Over the past month or so it seems like everyone has been championing excellent guard play and pointing out that it seems like teams that go far in the NCAA tourney have great guard play. That may be true to an extent but I think it'll be proven tonight that a dominant big man makes more difference than good guards. Against Duke, UConn looked lost in the first half when Okafor was on the bench with foul trouble. Everything changed in the second half when he came back with a vengence. His 18 points in the second half and defensive presence is what won the game for UConn. The reason that the NCAA tourney has become guard oriented in the past few years is that most big man with any semblance of a game jumps to the NBA. For example, Tech lost Chris Bosh to the draft last year after only 1 year in college. If he was still in school Tech would definitely have it's offense geared on getting him the ball 1st. Now I'm not saying that UConn has below average guards, it's just that all the talk about having to have excellent guard play to win the NCAA tourney is not true.
of course guard play is huge in the tournament, that is obvious. I've been on that bandwagon all tournament but there is a difference when speaking of big men... here's my post on UCONN before the tournament and the reason I picked them to win it. "I think Uconn with Okafor makes them the team to beat on this side. No one college team has a real Patrick Ewing type anymore cuz they are all in the NBA....This makes them unique and a force ppl cant match up with no matter what given he is healthy." The difference is maybe once every 10 yrs there is a dominant big man who doesnt go pro before playing out his college career nowadays. Having an Okafor/Shaq/Ewing, etc is obviously a team's need to win it all if available but you cant just create one. Good guards are a lot more available and if you look at the teams to make it deep in the trny every year have excellent guard play. Just because UCONN has a dominant big man doesnt lessen that impact... Okafor is a once in lifetime player for Jim Calhoun and he knows it. He said if we didnt make it to the finals I woulda felt like i let this team down. Kinda funny we didnt go anywhere with shaq.... needless to say, that was a once in lifetime shot for us.
You guys are right... it has become the nrom to say guards rule in the NCAA as there was a trend with teams like Arizona who had guards as the strongest players. The fact of the matter is that you better be strong all around in order to win an NCAA title most years. We'll have to see how Big Luke does tonight but he does give GA Tech a little more balance, especially as the season has gone along. He was the biggest reason they won their semifinal I think as he dominated the second half. Of course having Lewis hit 5 three's in the first half was big also. I really believe that the most important thing to have in a guard is a good distributor that doesn't urn the ball over at the point as you can have a couple of forwards that hit the 3 to open up the middle but of course having a great 3 point off guard is a big boast also. As long as a team has good shooters and at least one very good scorer in the middle they can make a run. Both of these teams are proving that even though Tech has been more guard oriented over the the course of the year since they have so many good ones.
