Won't be quite the same in the Sprint Center tonight lol
KUAD: Kansas vs Washington State pregame notes
The Jayhawks are heavily favored in this one. KenPom predicts a 68-58 KU victory with 83 percent confidence. The Cougars will have to convert their inside opportunities and limit turnovers, otherwise Kansas could easily run away with the game in front of what amounts to a home crowd.
Motum and Withey will be the most intriguing battle, and will likely decide whether or not the Cougs have a chance on Monday.
cougcenter.com preview
Kansas is a team in transition, which is why coach Bill Self wants to see the Jayhawks in transition as much as possible.
KU’s halfcourt offense has been clunky at times, and until the Jayhawks figure it out, fastbreak points represent an easy source of scoring. If Self gets his wish, the CBE Classic at Sprint Center will be a sprint for the Jayhawks, who face Washington State at 9 p.m. Monday.
“We can’t play fast enough,” Self said. “Hey, let's just call it like it is — we don’t look athletic to me at all. We look athletic in one spot: (Ben) McLemore.
“The other guys are just average athletes as far as being able to run. Are they average athletes? No, but they're playing slow.”
Tyshawn Taylor, KU's point guard last season, basically had three gears: fast, faster and too fast. Elijah Johnson doesn’t possess Taylor’s quickness, but Self thinks KU’s point guards can provide a better pace than they have in the Jayhawks’ first three games.
“It starts with your point guard,” Self said. “Elijah’s playing extremely slow. Our bigs don’t run for a purpose at all. Travis (Releford) isn’t playing fast at all. Naadir (Tharpe) gives us no pace. I’m disappointed in how fast we’re playing.”
…Washington State enters the CBE Classic with a 2-1 record, losing Friday at Pepperdine in overtime. Brock Motum, a 6-foot-10 forward, leads the team in scoring at 17.7 points per game, and former Jayhawk Royce Woolridge starts for the Cougars in the backcourt.
“They run an offense that's very similar or the same offense that Frank (Martin) ran at K-State his last couple years, and it gave us some problems,” Self said. “They've got a nice team.”
…KU played in the Maui Invitational last season and will travel to the Bahamas for the Battle 4 Atlantis next year, so Self was happy to stay close to home and play in the CBE Classic this season.
“I elected to go to Kansas City,” Self said. “Plus, the NABC (National Association of Basketball Coaches) wanted us in Kansas City. That kind of helps their attendance.”
The location isn't exotic, but the Jayhawks might as well get used to Sprint Center. In addition to two games in the CBE Classic — KU will face either Saint Louis or Texas A&M on Tuesday — the Jayhawks will play Oregon State at Sprint Center on Nov. 30 and will return for the Big 12 Tournament in March. And, if all goes according to plan, the Jayhawks could be back for the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament.
TCJ
But if Self has seen one troubling trend in the season’s opening weeks, it’s the kind of thing that flies in the face of his basketball DNA.
“We don’t play very tough yet,” Self said.
It’s been a common theme for Self in the season’s first few weeks, as his Jayhawks have lumbered through a couple less-than-pretty performances. The Jayhawks fell to Michigan State on Tuesday in Atlanta before coming out flat against Chattanooga on Thursday night at Allen Fieldhouse. Some of it is to be expected. The Jayhawks have added three freshmen to their regular rotation, and it could take weeks or months before KU is at full tilt.
But unlike last year’s team, which excelled when the games got a little murky, Self is looking for stronger leadership and toughness from his upperclassmen.
“We had two guys last year that were assassins,” Self said, mentioning forward Thomas Robinson and guard Tyshawn Taylor.
…Kansas City is not quite Maui — the tournament where the Jayhawks came together last season — but the friendly confines could fit KU’s needs just fine.
“It’s gonna be good for the young guys to be on the road,” Withey said, “but not really on the road.”
…Self confirmed Sunday that freshman forward Landen Lucas would definitely redshirt this season. The news, which was expected, came during a Q&A with fans at the College Basketball Experience.
KC Star
“Right now, I am set on four starters,” Self said of seniors Jeff Withey, Travis Releford and Elijah Johnson and freshman Ben McLemore. Perry Ellis and Jamari Traylor have started at the other slot.
“I am not even close to being set on the fifth. I don’t know who is better off the bench and who is better starting,” Self added. “We haven’t given Kevin Young a chance to start yet because of his hand (which forced him to miss two exhibitions and the opener). Jamari has played better off the bench than starting. I don’t know what the answer is. We need energy and points off the bench. Our bench for the most part has played OK,” he added, noting he’d like to develop a scorer at the power-forward spot.
…Self said one bench player needs to step it up — sophomore backup point guard Naadir Tharpe.
“His man scored nine straight points on him the other day,” Self said of Chattanooga’s Farad Cobb, who scored 18 the first half. “He (Tharpe) has to run the team, be poised and guard and take care of the ball. The responsibility is easy compared to somebody who has to make shots in order to play well. I just think his effort defensively is at the point where it has to improve, or we’re going to seriously have to go in a different direction. We need him. But if you are not making shots and you are not guarding, that’s a bad combination.”
LJW
It didn’t take former Kansas University basketball player Royce Woolridge long to become a fan favorite at his new school, Washington State.
The 6-foot-3, 175-pound third-year sophomore point guard, who practiced but could not play in games last season according to NCAA transfer rules, flushed a one-handed dunk following a 360-degree spin move, then completed a between-the-legs jam to win the slam-dunk competition at the Cougars’ 2012-13 season-opening ZZU Mania in Pullman, Wash.
“The crowd liked it. My friends from Phoenix were there and loved it. One of them taped it,” Woolridge said.
He is expected to start for the Cougars during today’s 9 p.m. CBE Classic contest against KU in Sprint Center.
…Woolridge takes over at the point for Reggie Moore, a three-year rotation player who was removed from the team in September for a violation of team rules.
Woolridge had been considered more of a shooting guard prospect at KU, where he scored nine points total his freshman season (2010-11) while logging 44 minutes in 16 games.
“I played a little bit of point guard in high school,” the former Phoenix Sunnyslope High player told the Journal-World in a phone conversation. “When I got to Kansas, I got some reps there. I went against Tyshawn (Taylor) and Elijah (Johnson), who are good point guards. When I got here, I knew I had to be a point guard and had to transform.
“I got in the gym and worked on getting a lot of shots up, talking to coach (Ken Bone) to see what he wanted from a point guard.”
…“It’s like my second home,” Woolridge said of Lawrence. “I committed so early. I’d been to Kansas so many times. I have a lot of friends there.
“I still talk to Niko (Roberts, KU junior), my roommate, all the time. I talk to Elijah from time to time. I actually came back and visited Kansas last spring. I got a chance to see everybody. I hung out three or four days to kick it with Niko and see what Lawrence was like. I was missing it.”
Roberts said Woolridge’s return visit proved “how much KU has impact on people. Merv (Lindsay, transfer to New Mexico) wants to come back and visit. When you leave KU, you are still part of the family, and you always want to come back.”
LJW
A healthy dislike for the University of Arizona turned Royce Woolridge into a Kansas fan a few years back.
Wool- ridge, who is from Phoenix, recalls watching on television as Kansas won one of its many heavyweight- on-heavyweight battles over Arizona, and thinking at the time, “Man, I want to go to Kansas.”
So that’s what he did. Woolridge committed to the Jayhawks and coach Bill Self as a sophomore in high school, but decided to head elsewhere after appearing in only 16 games as a freshman.
Now, he’s Washington State’s starting point guard, and will lead the Cougars against his former team in the CBE Classic at the Sprint Center tonight at 7 p.m. in an attempt to shake off Friday’s disappointing overtime loss to Pepperdine.
“It’s going to be fun. It’s going to be intense, though, because they have a lot of fans and it’s going to be crazy,” Woolridge said. “I still talk to a couple of the dudes on the team.”
He should run into one of them often on the court tonight. Woolridge said Kansas guard Elijah Johnson, the Jayhawks’ second-leading scorer, is still a good friend of his.
…He didn’t come to Kansas with delusions of grandeur. But the way his freshman season went, Woolridge said, didn’t bode well for his chances of playing much down the road.
“He (Self) had some plans that he wanted to do that I thought should have went differently, I guess,” Woolridge said. “I just wanted to get a little more playing time, so I decided to leave and find somewhere else to go.
“I didn’t expect to start or play big minutes, but I felt like my sophomore year that maybe I should have been able to play a little bit. But from what he was saying, it seemed like I wouldn’t have been able to.”
WSU assistant coach Curtis Allen received an email from a contact on the AAU circuit informing him that Woolridge had been granted his release and was looking to transfer.
Allen was excited. He’d seen Woolridge play at an AAU tourney in Las Vegas a few years back, but hadn’t spoken with him because he’d been committed to Kansas.
“We knew how good he was,” Allen said. “So as soon as we got the release, we were able to pursue him … we were pretty aggressive in trying to get him.”
…Woolridge has wound up a bigger part of WSU’s rotation than he might have expected. Starting point guard Reggie Moore’s dismissal from the team before the season thrust Woolridge into the spotlight.
Spokesman-Review
Clyde Lovellette
Career
Among college basketball’s first great scoring big men, Lovellette remains the only player to lead the nation in scoring for an NCAA championship team, when he averaged 28.6 points for the 1952 Kansas Jayhawks. He was Kansas’ career scoring leader until Danny Manning passed him in 1988, and only Wilt Chamberlain averaged more points per game in a career than Lovellette’s 24.7
Beyond college
After helping the United States win a gold medal at the 1952 Olympics, Lovellette played in the AAU for Phillips 66 for one season and then went on to an 11-year NBA career. He was a four-time NBA All-Star and played for three NBA champions.
Did you know?
Lovellette was the first to play for an NCAA, Olympic and NBA champion.
KC Star: Profiles of the 2012 National Collegiate Hall of Fame inductees
“There are too many people to thank for being enshrined in the Hall of Fame,” Lovellette said at the ceremony. “It’s always an honor to be inducted to a Hall of Fame. It’s always great to be represented in basketball. That’s been my life ever since I could bounce the ball. Playing for a great coach like Phog Allen and being with a group of guys like Bill Lienhard, Bill Hougland, and Bob Kenney, those are the people that really make the team. Without a staff around you, I wouldn’t be here. I don’t believe one man can win any ballgames. They can have a big impact, but the other four men that are with him, that’s where you develop team play, camaraderie and the real togetherness to win a ballgame.”
Of his game, Clyde said: “I started out with a good hook and then I had a good one-handed shot. The hook shot has sort of gone away because not many people play with their back to the basket anymore. They’re big enough and moving quicker. They’re out there in front where they can see the basket. I shot my shot with my back to the basket, so I couldn’t see the basket. You had to have that touch and distance. It just came natural.”
Lovellette still ranks fourth all-time in Jayhawk history for total points, while his 24.7 points per game marks the second-best scoring average behind only Wilt Chamberlain’s 29.9 points per game. Lovellette’s career average of 10.5 rebounds per game places him fourth on KU’s all-time charts.
“I think anybody who ever played at Kansas is recognized,” Lovellette said. “It’s a great tradition at KU. The people take their basketball to heart. They know the players. They know the old players because their grandpa told them, or uncles or aunts. It’s a family affair at Kansas.”
KUAD
“Clyde was really dominant in his day,” Lienhard said. “If he had the ball around the basket, he got it in there. He was not only a good scorer, but a good shooter.
“You couldn’t dunk in 1952. He had to shoot to get everything in the basket for 28 points a game. Everybody likes Clyde,” Lienhard added of the three-time NBA champion (twice with Boston, once with Minneapolis). “Clyde is a real gentleman, born-again Christian and great guy.”
He also was a “tough guy,” Lienhard added.
“If anybody guarded him too close ... he had a sweeping hook shot,” Lienhard said. “That left elbow would go out when he went in (toward goal). More than one center got an elbow in his jaw on the turn. He was a good scorer, rebounder and very tough.”
LJW
For Clyde Lovellette, the television set inside his home in North Manchester, Ind., is his most trusty portal to his old life.
Lovellette is 83 years old now, and trips back to Allen Fieldhouse are becoming more and more rare. He’s more than 60 years removed from that magical year in 1952, when he led the nation in scoring, won an NCAA basketball title at Kansas and then won an Olympic gold medal in Helsinki, Finland. But if there’s one forgotten advantage in being a legendary figure at a place like Kansas, Lovellette discovers it every time he goes to flip on the television set. More often than not, his Jayhawks are on television.
“I watch them on television as much as I can,” Lovellette said Sunday night.
…So there he was on Sunday night, wearing black cowboy boots to go along with his coat and tie, talking about a lifetime in basketball. There were the early days, when Kansas coach Phog Allen showed up in Indiana and told him that he would win the 1952 title and an Olympic gold medal if he came to Kansas. And there was his long NBA career in the league’s infancy, when he won three NBA titles and matched up with the likes of Bill Russell and former KU star Wilt Chamberlain.
“You had to adapt to him or he’d kill you,” Lovellette said of Chamberlain.
In Lovellette’s days, he mastered the hook shot and the back-to-the-basket game. He also remembers Allen making players shoot their free throws underhanded and frowning upon jump shots.
“They thought you got up in the air and you lost all your senses,” Lovellette said. “They kept you on the ground.”
In so many ways, the game has changed. But some things haven’t. Like Kansas, Lovellette says, which is still winning more than 60 years after he left Lawrence.
“He had a hundred different nicknames,” said Max Falkenstien, the legendary KU broadcaster. “Cumulus Clyde. The Master of the Planks. The Big Turkey gets all the grain.”
These days, Lovellette is living back at home in Indiana. He spent a few years in Michigan, he said, but the cold and snow drove him back home among family members in the Hoosier State.
But he still keeps in contact with a group of players from that 1952 team. Many of them still live around the area, including Bill Lienhard, Bob Kenney and Bill Hougland. Sometimes, they call up Lovellette and wonder when he’s coming back to Kansas.
“I’ve got to come the furthest,” Lovellette says. “But I would come the furthest, just to be with those guys.”
They were men who played the game in a different era. The pace may have been slower. The players may have been skinnier. But for Lovellette, it was still the game he grew up loving.
KC Star
Marcus Morris scored 16 points off the bench on Friday, hitting 6-of-9 shots (including four threes) with three rebounds, two assists, and one steal in 30 minutes.
Link
Markieff Morris scored 16 points off the bench to lead Phoenix on Saturday -- he made 6-of-9 FGs, including two 3-pointers.
Link
Audio: Ric Bucher podcast with Brandon Rush
KUAD: WBB Jayhawks slide past Demon Deacons 64-58 stats, quotes, notes, photos, video
LJW: WBB KU vs Wake Forest photos
Kansas University’s women’s basketball players didn’t let a string of blown layups shake their confidence against Wake Forest on Sunday afternoon at Allen Fieldhouse.
Although the Demon Deacons took a two-point lead with less than three minutes remaining following three straight KU misfires from point-blank range, the Jayhawks found their touch down the stretch and held off Wake Forest, 64-58.
“No one was getting really nervous,” Kansas senior forward Carolyn Davis said after scoring a game-high 22 points in 27 minutes. “We just tried to stay in the game, understand our game plan and go out and be aggressive and try to get the score back.”
LJW
Kansas 2012-13 MBB Schedule
Kansas 2012-13 WBB Schedule
Big 12/College News
We were teased with a true opening day.
We got mesmerized by the 24-hour Marathon.
And if that, in these pre-conference college basketball days of wacky matchups and could-be upsets, isn't enough to be thankful for: This week, we get to feast.
No, I'm not (just) talking about that can-shaped cranberry log, Mama Kay's marshmallow-topped yams or your second cousin's turducken (do people actually eat those?), but about dazzling dunks and missed free throws and that highlight play from some bench guy you've never heard of but won't soon forget.
From Alaska to Maui, from Vegas to Orlando, from the Bahamas to South Padre Island, basketball teams will be carving out some early-season storylines this week.
Here are some issues/teams/players to chew on while you're defrosting the bird, pecaning the pie or making reservations because of last year's deep-fryer incident:
ESPN
2012-13 Early Season Events List
Maryland and Rutgers are in discussions with the Big Ten to possibly join the conference in 2014, a person familiar with the situation told The Associated Press.
The person spoke Saturday night on condition of anonymity because neither the conference nor the schools want to publicly discuss their plans.
ESPN.com first reported that the Big Ten was looking into expanding to 14 teams by adding Maryland and Rutgers.
The person says Maryland would have to be ''the first domino to fall,'' but added that an agreement could be reached as soon as this week for both schools.
AP
Remember when Colorado basketball was a bad Big 12 joke?
Remember when the Buffs were road kill?
Remember when some of Jeff Bzdelik's post players had higher grade-point averages than rebounding averages?
When coaches use the "we have to change the culture" cliche, what they're hoping to accomplish is what Tad Boyle has delivered.
CU completed an impressive hat trick here with an 81-74 victory over Murray State in the championship game of the Charleston Classic on Sunday night at TD Arena.
The Buffs (4-0), off to their best start in 14 years, will likely be ranked for the first time since a brief appearance in 2005-06 (No. 25, Feb. 6-12) when the polls are released today.
Boulder DC
SLU interim coach Jim Crews admits that while his staff puts in long nights after most games, the one they put in after Wednesday’s loss to Santa Clara was longer than usual. “It was a late night,” he said.
After a 12-point loss that, if not numerically immense in the final tally, certainly packed some substantive oomph, the Billikens (1-1) find themselves looking for something as they head to Kansas City for two games in two days, starting today at 6:30 p.m. against Texas A&M (3-0) in the CBE Hall of Fame Classic. Depending on the result today at the Sprint Center, SLU would then get either Kansas or Washington State on Tuesday.
“We’ve got to clean things up, big time,” Crews said. “We did everything individually, offensively and defensively (against Santa Clara). Everything was on an island instead of doing things collectively. The bottom line is, there’s good basketball and not good basketball and our goal is to get good basketball.”
St Louis PD
A former University of San Diego basketball star has pleaded guilty in a college sports bribery case.
U-T San Diego reports Brandon Johnson pleaded guilty Thursday to soliciting a current team member to influence the outcome of a game through a bribe.
However, his attorney says the school's all-time leading scorer never profited from the scheme and never personally threw a game.
Johnson and nine others were charged in federal court with running a sports betting business to fix West Coast Conference games.
AP
As a reading specialist at UNC-Chapel Hill, Mary Willingham met athletes who told her they had never read a book and didn’t know what a paragraph was. She said she saw diagnostic tests that showed they were unable to do college-level work.
But many of those athletes stayed eligible to play sports, she said, because the academic support system provided improper help and tolerated plagiarism. When she raised questions or made an objection to what she saw as cheating, she said, she saw no one take her concerns seriously.
Willingham, who still works at the university but not with athletes, said she lodged complaints at least two years before UNC’s academic problems erupted into scandal. She channeled some of her frustration into a thesis for her master’s degree, on the corrupting influence of big-money sports on university academics.
But after attending the recent funeral of former UNC system President Bill Friday, a prominent critic of revenue-driven college sports, and seeing that no one within the program was willing to admit that they had been aware of a problem, Willingham decided it was time to go public.
In a series of interviews with The News & Observer, she said there were numerous people in the academic support program who knew that what was going on was wrong, but they looked the other way, helping to protect one of the nation’s most storied athletic programs.
Among her assertions:
News Observer
Big 12 Composite Schedule
Recruiting
Kansas signed five players during this week's early-signing period, a collection of talent that, on its own, could stand as one of the top recruiting classes in the country.
But KU coach Bill Self still has a few unchecked boxes on his recruiting wishlist.
“I’d like to get one more big guy,” Self said Saturday. “I’d like to get a wing.”
When the week was over, and KU had inked five new players, Rivals.com rated KU’s class as the second-best in the country behind Kentucky.
…“I think it’s a great class,” Self said, “because I think there’s two players in it, that’s nobody’s talking about, that (are) just about as good as anybody at their position in the country, in Mason and Joel.
“It’s incomplete still. We still gotta get another guy or two to make it as good a class as we’ve had.”
The most likely target: Julius Randle, a power forward from Plano, Texas, who ranks as the No. 2 player in the country, according to Rivals.com. Self also reportedly visited Andrew Wiggins, the consensus No. 1 overall player, at Huntington Prep (W.Va.) earlier this fall.
KU is set to have five open scholarships for the 2013-14 season. But that number could change based on early entries to the NBA Draft or other roster defections.
KC Star
Wichita Eagle photo
A kid who averages 32.4 points per game, who is primed to become the City League’s all-time leading scorer this season, who holds the single-game scoring record with a 52-point performance against Northwest as a sophomore — that kid’s gotta be a prima donna, right?
Sorry to disappoint.
Frankamp barely stands out from the crowd inside his diverse high school, North, where kids from many different backgrounds and cultures know him simply as “Conner.”
He relishes their adulation, but he doesn’t flaunt it. He works hard in school, likes to please his parents and takes out the trash because it’s on his list of chores.
Frankamp is signed, sealed and delivered to play basketball at Kansas, but he reminds himself constantly that those days are in the future. What’s at hand now is his senior year at North, where he will help bring down the oldest gymnasium in the City League while raising, he hopes, a City League championship banner to put in the new gym that opens next year.
“If you didn’t know who Conner was here, you’d never be able to pick him out of a crowd at North,” athletic director Brian Becker said. “He just wants to be a kid, to be a high school student.”
…“At North, Conner has had to do so much,” Kansas coach Bill Self said. “He’s scoring, handling the ball. But the great thing about him from his time playing in the summer campus and Junior Olympics is that he’s shown he can really play with other good players. I think a lot of those guys look at him and say, ‘Who is this guy?’ ”
Even with the gaudy scoring numbers, though, North is only 35-31 in Frankamp’s three seasons. He’s been filling it up, all right, but too many times has gone home disappointed from losses.
So he’s not thinking about 35 points a game or breaking records this season. He’s thinking about winning.
…He is a lot like former Claflin High and Missouri State standout Jackie Stiles in that way. So imagine the energy created a few years back when Frankamp worked with Stiles regularly in Wichita to improve his skills.
“Do I remember Conner?” Stiles asked incredulously when asked if she remembers Conner. “Oh my goodness, yes. I remember after my first sessions with him that I called my dad and said, ‘Remember this name, he’ll play anywhere he wants to as long as he keeps working hard and stays healthy.’ ”
Stiles, in her first season as an assistant coach at Loyola Marymount in Los Angeles, saw her career end because of injuries she suspects occurred because of all the hours she devoted to basketball when she was growing up. You couldn’t lock her out of the gym.
It’s the same way with Frankamp, who is aware of potential wear and tear.
“We try to keep a handle on it,” he said. “I try to take a couple of days off here and there, just to let my body recover. But working with Jackie was a great experience. I learned from her work ethic.”
Stiles saw a part of herself in Frankamp, which is partly why their sessions together were so enjoyable.
“You just don’t see that kind of passion in kids,” she said. “He was just the whole package — very, very special. I feel honored that I had a chance to work with. I grew up as a huge KU fan and I remember watching Danny and the Miracles with my dad. Now I absolutely cannot wait until Conner gets there so that I’ll have that KU connection again.”
…Frankamp can’t wait to get to KU. He signed his letter of intent Wednesday and says playing for the Jayhawks will be a dream come true. He committed to Kansas a year and a half ago without much fanfare.
His star has risen since, thanks to an incredible junior season for North and a summer during which he helped the U.S. win the FIBA U17 world championship in Kaunas, Lithuania.
Frankamp moved from a three-star to a four-star recruit. The buzz that once accompanied Frankamp has become a buzzer. He’s hot but he doesn’t know it. Or at least doesn’t acknowledge it.
“He doesn’t bring any individual attention to him at all,” Squires said. “He’s a very confident young man and he knows what it takes to get the job done. But he doesn’t make waves about it.”
Wichita Eagle
Many of the top postgraduate basketball programs in the country were at Albertus Magnus College this weekend for the annual National Prep Showcase. Sunday’s schedule brought some of the of the tournament’s best matchups, featuring games that included NEPSAC powers Brewster Academy (N.H.), New Hampton School (N.H.), Lee Academy (Maine), Northfield-Mt. Hermon, Tilton School (N.H.), and Wilbraham & Monson Academy.
In total, over 130 Division 1 basketball coaches attended National Prep Showcase to watch some of the top high school hoopers in the nation.
There were no players of higher profile than 6-foot-8 senior forward Noah Vonleh, who helped lead his New Hampton squad to an 82-66 victory over Lee Academy. Vonleh was a dominant presence on the glass and efficient scorer in the post, but he also had plenty of freedom to perform given the great play of his supporting cast: point guard Travis Jorgenson, and guards Anthony Pate, Lincoln Davis, and Mike LeBlanc.
Jorgenson, a senior point guard from Kansas City who decommitted from Missouri earlier this fall, may have been the most consistent player on the floor for New Hampton. He hit several long outside shots and on many occasions fed New Hampton’s slashers and bigs with beautiful feeds that ended in dunks or layups.
“Travis makes us go, he completely controls the tempo,” Huskies head coach Pete Hutchins said, “When he makes a mistake, you’re shocked. He has everyone’s confidence, especially in his ability to go out and lead our team.”
…Clean Sweep For Kiski: Brewster and Tilton have been NEPSAC royalty the past few years, but apparently nobody mentioned that to the squad at Kiski School (Pa.). Kiski knocked off Brewster 79-77 on Saturday night, behind 29 points from senior Rashad Richardson.
Kiski came with the same type of effort defensively on Sunday afternoon, beating Tilton 94-86 despite a furious second half run by the Rams, who were led by Kansas signee Wayne Selden (33 points) and Messier.
ESPN
Andrew Wiggins, the nation’s No. 1 basketball prospect and a top recruiting target of the University of Kentucky, had 17 points (6 of 18 from the floor, 4 of 9 on free throws) and 11 rebounds on Sunday in helping his team, Huntington (W.Va.) Prep, defeat North Carolina’s Christian Faith Academy 61-44 on Sunday at Scott County High School.
There were more than 2,000 fans in attendance, most of whom were wearing some kind of UK apparel. So were UK coach John Calipari, assistants Orlando Antigua and Kenny Payne and UK players Kyle Wiltjer, Jarrod Polson and Brian Long.
Wiggins, formerly the nation’s No. 1 junior who recently reclassified to 2013, signed autographs for a line of dozens of fans after the game. Before that, he spoke with the media, reflecting on his game, the crowd and where his recruitment stands.
…Q. What is you recruiting list if you have a top five, top three, a No. 1?
I don’t have any specific schools in order. There are a bunch of school recruiting me.
Q. What are some of the ones you’re thinking about the most?
It’s not that I’m thinking about them the most, but the ones recruiting me are Kentucky, Florida State, Kansas, Ohio State and UNC. That’s off the top of my head.
Q. As it relates to Kentucky, what do you think about the class that they have signed?
I think it’s great. The Harrison twins – I’ve never really watched them play in person, but I’ve seen highlights of them. They look unselfish, great teammates. I wouldn’t mind playing with them.
Q. How about your teammate Xavier Rathan-Mayes committing to Florida State? Does that make them more appealing?
Yeah, it does. Me and him are close. We hang out off and on the court. Our relationship is strong.
Q. What’s your timeline for when you want to make visits and a decision?
Spring.
LCJ
Although Luc Richard Mbah a Moute has been recovering from offseason surgery, it hasn't been all bad for him lately. A player found at one of his basketball camps, Joel Embiid, just committed to Kansas. And now Mbah a Moute might have another player on the horizon.
The breakout star of the first day of the National Prep Showcase in New Haven, Conn., was Roger Moute a Bidias, a 6-foot-7 native of Cameroon who plays at Notre Dame Prep (Mass.). He also happens to be Mbah a Moute's younger brother.
CBS
My 2012 KU Alumni games, 2011-12 Border War, Legends of the Phog, KC Prep Invitational, & Jayhawk Invitational Videos, Late Night in the Phog, and more now on YouTube
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