Blue Devils befuddled early in NCAA Tournament - again
Seated at his locker on Saturday evening in Salt Lake City, a tough, smart, personable, enviably built, 6-foot-5, 220-pound freshman from Brooklyn got midway through his answer - “This team is built for this. We're all . . .” - when suddenly he let out a medium-volume sound of agony.
“Ahhhhh!” Arizona starting guard Rawle Alkins blared.
He had just lowered his right hand to start removing his left sock.
“Sorry about that,” he winced to a reporter because he hadn't finished his answer.
This was beyond forgivable as the right hand had a freshly fractured index finger.
“I tried to, like, get this sock off. I can't really bend it right now ' cause it's stiff, but . . . [Pause.] Oh, man,” he said, pain still flaring.
He had injured it in the first half against an excellent Saint Mary's team, had exited the arena but returned for the remainder, and had finished with six points, two rebounds, two steals and an assist.
“I'm gonna be good, man. It's all right. I'm gonna be good,” he concluded.
Not only had he learned something basketball players seldom learn - “It makes you actually realize how important the finger is,” he said - but he had epitomized this Sweet 16 of adept adapters. This thing coming Thursday and Friday is loaded up with programs that long since know how to adapt between games, amid games and after attempted sock removal following games. That's why it shocked the devil out of so many when the No. 1 adapter of the 33-season era of the 64-team tournament, Duke, became the one top-tier aristocrat that failed to adapt.
“You know, it's the toughest defense we've played against all year,” 23-time Sweet 16 participant (since 1985) and Duke Coach Mike Krzyzewski said, while others around the land chitchatted about South Carolina's offense, which blew from the outskirts of nowhere (7 for 35 in the first half) to an inconceivable 65 second-half points (on 20 for 28 shooting).
Given that No. 2 seed Duke had entered this tournament with steam, mustard and Krzyzewski after winning the ACC tournament, the Gamecocks' 88-81 win became the stunner of the 50 games thus far. It took a bunch of mansions and veritable mansions and placed alongside them . . . A debutant. How curious and strange, this year. The others? North Carolina has been to 22 of the past 33 Sweet 16s, Kansas to 21, Kentucky to 20 (and six of the past eight), Arizona to 17 (and four of the past five), UCLA to 14 (and three straight). Go ahead and count Xavier as a Sweet 16 aristocrat; it's at eight, and six of the past 10. Wisconsin (10 of 18 and all the past four), Florida (seven of the past 12), Gonzaga (eight of 19), West Virginia (seven of 20), Butler (five of 15), Oregon (five of 15 and two straight), Michigan (eight total and three of past five), Purdue (eight total) and Baylor (four of the past eight)?
We know all those people, and even if they're different people from before, a bushel of these programs flashed some old knowhow. Kentucky adapted to a kind of game it would not choose to play, that of that street fighter Wichita State, and Kentucky ended what Pat Forde of Yahoo Sports called the “Wichita State Simmering Resentment and Cold-Blooded Revenge Tour,” what with Kentucky having dashed the Shockers famously three years ago.
North Carolina adapted to a 65-60 deficit with 3:31 left, making Arkansas spend the last 210 seconds of a promising season scoreless. Wisconsin stared at a 57-50 deficit with 5:16 left against defending national champion and No. 1 overall seed Villanova, but it long since honed the stomach to cope with that. Florida coped with a center lost to injury, Xavier with a point guard lost to injury. Even the hot new thing, Michigan - and seriously, shouldn't Michigan forgo all rights to ever being a “hot new thing?” - certainly knew how to adapt to a nine-point deficit with 14 minutes left and its three-point joy killed by Louisville's killjoys. In fact, Michigan has looked like an old hand in one of the most important ways: In its six tournament games counting the four in the Big Ten at the Verizon Center, it has made 78 of 97 free throws, 11 of 12 in the closing minutes against No. 10 seed Oklahoma State and No. 2 seed Louisville.
All this leads us to some sumptuous-looking stuff, as if to repay us for the zero buzzer-beaters, zero overtime rounds and sprinkling of upsets that marked the first weekend. Michigan and Oregon, playing in a Midwest Region semifinal in Kansas City, looks like a treat for the retinas. Kansas and Purdue, right after that, looks like a fierce struggle for game-pace influence. North Carolina and Butler will specialize, at very least, in contrast.
But what has almost no chance to live up to how it looks today, because it looks so bloody good, is the South semifinal between UCLA, the nation's most artful scorers, and Kentucky, which has artful scorers who'll be freed from Shocker shackles.
From the freshly mighty Pacific Time Zone, then, with its full quarter of the Sweet 16 qualifiers, the West Region will boast two aching bids for whom a Final Four berth would constitute some kind of justice. That's No. 1 seed Gonzaga (34-1), and No. 2 Arizona (32-4) and its coach, the four-time Elite Eight qualifier Sean Miller, with his sublime 19-9 tournament record not yet yielding a Final Four, and with a Final Four scheduled for Phoenix two weeks hence.
His team beat the fast North Dakota and the methodical, phenomenal move-the-ball sorts from Saint Mary's, and he had the ultimate adapter of the weekend. Miller called Alkins's return an inspiration for his team and said, “It would be one tough kid to pop your finger back midway through the first half, come out on your shooting hand and play the rest of the game . . . Anybody that's played the game and has suffered a hand injury like that knows how difficult it is to do what he did.”
In an event of adapt-and-advance, Alkins said, “There were times when I would normally reach for the ball, there were times when I tried to reach it and I just felt it, so it definitely impacted a lot. But at the same time, I don't want to give up. It's March Madness, and it's just go hard, or go home, and I don't want to go home.” He'll spend the next week in the bracket company of basketball kingdoms that just aren't very good at going home, and then that one delicious, who-knew straggler.