Photo by: Matt Cashore-USA TODAY Sports
Friday Fast Break: Week XI
February 18, 2022 | Men's Basketball, #ForBoston Files
The season is winding down, but BC is still learning as it approaches its last six games.
CHESTNUT HILL, Mass. -- I sometimes wish I had a better origin backstory for my college basketball fandom. I can't subjectively recall anything about storming the court as a child, nor can I vividly remember the first time I watched my team in the NCAA Tournament. I left class early in order to watch Boston College play Pacific in 2006, but I was already in college and understood the sport and both the allure and appeal of playing deep into March.
Nope, my introduction to college basketball didn't come from television, though I think everyone, including seven year olds, emulated the Fab Five when they tried to dunk a styrofoam basketball. It came from, of all places, a Sega Genesis video game that served as an offshoot of the NBA Live series from EA Sports: Coach K College Basketball.
That's right. My earliest basketball memory involved Arkansas and UCLA battling for a national championship on 16-bit graphics attached to my parents' television in the den of our family home. My brother and I often sat and commentated on the games, but I had no idea what I was doing whenever I tried to break the 2-3 zone by firing three-pointer after three-pointer at the hoop.
That game came out in 1995 and carried the namesake of Duke head coach Mike Krzyzewski, a two-time national champion who finally won his titles a couple of years earlier. The Blue Devils were the biggest name in college basketball at the time, and the younger of my two older brothers essentially painted our bedroom in blue and white. He loved Duke and idolized both Christian Laettner and Bobby Hurley while simultaneously shooting on our neighbor's basketball hoop while dreaming of playing for the coach whose name we couldn't spell.
There were a lot of good memories tied to that game and, eventually, watching those teams through the late-1990s as Kentucky, Syracuse, Arizona, Utah, Stanford and others advanced to the Final Four. I dreamed of it happening in my backyard at Boston College, and as I slowly came of age as a teenager, the Eagles moved into the Atlantic Coast Conference and battled the iconic team tied to my younger years while simultaneously competing for a spot in one of those Final Fours.
That it all started with Coach K hung the backdrop for my experience watching BC's game against Duke last Saturday. The short-lived matchup between the schools only really started when the Eagles shifted into the ACC, but that moment when he walked onto the Conte Forum court always felt surreal. I couldn't help but remember those shots in my neighbor's driveway whenever Duke ran out on the floor, but I also dreamed, again, of what Conte Forum would look like when the Eagles held that lofty company and competed for national championships like their Tobacco Road counterparts.
"That game gave me a good picture of what it should look like as we continue to try and build a program," BC head coach Earl Grant said. "Hopefully we get to the point where it's always like that, where everyone in the crowd was cheering for us. There was good energy. Our guys fed off that energy. It was a big time atmosphere and a good game."
I really believe that sports have a way of connecting to our childhood dreams if we let them into those recesses of our mind, and with Coach K retiring, allowing myself those few minutes to enjoy the moment let seven-year old me know that the dreams didn't change, even if it's in living color now and not on a 16-bit video game.
That Duke game kicked off a week of ups and downs as BC battled the Blue Devils before nearly toppling Notre Dame. When it ended, there was more than enough to unpack. Let's start at the end with the Irish for one last point before we work our way backwards:
1) One, two, three o'clock, four o'clock rock.
Losing Quinten Post and T.J. Bickerstaff left BC's frontcourt understaffed and undermanned long before anyone ever got into foul trouble against Notre Dame, so losing James Karnik and Justin Vander Baan to the bench in the first half before their eventual fifth whistle in the second half left the Eagles with literally nobody tall enough to combat Notre Dame's centermen.
The situation left Earl Grant with a decision where he could either find a player capable of playing the paint as a severely undersized big, or he could tailor the scheme around a smaller, guard-based lineup. He chose the latter and rolled out four or five guards with extreme regularity and, after Karnik, Vander Baan and Gianni Thompson all fouled out, necessity.
"We had a smaller lineup and went to a five-out motion to spread it out and drive it," Grant said. "Other than that, we saw a lot of the things that we talked about over the last month kind of come out. We made shots with a good-shooting team, and we drove the paint. We really wanted to dominate inside and throw it in, but our bigs got in foul trouble. To that element of the game, we couldn't really do too much with that [scheme]."
Grant favored a four-guard set before he was forced to run the high-screen, motion offense with five smaller players. It makes sense; Bickerstaff can run the floor like a guard but stands 6-9, the same height as Karnik, an undersized but powerful center who is battle-tested by the ACC.
Post is 7-feet tall but can play outside the paint, and Thompson, while raw, is a 6-8 power forward who rated as a three-star prospect when he committed to BC last year. All of that lends itself to an offense capable of running the floor in transition while simultaneously possessing enough size and agility to get defensive stops and rebounds. The scheme plays into that, and as four guards rotate in and out of the lineup, whoever is playing inside can shoulder the weight as long as injury and the dreaded whistle doesn't catch up.
2) Crash, kaboom, bang bang.
Back to the Duke game for a minute. Much of it centered around Coach K and his final trip to Conte Forum (and how it caused sports celebrities like both Jayson Tatum and Brad Stevens from the Boston Celtics to sit in the crowd), but the actual basketball on the court made for some great theater, especially early when BC very clearly battled the Blue Devils as equals and, at times, the better team.
Rebounding had a major impact on that. The Eagles didn't outshoot Duke in the first half and couldn't spot the three-pointer with any type of success, but James Karnik and both Makai Ashton-Langford and T.J. Bickerstaff owned the glass with a combined nine rebounds. Justin Vander Baan likewise had two on the defensive window after being forced into playing time with Quinten Post's absence, and BC , at least in the first, hung around on Duke by not giving up too much of an advantage on the glass.Â
"We try to send three guys as much as we can," Grant said this week. "We want to get extra possessions and easy baskets, so we try to send three guys to the glass. The numbers are those guys being aggressive and being in the right place at the right time."
Duke won the overall rebounding battle, but the lack of a disparate number contributed to the Eagles' ability to run with the Blue Devils over the course of the full 40 minutes. They ended the game on an 11-1 run over the last three minutes, and Duke failed to hit a basket over the final 3:55. That brought the score back to an 11-point loss, thanks in no small part to Karnik's seven second half rebounds and Ashton-Langford's four.
3) Spray a little more Windex on it.
The whole projection of the Duke game changed when Bickerstaff suffered his injury, and though BC succeeded at battling the Blue Devils on the glass, a little extra piece went missing. The Drexel transfer had four boards entirely on the offensive window, and having only played 11 minutes, his torrid pace had him primed for another double-digit rebounding game in line with his performances over the past week.
Before he went down, BC's balance held both firm and strong against the size of center Paolo Banchero, but losing Bickerstaff when Quinten Post was ruled out for the game sapped the Eagles of a complementary piece for James Karnik. Until that point, Banchero had been largely unable to compete in the paint, but after that point, he finished the first half with 10 points and four rebounds before dominating the interior for 10 boards in the second half alone.
"Quinten Post and TJ both weren't in," Grant said. "We typically like to play four guards at times, but with Quinten out and TJ banged up, we were forced to play four guards. It ended up working out for us, and we've done it multiple times this year, that we were able to spread the floor and attack with those four guys, but from a size standpoint, you typically don't deal with guys who are 6-10, 250. Most teams you can get away with that because they might have a shooter who is [six feet, seven inches]. Paolo was a load, so while it might have helped us offensively a bit, defensively, it wasn't working in our favor."
Layup Line: Broooooklyyyyn
The concept of nearly knocking off a top ACC team might earn brownie points and consolation prizes, but it doesn't help much for a conference tournament race that's finally thinning out as teams earn and win their way into bye positions. Only six games remain for BC, but the losses to both Duke and Notre Dame dropped the Eagles into 12th place with over two games separating them from a ninth place, first place bye.
They still have a very good chance to improve seeding to get a favorable matchup out of the first round, and a path exists that might send the Eagles rumbling towards a rubber match with Notre Dame if they can gain momentum in either of the first two days of games. As it stands right now, the No. 12 seed would play in the first game of the tournament against the No. 13 seed, a matchup conceivably pitting BC against Clemson.Â
One game separates BC from tenth place Pittsburgh and a potential matchup against Georgia Tech, and N.C. State and Louisville are the remaining teams currently in first day games as the No. 11 and No. 14 seeds. Syracuse and Florida State are eighth and ninth and would earn first round byes to play one another in the second round, and Virginia Tech, Virginia and Wake Forest are the next three seeds awaiting winners from the first game.
North Carolina, Miami, Notre Dame and Duke are the top four teams who would currently receive the coveted "double byes," but the difference between the Tar Heels to both Wake and UVA is less than one game.
The different tracks for each team obviously pit one another against different opponents depending on who finishes in what slot. The top seed gains the winner of that 8-vs.-9 game in the quarterfinals, but the No. 2 seed earns the winner of either Game 6, or the No. 7 vs. No.10/No. 15 game. Since Notre Dame and Duke occupy those two slots, the ability to catch tenth-seeded Pittsburgh could earn the Eagles a shot at teams that held higher seeds but struggled to consistently dominate against BC's style.
Finding "favorable" matchups is all in the eyes of the beholder, and the path through the first and second games is obviously more speculative than anything else. Anything can happen in a one-game series, but with the prospect of a Brooklyn-based crowd in one of Boston College's home markets, a large alumni contingent could fill the Barclays Center and turn those games into the Eagles' happy stomping grounds.
Of course, it's very much worth noting that six games remain in the season, and anything can happen. What's most important is the proverbial next one against Syracuse on Saturday, a game nationally televised on ESPNU.
Â
Nope, my introduction to college basketball didn't come from television, though I think everyone, including seven year olds, emulated the Fab Five when they tried to dunk a styrofoam basketball. It came from, of all places, a Sega Genesis video game that served as an offshoot of the NBA Live series from EA Sports: Coach K College Basketball.
That's right. My earliest basketball memory involved Arkansas and UCLA battling for a national championship on 16-bit graphics attached to my parents' television in the den of our family home. My brother and I often sat and commentated on the games, but I had no idea what I was doing whenever I tried to break the 2-3 zone by firing three-pointer after three-pointer at the hoop.
That game came out in 1995 and carried the namesake of Duke head coach Mike Krzyzewski, a two-time national champion who finally won his titles a couple of years earlier. The Blue Devils were the biggest name in college basketball at the time, and the younger of my two older brothers essentially painted our bedroom in blue and white. He loved Duke and idolized both Christian Laettner and Bobby Hurley while simultaneously shooting on our neighbor's basketball hoop while dreaming of playing for the coach whose name we couldn't spell.
There were a lot of good memories tied to that game and, eventually, watching those teams through the late-1990s as Kentucky, Syracuse, Arizona, Utah, Stanford and others advanced to the Final Four. I dreamed of it happening in my backyard at Boston College, and as I slowly came of age as a teenager, the Eagles moved into the Atlantic Coast Conference and battled the iconic team tied to my younger years while simultaneously competing for a spot in one of those Final Fours.
That it all started with Coach K hung the backdrop for my experience watching BC's game against Duke last Saturday. The short-lived matchup between the schools only really started when the Eagles shifted into the ACC, but that moment when he walked onto the Conte Forum court always felt surreal. I couldn't help but remember those shots in my neighbor's driveway whenever Duke ran out on the floor, but I also dreamed, again, of what Conte Forum would look like when the Eagles held that lofty company and competed for national championships like their Tobacco Road counterparts.
"That game gave me a good picture of what it should look like as we continue to try and build a program," BC head coach Earl Grant said. "Hopefully we get to the point where it's always like that, where everyone in the crowd was cheering for us. There was good energy. Our guys fed off that energy. It was a big time atmosphere and a good game."
I really believe that sports have a way of connecting to our childhood dreams if we let them into those recesses of our mind, and with Coach K retiring, allowing myself those few minutes to enjoy the moment let seven-year old me know that the dreams didn't change, even if it's in living color now and not on a 16-bit video game.
That Duke game kicked off a week of ups and downs as BC battled the Blue Devils before nearly toppling Notre Dame. When it ended, there was more than enough to unpack. Let's start at the end with the Irish for one last point before we work our way backwards:
1) One, two, three o'clock, four o'clock rock.
Losing Quinten Post and T.J. Bickerstaff left BC's frontcourt understaffed and undermanned long before anyone ever got into foul trouble against Notre Dame, so losing James Karnik and Justin Vander Baan to the bench in the first half before their eventual fifth whistle in the second half left the Eagles with literally nobody tall enough to combat Notre Dame's centermen.
The situation left Earl Grant with a decision where he could either find a player capable of playing the paint as a severely undersized big, or he could tailor the scheme around a smaller, guard-based lineup. He chose the latter and rolled out four or five guards with extreme regularity and, after Karnik, Vander Baan and Gianni Thompson all fouled out, necessity.
"We had a smaller lineup and went to a five-out motion to spread it out and drive it," Grant said. "Other than that, we saw a lot of the things that we talked about over the last month kind of come out. We made shots with a good-shooting team, and we drove the paint. We really wanted to dominate inside and throw it in, but our bigs got in foul trouble. To that element of the game, we couldn't really do too much with that [scheme]."
Grant favored a four-guard set before he was forced to run the high-screen, motion offense with five smaller players. It makes sense; Bickerstaff can run the floor like a guard but stands 6-9, the same height as Karnik, an undersized but powerful center who is battle-tested by the ACC.
Post is 7-feet tall but can play outside the paint, and Thompson, while raw, is a 6-8 power forward who rated as a three-star prospect when he committed to BC last year. All of that lends itself to an offense capable of running the floor in transition while simultaneously possessing enough size and agility to get defensive stops and rebounds. The scheme plays into that, and as four guards rotate in and out of the lineup, whoever is playing inside can shoulder the weight as long as injury and the dreaded whistle doesn't catch up.
2) Crash, kaboom, bang bang.
Back to the Duke game for a minute. Much of it centered around Coach K and his final trip to Conte Forum (and how it caused sports celebrities like both Jayson Tatum and Brad Stevens from the Boston Celtics to sit in the crowd), but the actual basketball on the court made for some great theater, especially early when BC very clearly battled the Blue Devils as equals and, at times, the better team.
Rebounding had a major impact on that. The Eagles didn't outshoot Duke in the first half and couldn't spot the three-pointer with any type of success, but James Karnik and both Makai Ashton-Langford and T.J. Bickerstaff owned the glass with a combined nine rebounds. Justin Vander Baan likewise had two on the defensive window after being forced into playing time with Quinten Post's absence, and BC , at least in the first, hung around on Duke by not giving up too much of an advantage on the glass.Â
"We try to send three guys as much as we can," Grant said this week. "We want to get extra possessions and easy baskets, so we try to send three guys to the glass. The numbers are those guys being aggressive and being in the right place at the right time."
Duke won the overall rebounding battle, but the lack of a disparate number contributed to the Eagles' ability to run with the Blue Devils over the course of the full 40 minutes. They ended the game on an 11-1 run over the last three minutes, and Duke failed to hit a basket over the final 3:55. That brought the score back to an 11-point loss, thanks in no small part to Karnik's seven second half rebounds and Ashton-Langford's four.
3) Spray a little more Windex on it.
The whole projection of the Duke game changed when Bickerstaff suffered his injury, and though BC succeeded at battling the Blue Devils on the glass, a little extra piece went missing. The Drexel transfer had four boards entirely on the offensive window, and having only played 11 minutes, his torrid pace had him primed for another double-digit rebounding game in line with his performances over the past week.
Before he went down, BC's balance held both firm and strong against the size of center Paolo Banchero, but losing Bickerstaff when Quinten Post was ruled out for the game sapped the Eagles of a complementary piece for James Karnik. Until that point, Banchero had been largely unable to compete in the paint, but after that point, he finished the first half with 10 points and four rebounds before dominating the interior for 10 boards in the second half alone.
"Quinten Post and TJ both weren't in," Grant said. "We typically like to play four guards at times, but with Quinten out and TJ banged up, we were forced to play four guards. It ended up working out for us, and we've done it multiple times this year, that we were able to spread the floor and attack with those four guys, but from a size standpoint, you typically don't deal with guys who are 6-10, 250. Most teams you can get away with that because they might have a shooter who is [six feet, seven inches]. Paolo was a load, so while it might have helped us offensively a bit, defensively, it wasn't working in our favor."
Layup Line: Broooooklyyyyn
The concept of nearly knocking off a top ACC team might earn brownie points and consolation prizes, but it doesn't help much for a conference tournament race that's finally thinning out as teams earn and win their way into bye positions. Only six games remain for BC, but the losses to both Duke and Notre Dame dropped the Eagles into 12th place with over two games separating them from a ninth place, first place bye.
They still have a very good chance to improve seeding to get a favorable matchup out of the first round, and a path exists that might send the Eagles rumbling towards a rubber match with Notre Dame if they can gain momentum in either of the first two days of games. As it stands right now, the No. 12 seed would play in the first game of the tournament against the No. 13 seed, a matchup conceivably pitting BC against Clemson.Â
One game separates BC from tenth place Pittsburgh and a potential matchup against Georgia Tech, and N.C. State and Louisville are the remaining teams currently in first day games as the No. 11 and No. 14 seeds. Syracuse and Florida State are eighth and ninth and would earn first round byes to play one another in the second round, and Virginia Tech, Virginia and Wake Forest are the next three seeds awaiting winners from the first game.
North Carolina, Miami, Notre Dame and Duke are the top four teams who would currently receive the coveted "double byes," but the difference between the Tar Heels to both Wake and UVA is less than one game.
The different tracks for each team obviously pit one another against different opponents depending on who finishes in what slot. The top seed gains the winner of that 8-vs.-9 game in the quarterfinals, but the No. 2 seed earns the winner of either Game 6, or the No. 7 vs. No.10/No. 15 game. Since Notre Dame and Duke occupy those two slots, the ability to catch tenth-seeded Pittsburgh could earn the Eagles a shot at teams that held higher seeds but struggled to consistently dominate against BC's style.
Finding "favorable" matchups is all in the eyes of the beholder, and the path through the first and second games is obviously more speculative than anything else. Anything can happen in a one-game series, but with the prospect of a Brooklyn-based crowd in one of Boston College's home markets, a large alumni contingent could fill the Barclays Center and turn those games into the Eagles' happy stomping grounds.
Of course, it's very much worth noting that six games remain in the season, and anything can happen. What's most important is the proverbial next one against Syracuse on Saturday, a game nationally televised on ESPNU.
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Players Mentioned
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