It's not often any more we get to see a complete college basketball team. In this age of players leaving college after a year or two, or going straight from high school to the NBA, we might see a great back court, like Jameer Nelson and Delonte West at Saint Joseph's, maybe an elite swing player like Carmelo Anthony. Now and then there's a rapidly evolving big man like Brigham Young's 7-foot, 300-pound Rafael Araujo. But it's been years and years since a college team has had what Connecticut has, which is to say two point guards, two great shooters, interchangeable and versatile 6-foot-10 forwards, and a supreme shot-blocker who can own the game without scoring a point.
If Emeka Okafor was completely healthy, U-Conn would be a cold-blooded lock to win the national championship a week from Monday. In the first 7 minutes 39 seconds of Saturday's Phoenix Region final, Okafor blocked five shots and the Huskies were off to an insurmountable 53-29 halftime lead. The all-American center scored one basket, played just 19 minutes because he suffered another injury, this one to his right shoulder, which left him without some of the feeling in his right arm and hand. But he took control of the game with the score 10-8 in U-Conn's favor when he blocked, in succession, Chuck Davis, Evan Brock and Earnest Shelton, all three in about 25 seconds.
Okafor played just the first three minutes of the second half, but said 30 minutes after the game the feeling had returned, "except for this little tingling in the tip of my middle finger. I think it was a pinched nerve." He said he would have volunteered to go back into the game had his team's lead slipped to 10 points. But it didn't. U-Conn, without Okafor, is a tournament team. With him at 80 percent or more, the Huskies appear to be a championship team.
Connecticut has five probable first-round NBA draft choices: Okafor; guard Ben Gordon, who had 36 points Saturday; shooter Rashad Anderson, who scored 28; 6-10 freshman and Mt. Airy, Md., native Josh Boone; and 6-10 Charlie Villanueva, who believe it or not is a reserve.
It was such an overpowering performance by U-Conn that Alabama Coach Mark Gottfried said afterward: "I love my team, I'm proud of my team, but today U-Conn was the story. The biggest problem against them is they're playing with two point guards. Both can take you off the dribble. And if you elect to put your point guard on Gordon, can you still pressure Taliek Brown? Somebody's got to have a great effort to beat them. To beat them, somebody's got to have two or three great on-the-ball defenders that can guard the perimeter. And even if you do that, they've got Okafor, Villanueva and Boone around the basket. We played some great teams this year, within the league and outside the league. But they made me a believer today."
Nobody knows better than U-Conn Coach Jim Calhoun how good this team is. He knows how difficult it is to assemble this much diverse talent nowadays. Most 6-10 shot-blockers don't bother with college, even for a year. Villanueva nearly did go to the NBA straight from Blair Academy in New Jersey. Not only are the Huskies loaded with skilled players, but they listen to their coach far more often than not. And all that is why Calhoun said after the game, "I would have been disappointed in myself if I couldn't take this kind of talent to the Final Four.
"Sometimes you don't feel that way. But I felt that way about this team. If we didn't win, I thought that it would have been because either I didn't get them up, or I didn't do the right things. I'd have felt awful."
Saturday was testament to why Calhoun felt that way, to why so many folks picked U-Conn to win the whole thing when the college basketball season began. Alabama, starless as the team is, plays very smart basketball, and Gottfried is able to hide the team's few weaknesses and get the most out of some very athletic and disciplined players including forward Kennedy Winston, undersized center Davis and guard Shelton. The Crimson Tide didn't play poorly at all the first half, yet found itself down by 24, though Okafor had two measly points.
U-Conn, meantime, hit 9 of 11 three-point shots, played almost perfect interior defense and didn't succumb (only seven turnovers) to Alabama's wilting pressure. Up by two dozen at the half, the sum total of Calhoun's halftime speech was, "Don't let up."
And while Alabama kept after it, U-Conn showed it has too many ballhandlers and versatile defenders to squander that kind of lead, even if it's harder to maintain with Okafor on the bench. Ultimately, the Huskies simply have too much size, too many shooters and too many defenders both big and small. Not since Duke's Christian Laettner-Grant Hill-Bobby Hurley teams that won back-to-back championship teams in 1991 and 1992 has a team been so clearly better than the field.
"When you're playing at this point," Alabama's Gottfried said, "everybody's pretty good. They're really good."
The only reason for U-Conn supporters to fret is recent history. Several times teams have scored regional final blowouts and lost in either the national semifinal or the championship game. Notably, Duke beat Temple by 21 points in a 1999 regional and lost to U-Conn in the national championship game. The year before, Utah beat Arizona by 25 in a West Region final but then lost to Kentucky. The year before that, in '97, North Carolina pummeled Louisville by 23 but then lost to Arizona.
It's probably a good thing for U-Conn, if you believe in trends, that Alabama cut that huge deficit to a final score of 87-71 because since 1992, nine teams have won regional finals by 20 or more points and only one of them -- Kentucky in '96 -- went on to win the national title.
That's how good these Huskies are, with their talent, skill, depth and a coach who has already won a national title and is going to his second Final Four in six years. We need to find some indicator, some historical footnote or trend to bring U-Conn back to earth just a bit, because it's entirely possible no team will be able to do that next weekend in San Antonio.
