College hoops bows to experience this year
Perhaps because center Jasmine Joyner had scored a team-high 17 points, fellow senior Queen Alford had added 14 and the two of them made most of the biggest plays for his team down the stretch, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga women’s basketball coach Jim Foster told a television interviewer immediately after the Mocs’ 61-59 Southern Conference tournament title win over Mercer on Sunday: “We have them (seniors), they don’t.”
It was quite a statement to make in this one-and-done, youth-is-served culture that college basketball is said to run on these days.
And before anyone says that mindset only applies to the men’s game, give a glance toward North Carolina, the Atlantic Coast Conference regular-season champions and arguably the most balanced team in men’s college basketball as March Madness heats up.
When the Tar Heels held off Duke and its top-rated freshman class Saturday night in Chapel Hill, they did so with a roster that relies quite heavily on three seniors and three juniors, including junior point guard Joel Berry, whose 28 points led his team in a 90-83 win.
No. 3 UCLA — which made its first big splash of this season by going into Kentucky’s Rupp Arena and shocking Big Blue’s annual collection of one-and-done Kitty-Kats to end the program’s 42-game winning streak — is similarly mature. Though Bruins freshman point guard Lonzo Ball understandably receives much of the credit for their 28-3 record, senior guards Bryce Alford and Isaac
Hamilton and junior center Thomas Welsh have been both powerful and steadying influences during UCLA’s best regular season in years.
Closer to home, though Kentucky did win the Southeastern Conference regular-season crown with a 16-2 league mark, the most balanced SEC team for much of the regular season was Florida, which was tied with the Wildcats for the lead until Gators redshirt junior center John Egbunu was lost for the season to a knee injury on Valentine’s Day. Standing 11-2 in league play when Egbunu went down, the Gators finished 14-4, losing two of their final five.
But one reason they were so strong for so long was that coach Mike White could count four seniors, three juniors and no freshmen among his top nine players.
Likewise Vanderbilt — arguably the hottest and most feared team in the league heading into this week’s SEC tourney in the Commodores’ Nashville backyard — is anchored by two seniors and three juniors, including 7-foot senior post player Luke Kornet, who might be the most complete player in the league.
Then there’s Gonzaga, which used a roster built around a fifth-year senior, a senior and two redshirt juniors to become the last undefeated team in the land before losing its final regular-season game of the year to head into its West Coast Conference Tournament with a 29-1 record and a probable No. 1 seed when the NCAA tourney field is announced next Sunday.
This isn’t to say the oneand-done era is ending. The biggest reason Kentucky won its 48th regular-season league crown — the rest of the SEC combined has 50 won or shared — is irrepressible freshman shooting guard Malik Monk, who has scored 30 or more points on four occasions and arguably turned in the Power Five conference single-game performance of the year when he lit up North Carolina for 47 points in a 103-100 win in December.
And precisely because of talents such as Monk, both Duke and Kentucky should be in the mix for a run at this year’s NCAA title, all their rookies getting better by the day.
It’s also not to say experience will always carry the day. One need merely take a painful glance at UTC’s men’s team and its senior-laden roster to know chemistry and cohesiveness isn’t an assured commodity with an older lineup. Sometimes familiarity can breed contempt, and that may have wrecked a oncepromising Mocs season.
That doesn’t mean experience may not be preferred, however. That’s true even at Kentucky, for better or worse the one-and-done poster child since coach John Calipari arrived in spring 2009. Duke may now be almost as one-and-done driven as the Wildcats, but it’s Cal who takes the heat for it.
Yet even he sounded greatly relieved to have three seniors who play significant minutes on this year’s team after graybeards Dominique Hawkins, Mychal Mulder and Derek Willis combined to score 22 points, grab six rebounds, hand out three assists and block three shots in Saturday’s 71-63 win at Texas A&M.
After Willis credited Hawkins with sparking the team to rebound from an early 19-4 hole, noting, “I think tonight Dom kind of came in there and saved us in a sense,” Cal went further regarding his senior trio.
We’re probably one of the few young teams that’s winning,” he said. “Out of 350 schools, we’re 340-something in age. (But Dom’s) given us such a lift. Dom makes us older. Mychal makes us older. Derek makes us older.”
As March Madness prepares to unfold in all its annual glory, if for this season only, older appears to be better.