Stanford climbs to No. 2 in women’s AP Top 25 behind Uconn
kansas is in the top 10 for the first time since reaching No. 1 in 1994-95.
Buoyed by an impressive run to the Pac-12 Conference championship, Stanford jumped two spots to No. 2 in The Associated Press women’s college basketball poll on Monday.
The Cardinal won three games in the conference tournament by an average of 31 points, including a 20-point victory over then-no. 9 UCLA on Sunday for the title.
Coach Tara Vanderveer’s team received five of 29 first-place votes from a national media panel. Stanford (25-2) trails only Uconn in the AP Top 25. The Huskies got 22 first-place votes and play for the Big East Tournament title on Monday night against Marquette.
Off the court, the NBA All-stars could not attend parties, host clinics or even enjoy dinner at a restaurant.
“There’s not a lot of people around. There’s no entertainment,” Los Angeles Clippers forward Kawhi Leonard said. “There’s no energy. There’s no excitement.”
On the court, the NBA All-stars still brought excitement and energy through the same methods that have become familiar in other show-case games. Giannis Antetokounmpo threw down endless dunks. Damian Lillard and Stephen Curry drained endless 3-pointers. Neither All-star teams played much defense.
The NBA held its All-star game this year in Atlanta with fake crowd noise, an enclosed arena and strict safety protocols to mitigate risk with the coronavirus. Yet, both All-star teams still offered highlight reels, competitiveness and clutch performances.
Lebron James himself used the Allstar Game as a form of load management by sitting the entire second half. Kevin Durant missed the game entirely because of a left hamstring injury. So other factors influenced “Team Lebron” finishing with a with a 170-150 win over Team Durant.
Antetokounmpo won his first All-star MVP award by posting a team-leading 35 points on 16-of-16 shooting. Lillard made the game-clinching shot from near halfcourt, which capped a 32-point performance while shooting 11-of-20 from the field and 8-of-16 from 3-point range. And Curry joined in on the long-distance frenzy with 28 points while going 10-of-19 from the field and 8-of-16 from deep.
“The game itself felt the same. The only thing is you can’t really see the crowd in normal years like outside of the courtside rows,” Curry said. “The energy is definitely louder and more engaged with more people, but the only thing that really was really missing was the who’s
who sitting down there and just the energy around the court.”
In normal times, NBA All-stars would stay in a host city for three days. They would spend the first days fielding interviews, hosting clinics and making sponsorship appearances. They would spend the next two evenings enjoying the city’s culinary delights, night life and VIP events.
These are not normal times, though. With the NBA hosting an All-star Game in Atlanta nearly a year after the coronavirus outbreak first started, the league required various protocols that mirrored their resumed season last summer on a campus bubble. All participants had to resume daily COVID-19 testing, maskwearing and social-distancing practices. They had to stay quarantined at the hotel before the game. And they could only bring a small handful of friends and famforward
ily.
Hence, Denver Nuggets center Nikola Jokic spent most of his weekend just playing cards with his wife and his two brothers in his hotel room. Others just played video games. James didn’t even bother bringing his family.
“Everyone in basketball in the world usually comes to one city and we all enjoy it,” James said. “We all really sit back and think, ‘Wow this is really what the game has built. This is a beautiful weekend in all walks, on the floor and off of it.’ ”
James and other NBA All-stars hardly felt as nostalgic about Sunday’s game. James even called it “a slap in the face” for the league to have an All-star Game after starting a compressed 72-game season only two months after the Los Angeles Lakers won the NBA title. On Sunday morning, the NBA ruled out Philadelphia 76ers center Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons from playing after they were exposed to a barber who tested positive for COVID-19. Although that exposure happened in Philadelphia, that development partly explained why some All-stars questioned the idea.
Still, the NBA and the National Basketball Players Association pushed forward with the game. They knew it would maximize its television contract and keep its sponsors happy. They knew it would help HBCUS with over $3 million in donations and endless exposure. And they knew that the frustrations would soften once players stepped on the court.
“There’s always a lot of back and forth on these different decisions,” said Phoenix Suns guard Chris Paul, the president of the NBPA. “But once guys get here, I think they’re grateful for it.”
The players could not feed off the energy from a packed arena filled with celebrities and hardcore NBA fans. But they could feed off the 1,500 frontline workers, HBCU students and additional family members that sat inside. They could also hear the fake crowd noise from the virtual fan section that featured 300 frontline workers and HBCU students.
So before the game started, James performed his customary chalk toss. Curry watched with admiration and excitement.
Then, the All-stars put on a show. Curry, Lillard and Paul rose to each other’s challenges to throw down alley-oop dunks. Antetokounmpo mostly dominated in the paint, but he also banked in a couple 3-pointers. Curry and Lillard drained shots from the logo. Though Curry insisted the plan was not pre-meditated, he tried to clinch the game with a deep 3. Following Curry’s miss, Lillard took the lead in ending the game with his own long-distance heave.
“Given the circumstances with COVID and the kind of season it’s been, it was fitting,” Lillard said of his game-clinching shot.
Selection Sunday is shaping up to be the most controversial ever.
The NCAA Tournament selection committee briefly takes center stage during March Madness, often to be ridiculed and criticized by men's college basketball programs, coaches and fanbases for its decisions on teams' seeds and notable omissions from the field of 68.
Following an unprecedented regular season amid a global pandemic, the job of the 10-member committee made up of athletics directors and conference commissioners figures to be all the more difficult – and, subsequently, debatable.
Starting the 2020-21 season amid the height of the pandemic and then accommodating safety protocols for COVID-19 has led to massive scheduling conflicts, with week-long postponements and month-long breaks for some teams due to positive tests and contact tracing.
The result? The selection committee will be judging apples vs. oranges as some teams have played more games, some have stronger NET scores with fewer games and some have had to compete without key players, out because of COVID-19 protocols.
The sport's go-to Selection Sunday villain – the committee – could be the scapegoat for any extra blowback.
“The committee is subjective every year, but their decisions are always based on data,” ESPN college basketball analyst Jay Bilas said. “I do think we have more mistakes this year, but I also expect everybody to be more tolerant because how many years can you say, ‘This has been the hardest year because of coronavirus?' We're lucky to be playing.”
Kentucky athletics director Mitch Barnhart, the selection committee's chairperson, acknowledged the difficulties the pandemic presented in November when the NCAA was planning its single-site tournament set-up in Indianapolis.
“We coalesced around a decision that we were not going to be able to host the tournament in 13 different sites. Through the pandemic, it was unreasonable to expect that,” Barnhart said.
And the last four months of the regular season have shown that COVID-19 still is regularly affecting games. A Missouri Valley Conference quarterfinal between Northern Iowa and Drake was
canceled Friday, advancing Drake to the semifinal round when UNI had a Covid-19-related issue.
While there's a sense of relief to have the country's most-watched sporting event back following last year's abrupt cancellation, coaches were not in agreement on how the NCAA handled the season.
“We just want to get to March, whatever that takes,” Gonzaga coach Mark Few told USA TODAY Sports in November. His team is undefeated atop the Ferris Mowers Coaches Poll and will nab a No. 1 seed next Sunday.
But Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski called out the NCAA in December for “just plowing through” games and the Blue Devils (11-11) canceled their last two non-conference games in hopes of avoiding COVID-19 issues. Now the Blue Devils – who have made the tournament every year since 1995 – are fighting for inclusion in the NCAA Tournament.
“This year has undoubtedly been
chaotic,” Arizona State coach Bobby Hurley said.
Arizona State was on the NCAA Tournament bubble in 2018 and 2019 before getting in at the last minute on consecutive Selection Sundays. The Sun Devils (10-13) were poised to be less of a close call in 2020 as a projected No. 9 seed. Despite being the preseason No. 17 team in the Ferris Mowers Coaches Poll, ASU has struggled to find a rhythm and won't be considered as an at-large team.
Hurley said ASU had it as bad as any team, but that Covid-19-related shakeups haven't done his team any favors. The Sun Devils missed three consecutive weeks due to postponements after the holidays due to positive tests and contact tracing, and have had nine games postponed or canceled.
“You watch game tape to play one team, then you find out last-minute you're playing another team,” Hurley said. “Our players would come back with this sun-glazed look after every postponement like, ‘Again?' But like a lot of teams, they're just rolling with the punches.”
Hurley's brother, Dan Hurley, coaches bubble team Connecticut (14-6), a projected No. 10 seed in USA TODAY Sports' latest bracketology. But four of the Huskies' six losses came when leading scorer James Bouknight was out with an injury. How lenient will the committee be on injuries compared to past years? Now it will have to consider injury-related and Covid-19-related absences when examining a profile.
Scheduling challenges will put an even bigger spotlight on the committee's reliance on statistics and the subjective nature of decisions about the field of 68.
“The committee will likely have to rely less on metrics and more on the eye test,” Bobby Hurley said.
Colgate, the second-place finisher in the Patriot League, captures the bizarre nature of scheduling and data interpretation with its NCAA Tournament résumé.
The NCAA'S NET ranking, implemented in 2018 to replace the hotly-debated Rating Percentage Index (RPI), measures game results, strength of schedule, game location, scoring margin (capping at 10 points per game), and net offensive and defensive efficiency. The Raiders (12-1) are this year's anomaly as a mid-major program that has a NET score of 9 – ahead of projected No. 2 seed Villanova and No. 3 seed Kansas.
Much of Colgate's high NET score has to do with the fact that the team played only three teams in the regular season, facing those teams four times each, for a total of 12 games.
“I hope the committee focuses on the NET score, but I can understand the argument on both sides,” said Colgate athletics director Nicki Moore.
The Raiders have a better NCAA Tournament profile than Navy, but the Midshipmen received the No. 1 seed in the conference tournament.
That's where Bilas believes the “eye test” the NCAA committee often will lean on is inherently subjective and problematic.
“It always makes me laugh when we hear, ‘The committee sent this message.' Well, that's not their job. It's to pick teams based on data and watching them play,” Bilas said. “We can't rely on metrics alone because otherwise we're just spitting into a computer.”