Four big questions about a big Final Four
Can it be Saturday night yet?
INDIANAPOLIS — The Final Four is always great, obviously, because it’s the Final Four. It can’t not be fun. But all Final Fours are not created equal.
We can’t help but think about 2011, about how far we’ve come. Remember 2011? A post-Gordon Hayward Butler and that First Four VCU — two teams that won a combined nine NCAA Tournament games and still finished 36th and 53rd in adjusted efficiency in KenPom’s final rankings — played in one national semifinal. Kemba Walker-era UConn, which ended the regular season 21-9 and 4-7 in their last 11, beat a grinding Kentucky 56-55 on the other side. Then came the title game: 53-41 UConn. Fifty-seven possessions. Dross.
Back then, being a year-round college basketball fan took work. The default posture was defensive. The criticisms of the product were loud and obvious and frankly correct — the game was too physical, too defensive, too short on talent, and simply not that much fun to sit down and watch — and we true believers, surrounded on all sides by people puncturing our little bubble, could look silly trying to defend it. But there was no defending that title game.
Most of all, there was no defending the college basketball season that preceded it. There was no defending the prevailing culture in the sport, the years of decline and decay, that produced it. However defensive one was inclined to be — the tournament is always great, the sport will be fine just like it always is, and anyway this is our thing, leave us alone, don’t watch if you don’t like it, hmph — there was no denying that debacle at NRG. At minimum, it forced a top-down strategic reckoning. Eighteen months later, the freedom of movement era began.
That was 15 years ago. Look at us now.
This Final Four feels like the end result of everything that has changed for the better about the sport since. With respect to Kemba, the four squads in Indy this week would have blown any of those 2011 teams out of the damn gym. They would also have been incomprehensible, practically alien — simultaneously huge and fast and hyperefficient and smart. The complexity and stylistic diversity of these four teams’ tactics would have given most 2011 coaches a seizure. Wait: Your playmaking guards are Keaton Wagler and David Mirkovic? You have Yaxel Lendeborg, Aday Mara, and Morez Johnson, and you prefer to get out and run? You bring Tobe Awaka off the bench?! You run these sets, like, every possession? What the hell is all this?!
Among casual fans, the tournament is most renowned for its wackiness. Survivorship bias distorts conclusions. Some Final Fours are just, you know, the four teams that won. But more often than not, the final weekend of the season says something meaningful about the sport that yielded it.
This is a fantastic, fascinating edition, populated by historically excellent teams who are also super fun to watch. It’s no accident. This is what college basketball is now.
In case you can’t tell, we can’t wait for Saturday night. Can’t wait to watch it play out. Can’t wait to bask in it at all at Lucas Oil Stadium. Can’t wait to have that moment where we snap out of it and realize it’s time to decide what we’re going to say and write. Just can’t stop thinking about it. So, as is tradition, here are a few of the things we’ve been thinking about:
No. 3 Illinois vs. No. 2 UConn (Saturday, 6:09 pm ET)
1. Can Illinois stop Tarris Reed?
On the podcast two weeks ago, we half-joked with Tate about Tarris Reed’s historic first NCAA Tournament weekend, when Reed became the first player since Tim Duncan in 1997 to have at least 40 points and 40 rebounds in the first two rounds. The joke, of course, was that Reed had 31 points and 27 rebounds in the first round against Furman (which, to be clear, is still insane), and then had a very pedestrian performance in the second. The Duncan comparison sounded better than it felt.
Nobody’s joking about it now. Reed is having one of the historically great tournaments of any big in living memory. He had 20-5-4 against the bulwark frontcourt of Michigan State. He had 26 points, nine rebounds, four blocks, three assists and two steals against Duke and, as the rest of the Huskies flailed from the perimeter, was the only reason the Blue Devils weren’t up by a totally unrecoverable margin at halftime.
He will have to be every bit as good Saturday night.
Tactically speaking, Illinois is not a team that wants to double the post, particularly if the other team (like, say, Indiana, which Illinois throttled with this strategy Feb. 15) is doing a lot of complex off-ball screening and movement. The Illini have plenty of size and rim protection down there, after all, and they’d rather let their perimeter defenders stay extended. Maybe Brad Underwood will cook up different looks for this game — his subtle gravitational adjustments against Houston doomed the Cougars — but everything we’ve seen from this Illini team suggests it will prioritize the outside-in threat rather than the other way around.
This makes Reed the most important player in the game. The rest of the analytical breakdown favors the Illini: This is the best offense in the country, led by a freshman lottery pick that basically none of UConn’s guards or wings can individually match up with, playing for a coaching staff that has long since decided letting Wagler but also Mirkovic and Andrej Stojakovic hunt matchups is the most straightforward path to success. Illinois used to be a more systematic offensive team; it was at its best in a collective flow state. That was the kind of team you could see Ben McCollum drawing in to his Iowa quicksand. That’s not this Illinois. This one can play a bunch of different ways — it plays notably faster with Stojakovic flying at the rim than when Mirkovic is playing booty-ball from 18 feet — but the end result is almost always a good shot. Good luck with this:
UConn is more unlikely than any of Illinois’ three Final Four opponents to have the answers for those one-on-one matchups. Illinois is going to score, and it is going to run like hell, and use all of its positional length, trying to keep the Huskies from generating good looks off of all those pretty offensive sets.
Reed is the answer. Reed’s ability to generate a steady churn of points against the tall but not exactly physically stout Ivisicii — to establish a baseline, to hang around, to put the opponents in foul trouble, to start gnawing away at the load-bearing pillars, to put Underwood’s beautiful machine under stress — is the single biggest prospective advantage UConn has.
2. Does Danny Hurley have one more in him?
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