2014 NCAA Tournament: A tale of two titans, Florida and Louisville, in Orlando
Florida showed up and shut down Pitt on Saturday in Orlando, and re-established itself as a national championship contender. But Louisville muddled through a second straight game, and there are reasons to be concerned about the Cardinals.
When the brackets and matchups were released last Sunday, I was ecstatic to see both Florida and Louisville in Orlando, the subregional site I knew I was headed to on Thursday and Saturday. Two national championship contenders! And two really fun teams!, I thought as a basketball fan. I can scout a potential national final opponent for Florida!, I thought as a Gators fan.
But on Thursday, I got to watch performances from two frustrated yet excellent teams. Louisville saw itself in the mirror against Manhattan, and didn't quite know what to do until late; Albany smartly took away Florida's best punch — Michael Frazier II bombing away — and landed combos while the Gators worked their way back into a fight they were expecting to end early.
March Madness
On Saturday, I was worried for Florida, taking on a hot Pittsburgh team that had dismembered Colorado two days before, and relatively unworried for Louisville, which I thought was likely to rebound from its funk and sprint by Saint Louis.
It turns out that I had my worries almost entirely misplaced.
Florida handled Pittsburgh by locking the Panthers in the cage that is the Gators' halfcourt defense and smelting the key. Florida's guards did a tremendous job on Lamar Patterson, holding him to eight points on 11 shots, and an even better one on James Robinson, who scored one point on five attempts. The Gators' frontcourt was as good, maybe better: Talib Zanna had 10 points to lead Pitt, but grabbed just six rebounds, and Florida snagged 14 offensive rebounds on 35 chances for a stellar 40 percent Offensive Rebounding Rate. Pitt shot 37.3 percent from the field and 23.5 percent from three, and scored just 14 points over the 10 minutes heading into and the 10 minutes coming out of overtime.
Florida wound up winning by 16, 61-45, despite the lack of a particularly memorable performance on offense for any Gator other than Scottie Wilbekin. Wilbekin got his 21 points with all the moves that usually get his runners swatted — he made six of his eight two-pointers on Saturday, raising his two-point field goal percentage to 41.7 percent on the year — and by sinking three of his seven threes. He carried the Gators while Frazier (10 points) made just two of nine threes, and no other Florida player had more than eight points.
If its performance against Albany was a C, this was a B or a B+ — and yet Florida’s one of six teams left in the NCAA Tournament with two wins by double digits.
Louisville is not one of those teams, though the Cardinals pulled away late against Saint Louis for their 66-51 win on Saturday. And a lot of their struggles have to do with the struggles of their most important and best player, Russ Smith, who managed to be neither one of those things in either game in Orlando.
Smith looked off in both games, and finished his time in Orlando having gone 7-for-25 from the field, committed 13 turnovers, and done maybe one or two Russdiulous things. If not for his stellar outings at the line, where he made 16 of his 21 free throws, Smith could well have been in single digits in scoring in both games; the 13 turnovers over the two of them — which surprised me, looking at box scores, though I watched both games in person — are as many as Russ had had in any three consecutive games in 2013-14, as he established his new season high for turnovers in both games, with six against the Jaspers and seven against the Billikens.
Louisville's primary saving graces were Luke Hancock and officiating — appropriate, given Hancock's preternatural ability to buy calls from refs.
Hancock isn’t a great college player, and I suspect he would be a lesser player on many other teams, but he’s an excellent shooter and a master at drawing cheap whistles. He hit two pivotal threes for the Cardinals in the closing minutes against Manhattan, but he also drove into a Jasper at midcourt to get one foul, and altered his drive at the basket on another shot to create contact that was deemed a foul instead of taking an easy layup.
Photo: Kevin C. Cox It seems like Hancock has been playing college basketball for 20 years at this point — it’s just five, if we’re counting the 2011-12 season he spent at Louisville after transferring from George Mason — and he’s made use of the ken derived from two decades (Hancock did play games in 2009) of experience to become the game’s savviest player. Louisville needed all of it, and his shooting, to advance to Indianapolis, but Hancock’s bought fouls were just some of the 46 called against the Jaspers and Billikens, which led to a staggering 59 free throws.
The Cardinals made 43 donations from the charity stripe over the two games; their 72.9 percent mark on free throws was far better than the 66.3 percent the Cards have now shot on the season, even after that two-game hot streak. That helped them a lot, especially because they made just 10 of 30 threes — well under their average of 37 percent on the season — and struggled to get Montrezl Harrell consistently involved.
Another thing that helped: Louisville’s opponents got very little from distance. Manhattan made three treys, but took just five; Saint Louis set the new NCAA Tournament mark for futility from beyond the arc, becoming the first team to go 0-for-15 from three-point range. Louisville played like a team ripe to be upset all weekend, but one of the key ingredients for teams making upset soufflé was simply not available, and it wasn’t all thanks to the Cards’ perimeter defense.
Plus, Louisville only beat one team on a good day. Manhattan played well and Louisville played well when it had to to win that game; Saint Louis played poorly in nearly every respect, and Louisville played ... slightly less poorly?
This would be cause for concern for any of the teams in the NCAA Tournament going forward, especially given that the team that played relatively mediocre basketball beat a No. 13 seed and a No. 5 seed that played like a No. 12 seed to get to the Sweet Sixteen.
Louisville played like a team ripe to be upset all weekend
But it has to be especially concerning for Louisville, one of two teams (San Diego State is the other) headed for a rematch of a regular-season game it lost. And the Cardinals will be playing Kentucky, one of the nation’s best teams at drawing fouls and controlling a game from the line; it’s a bad bet that the fouls will favor any Kentucky foe.
Put simply, Louisville can survive upset bids while playing mediocre basketball against Manhattan and Saint Louis. If Kentucky repeats the performance that edged Wichita State in Sunday’s instant classic in Indianapolis, and the Cardinals turn in their third straight lukewarm day, Louisville may lose by 20.
Both national championship contenders in Orlando played one close game and one less close game. But Florida was able to rebound from a scare and outclass Pittsburgh; Louisville was only able to squander most of the momentum it had coming into the NCAA Tournament.
The Cardinals will either find that gear again in Indianapolis, or will run out of chances to do so.
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