7 bids): 12-1

Pac-12 (7): 3-6

Big Ten (7): 8-4

Big 12 (7): 6-4

Big East (5): 5-4

SEC (3): 3-2

Serena Speaks Her MInd

 

 

Indian Wells CEO Raymond Moore made reprehensible, sexist comments about women’s tennis before Sunday’s final at the BNP Paribas Open.

He later apologized in a statement.

Well, Serena Williams wasn’t going to look past Moore’s remarks.

She fired back at Moore following her 6-4, 6-4 defeat in the final to Victoria Azarenka.

Williams said via ESPN:

“Obviously, I don’t think any woman should be down on their knees thanking anybody like that. I think Venus [Williams], myself, a number of players have been — if I could tell you every day how many people say they don’t watch tennis unless they’re watching myself or my sister, I couldn’t even bring up that number. So I don’t think that is a very accurate statement. I think there is a lot of women out there who are more … are very exciting to watch. I think there are a lot of men out there who are exciting to watch. I think it definitely goes both ways. I think those remarks are very much mistaken and very, very, very inaccurate.”

Williams also didn’t buy that Moore’s statements could have been taken out of context.

“Well, if you read the transcript, you can only interpret it one way. I speak very good English. I’m sure he does too. You know, there’s only one way to interpret that. Get on your knees, which is offensive enough, and thank a man, which is not — we, as women, have come a long way. We shouldn’t have to drop to our knees at any point.”

Spot on, Serena. Spot on.

Game Time Bracket Challenge!!!!

 

Game Time Bracket Challenge!!!!

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Password -gametime

Printable Brackets 2016

 

Printable Bracket

Denzel Valentine Big 10 Player of the Year

Denzel Valentine has done it all for Michigan State, and the senior is The Associated Press Player of the Year in the Big Ten.

Valentine was among three unanimous picks on the AP All-Big Ten first team announced Monday along with Indiana guard Kevin ”Yogi” Ferrell and Iowa forward Jarrod Uthoff.

The other first-team selections, determined by a vote of media members who cover the league, were Wisconsin forward Nigel Hayes and Purdue center A.J. Hammons.

Valentine overcame a knee injury that cost him four games early in the season to stamp himself as perhaps the nation’s most versatile player. The senior from Lansing, Michigan, finished the regular season first in the conference in scoring (19.6 ppg) and assists (7.5) and as the top rebounding guard (7.5). Since assists became an official NCAA statistic in 1983-84, no player has averaged as many points, rebounds and assists in the same season.

Indiana’s Tom Crean was voted coach of the year after leading the Hoosiers to their second Big Ten regular-season title in four years. Maryland freshman center Diamond Stone was newcomer of the year, and Hammons edged out teammate Raphael Davis for defensive player of the year.

Valentine ended the regular season with his ninth double-double of the season with 27 points and a career-high tying 13 assists against Ohio State on Saturday.

”I don’t know many guys that have improved in every aspect of the game like he has,” Spartans coach Tom Izzo said. ”I reiterate what I’ve said a bazillion times in the last two weeks. I love another candidate or two out there, but I prejudicially say that he’s the (national) player of the year.”

 

Lovie to Coach Illinois

Old-School Lovie!!!

 

 

Digging out from a scandal and weary of having its football program mired near the bottom of the Big Ten, Illinois made a splash Monday by hiring former NFL coach Lovie Smith to lead the Illini.

The move came two days after athletic director Josh Whitman, in his first official day on the job, fired Bill Cubit after a single season in Champaign. He turned to Smith, who took the Chicago Bears to the 2006 Super Bowl and was dismissed as coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in January.

Smith said he is intent on making the Illini a power in the Big Ten, home to such big-name coaches as Ohio State’s Urban Meyer and Michigan’s Jim Harbaugh.

“I take this responsibility very seriously and can’t wait to get a staff in place to start our move to make Illinois a contender for Big Ten titles,” Smith said, hours before greeting a couple hundred enthusiastic students in the university union. “We will play an exciting brand of football that will make our fans, alumni, student body and members of the university community extremely proud.”

This is the first college head-coaching job for the 58-year-old Smith and he faces a daunting task: Illinois has had six losing seasons in the past eight years and the program also is recovering from allegations of player abuse that led the school to fire coach Tim Beckman a week before last season started.

Smith agreed to a six-year contract worth $21 million, including $2 million per year for the first two seasons.

Whitman said hiring a coach of Smith’s stature was a first step.

TOP 25 Polls

 

TOP 25 Polls

No Curry No Problem…Warriors Win

 

Draymond Green somehow caught Andrew Bogut’s baseline save pass at his knees and avoided a diving Kent Bazemore, then let the ball fly as his legs split in the air. 

Green hit an off-balance 3-pointer as the shot clock expired with 40.2 seconds remaining in overtime, and the Golden State Warriors escaped with a 109-105 win against the Atlanta Hawks on Tuesday night while Stephen Curry watched in street clothes with an injured ankle.

“It’s just a desperation heave,” Green said. “It’s just one of those things sometimes the ball just bounces your way and that one fell for me, unlike a lot of the other ones.” 

BOX SCORE:  WARRIORS 109, HAWKS 105 (OT)  

Klay Thompson made a go-ahead 3-pointer with 2:54 remaining and another big basket at the 11.4-second mark on the way to 26 points. The Warriors won their second straight overtime game to earn a franchise-best 43rd straight regular-season home victory and 25th in a row this season.

Golden State (54-5) can tie the Bulls’ 44-game unbeaten mark at home from March 30, 1995, to April 4, 1996, when the Warriors host Oklahoma City on Thursday. They are also chasing the `95-96 Chicago team’s record 72-win season.