PC and How6rd's CBB Corner: Week 7

Dude…

The week leading up to a quiet Christmas week of basketball the games around the country were nothing of the sort. With Mid-Major teams continuing to work power conference teams (including the best of the group beating one of the best in the nation) this week had it’s fair share of insanity. A conference like the Big East looks competitive enough to bring impressive teams down to Earth while other conferences such as the Big 12 haven’t started yet but still look to already have their fair share of contenders. Follow along with PC and How6rd below as a couple of the dudes give you the rundown on a chaotic week!

PC’S CBB CORNER

Duke gets big win over Baylor- Kyle Filipkowski is usually the lead man for the Duke Blue Devils. However, against the Baylor Bears he had an off night. The rest of the team needed to step up in a major way. They did just that. Jeremy Roach stepped up and was an assist machine out there. Jared McClain led Duke in scoring with 21 points. Roach contributed 18 points as well. Ryan Young is not my favorite player in this lineup. However, when Flip went to the bench in the 2nd half, Young stepped up and played exceptionally well on both sides of the floor. He came up with a key block and made a ton of must make buckets to secure the win. The Baylor Bears finally played someone who was a top 25 team and it showed that this team has some things to work on. RayJ Dennis is by far their best player. However in this game, it didn’t seem like he had much help at all. Ja’Kobe Walter has shown flashes of being great, but is still raw in his freshman year. It didn’t seem like many of the other Bears players were on the same level as Duke. It’s probably because of the lack of talent they’ve played against. Yves Missi was a force to be reckoned with. He had a double- double and was a nightmare matchup. If the Bears want to win a loaded Big 12, they need guys like Langston Love and Jalen Bridges to perform better. This team is good, it still seems like they are finding their groove playing together. 

RJ Davis takes over for North Carolina win- Oklahoma was an undefeated team nobody expected. They had played decent teams up to this matchup, but no teams that were as good as the Tar Heels. You could tell that the Sooners hadn’t played up to this competition with how many turnovers they had. They had 10 turnovers in the first half, and 18 total in the game. Otega Oweh played out of his mind and had 23 points. However, RJ Davis on the other side of the floor played just as well. RJ could not be stopped. He was draining three after three in the second half. He ended up with 23 points as well. North Carolina had some supporting role players help out as well. Armando Bacot had 14 points and 8 rebounds. Cormac Ryan had 13 points and 7 rebounds. The Tar Heels came out the gate hot and had a 12 point lead thanks to their stingy defense. The Tar Heels out scored the Sooners again in the second half to convincingly beat one of the last unbeaten teams in the nation. Oklahoma is playing way better than anyone expected and the Tar Heels continue to look like a threat in the ACC.

Arizona can win without a massive Caleb Love game- Arizona has been one of the best teams in the nation. Everyone can see it. Tommy Lloyd has himself a squad with a great leader in Caleb Love. Love has played well this year. When he plays well, the teams win. However, what happens when he doesn’t play well? Well, the Wildcats proved with a win over Alabama that they can win without a Love 20 piece. The supporting cast stepped up in a massive way. Each starter scored double digits. The Wildcats Oumar Ballo had a double-double with 16 points and 12 rebounds. Their other big man in Pelle Larsson had 16 points as well. The Wildcats only loss has come to the #1 team in the nation in Purdue, they should be highly competitive to win the national championship. Alabama played alright. Nate Oats doesn’t have as good of a squad as last year, but he has run his squad through a gauntlet of phenomenal teams. 4 of their 5 losses have come from top 25 teams. The other was against a team fighting to get into the top 25 in Ohio State. 3 of those losses were against top 5 opponents at the time they were playing them. Mark Sears is trying to lead this team, as he locked up Caleb Love. If Alabama wants to compete for an SEC title, they need their other guys to play better. If not, Oats will just have another average team that came in with high expectations.

How6rd’s Big East/Mid-Major Roundup

The Big East is a chaotic mess of competitive teams- I believe that a couple of the teams such as UConn and Marquette who lost in their Big East openers are still amongst the top teams in the nation, but it was very clear in the past week that this is not a conference any of these teams will come out with any sort of small damage. The Providence home atmosphere is incredibly loud and active and essentially was a 6th player in both of their games against two teams with great out of conference success in Marquette and Butler. UConn took a tough loss having their worst shooting performance of the season (at least from watching the game) against the Seton Hall Pirates who showed that they really came to play in the Big East…until they got smoked by a Xavier team struggling to connect up to the last game and lost by 20 points. The biggest disappointment was Creighton who had a solid performance out of Trey Alexander, but with no guard able to consistently let Kalkbrenner eat in the paint the rest of the team had an atrocious shooting game and just missed out on a lucky win being beat 68-66 at home by Villanova who shot quite poorly themselves. These games across the conference have shown us that all of these teams (except for Georgetown and whatever Depaul is doing) are capable to compete for the conference title this year and Creighton and Marquette have the last conference contest in 2023 that will be a huge litmus test for where both teams stand on December 30th.

The FAU Owls are here and they’re the TRUTH- Many people laughed at FAU’s top 10 ranking in the preseason polls and were ready to close the door on any “national championship contender” talk about them after their brutal home loss to Bryant. Fortunately, they didn’t care about any of that noise and have been nearly handling every Power 6 opponent they’ve faced since aside from a solid Illinois performance, and now they just beat a strong Arizona squad in what was the best game of the season up to this point. Johnell Davis had the most impressive individual performance aside from his three-point shooting finishing the game with a 35/3/9 playing in 49(!) minutes. The biggest game-changer of the night was team-assist leader Jalen Gaffney who made some huge three-point shots and rarely missed a shot in a bad situation along with dishing out some solid passes towards the end of regulation setting up Davis’ monster overtime performance. Aside from his game-tying dunk sending the game to two overtimes, Vladislav Goldin got in some foul trouble throughout the game and eventually fouled out putting the game in the hands of the Owls’ guard tandem. They did just that and ran out of T-Mobile Arena with a W in what was one of the most impressive wins of the year already and 100% let every college basketball fan this is a serious threat once March comes around.

How in the hell is Nevada not even ranked??- The media hasn’t done a good job of promoting the Wolf Pack this year and the AP poll must be ignoring what they’ve done recently because of it as this Mountain West squad looks incredible. Nevada has a 12-1 record this year with the one loss coming from an outlier of an awful shooting night against Drake, but besides that one loss they’ve had some huge blowout wins this season and are 3-0 against power conference opponents and recently winning the Diamond Head Classic. Jarod Lucas is a pure scorer who can put up 20 points a lot more often than not pushing the offense past the opponent’s pace early in the game, and his supporting cast are two lethal two-way players with Kenan Blackshear driving to the bucket as fast as he picks the ball out of the opponent’s hands and big man Nick Davidson grabs a chunk of clutch rebounds for the team along with putting double-digit points and multiple blocks on nearly any given night. The defense isn’t statistically eye popping but watching the games when the momentum is in the Wolf Pack’s favor nearly every player they put out on the court are hustlers and make it difficult for any other team to sway the momentum back in their favor. Maybe the Drake loss hurt them a lot more than most losses to other teams this season, but in my opinion, with seeing a handful of teams that made the rankings ahead of them I believe their large margins of victory against some solid competition like Georgia Tech (beat Duke not too long ago) and they should be in the AP rankings soon enough.