Racers getting some love

I know this is the UK section but the article does talk a great deal about the Cats too. Murray State finally got some votes for the top 25 this week after their bracket buster win on Saturday. This team is special and could prove to be a tough out in the tourney, provided they win the OVC tourney. And today they're getting some love from our good friend Pat Forde, who managed another swipe at UK and Coach Cal. What a douche.

Chemistry lesson: Handing out gradesComment Email Print Share By Pat Forde
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Forty names, games, teams and minutiae making news in college basketball (game-winning shots now on sale two-for-one at Maryland (1)):



Chemistry: Who's flunking it, who's acing it?


When this basketball season began, Texas (7) was ranked third and Kentucky ( fifth in the ESPN/USA Today coaches' poll. One of the big reasons for the high early rankings was the strength of both schools' 2009 recruiting classes -- UK's was ranked No. 1 by ESPN.com, UT's No. 4.

John Calipari has been able to mix the new guys with the veterans.
Today, the Wildcats are 26-1 and No. 2 in the polls, riding a seven-game winning streak. The Longhorns are 21-6 and No. 21, having lost six of their last 10. The two programs have been speeding in opposite directions for a few weeks now, largely because they have done drastically different jobs meshing newcomers and veterans into a cohesive unit.


John Calipari (9) has done a terrific job of it at Kentucky. Rick Barnes (10) has done a poor job of it at Texas.


Calipari's greatest strength as a coach is his ability to create teams that play together. His 1992 Massachusetts team remains one of the most overachieving units The Minutes has ever seen, featuring a shooting guard with range so limited he made one 3-pointer all season (Jim McCoy), a 6-foot-3 power forward (Will Herndon), and a left-handed center who stood all of 6-7 (Harper Williams). Somehow, that collection of marginal talent went 30-5 and advanced to the NCAA Sweet 16. His next four teams averaged 29 wins per season, capped off by a 35-2 squad that went to the Final Four* with one superstar (Marcus Camby) and a collection of complementary parts. (*Since vacated.)


Calipari did more of the same at Memphis, although with significantly better talent. The trick there was getting a bunch of highly touted recruits to coalesce into a team -- and again he succeeded spectacularly, capped off by the 2008 Final Four* run. (*Since vacated.)


Now Calipari's greatest chemistry success at Memphis has been duplicated at Kentucky: working five-star freshmen into leading roles without alienating existing players. He did it with Derrick Rose and Tyreke Evans, and he's done it again with John Wall (11), DeMarcus Cousins (12) and Eric Bledsoe (13).


Beyond a talent for team-building, there are a few reasons why Calipari has been able to throw together a brand-new lineup and make it work:


• He's a first-year coach at Kentucky taking over a massive underachiever that went to the NIT last year. So he had a clear mandate to tear down what was in place and start over -- a remake that included running off five players. The remaining Wildcats got a pretty clear signal that it was time to buy in or get lost.


• Kentucky's best returning player, junior Patrick Patterson, is a good soldier. He didn't resist taking on a reduced role and surrendering some spotlight to the new guys. After two years of nastiness and losing with Billy Gillispie, he was open to change.


• The new players were so clearly better than any veterans they were competing with for minutes that there was no use pouting over lost playing time.


• From the top of the stat POOP on down, individual ego had to be sublimated to maximize team success.


"They like each other," Calipari said Monday. "They respect each other. The veterans respect the talent of the young kids, and I think the young kids respect the talent of the veterans. They've all accepted roles."


Still, this group needed to be molded rather quickly from a collection of strangers into a team. That required a little player nature and a little coaching nurture.


"Some of it's got to be natural," Calipari said. "You've got guys who are respectful to each other. The other part of it is, you're getting them to understand how important it is to get along."




Rick Barnes has been searching for the right lineup.
The Minutes doesn't know where or how the Texas chemistry experiment turned into a lab explosion, but it has. Freshman guards Avery Bradley (14), J'Covan Brown (15) and Jordan Hamilton (16) are talented players who have had some great games and great moments, but it seems the more influence they exert on the team, the worse the results.


In games Texas has won, that trio has taken 42.2 percent of the team's shots. In games Texas has lost, they've taken 48 percent of the shots -- and most of them miss. Bradley has made 39.7 percent of his shots in six Longhorns losses, Hamilton 33.9 percent and Brown 32.1. And if you remove one hot game each for indiscriminate gunner Hamilton (10-of-16 at Missouri) and helter-skelter Brown (9-of-19 against Kansas), the percentages are truly awful -- 22.5 percent for Hamilton and 24.3 percent for Brown.


In Texas' past three losses, the trio of freshmen have jacked up a majority of their shots: 54.4 percent against Oklahoma, 52.5 percent against Kansas and 67.7 percent against Missouri.


Along the way, Barnes has been guessing wildly at what might be the right lineup combination. He played everyone but Bevo in the first half against Kansas, hoping something would click. (Nothing did.) He benched senior guard Justin Mason, a starter since the fifth game of his freshman year, playing him a total of 10 minutes in a three-game stretch -- then started him at Texas Tech on Saturday and played him 38 minutes.


While a return to the form that took Texas to the No. 1 ranking earlier this season is not out of the question, it seems increasingly unlikely (especially with the season-ending injury to guard Dogus Balbay). But there are reasons why Barnes had a harder chemistry exam than Calipari:


• He had more returning veterans who had proved themselves. It's tougher to limit the roles of guys you won games with in previous seasons.


• He isn't a first-year coach. Barnes already had established a bond with his players and did not have the starting-from-scratch imprimatur afforded Calipari.


• He's in a much tougher league. Kentucky's thrown-together team probably would have encountered more struggles (and more losses) in the Big 12 than it has in the SEC.


• His freshmen aren't as good as Kentucky's -- even if they think they are. The hardest guy to coach in college basketball might be a five-star recruit with a three-star understanding of the game and a seven-star opinion of himself. The Minutes cannot say for sure that that's the case with the Texas freshmen, but at times you wonder.


All of that leaves Barnes in the particularly anguished coaching place of second-guessing yourself while trying to ignore the second-guesses of others (such as The Minutes). We'll see how it plays out, but for now, give Calipari an A in chemistry and Barnes a D.



Dandy dozen games between now and Madness


Kentucky at Tennessee (18), Saturday. If the Wildcats are going to lose a second game before the postseason, this would be the spot. The Volunteers, who beat Kansas in Thompson-Boling Arena earlier this year, played the Cats dead even for 31 minutes before relenting in Lexington on Feb. 13.

Minutes crush of the week


What's not to love about Murray State (35)? The Racers are 26-3, undefeated in the Ohio Valley Conference, and have a freshman guard named Isaiah Canaan (36) who might have won himself an ESPY with this shot.


The Racers have redefined the term "balance," with eight players averaging between 15 and 25 minutes per game and six players averaging between 9.5 and 10.6 points. They have won 17 straight games heading into a showdown with defending OVC champion Morehead State on Thursday. And most impressively, they have now pieced together 23 straight winning seasons under six different coaches.

I hope they make it, be fun to watch em.

Always like having another Kentucky team in the dance to cheer for.

Oh, and btw, Pat Forde is still a douche. No matter what the message he still has to put his *'s in the story. * Since Vacated.* Kiss my ass Forde.

He gave some praise to the cats, but his denotes were kind of annoying.