A few links you may have missed this weekend:
- Crazie Talk was courtside at Cameron Indoor as Christ School HS faced off against Oak Hill Academy this weekend, giving them a chance to see future Blue Devils Quinn Cook and Marshall Plumlee. Video highlights from them are included below, and check out their post to see a few takeaways from the game.
- Seth Davis from Sports Illustrated talks to an NBA scout about a number of notable current college players, and has generally positive things to say about almost all of the Duke and UNC guys. Most hilarious tidbit? The scout trying to describe Tyler Zeller: “He’s not as strong as Michael Doleac, and he’s not as good as Brad Miller.” Well then!
- The ACC released their football schedules today, and it looks as though Duke and Carolina will resume their annual tradition of facing off for the final game of the regular season. UNC doesn’t really face a marquee team out of conference (once upon a time a game against Louisville would have been) but will be breaking in a new QB, so maybe that’s for the best. Duke will still be Duke, including what is sure to be a hilariously lopsided beatdown the second week of the season when they travel to Stanford. (correction: an alert reader noticed Stanford will actually travel to Wallace Wade to face Duke in Durham.)
- SI’s Luke Winn has two great graphics included in his college basketball power rankings this week. First, this shot chart of how Nolan Smith and Seth Curry took it to the Heels in the second half of their matchup last week, showing the two guards’ different, but equally effective, approach:
Nothing really surprising there, but it is interesting to note that Curry took a lot of shots off one or two dribbles. That tells me UNC has got to get better on not falling for a basic head fake or pump fake on the perimeter.
And second, this fantastic analysis of the difference in Kendall Marshall and Larry Drew not in terms of assists, but how those assists were distributed. Says Winn: “After reviewing play-by-play sheets for all 23 UNC games, it was revealed that the bulk of his assists (27, or 32.9 percent) were to big man Tyler Zeller, while Dexter Strickland and Harrison Barnes were the next-highest recipients at 13 apiece. Drew’s replacement, Kendall Marshall, had 110 assists but they were more evenly distributed, with six players receiving 14 or more, and only Strickland (just three) being snubbed.” The animation of the Drew/Marshall assist change is below, with the connector-line weight formula simply being 3.5 pixels multiplied by the number of assists:
Major props to Winn for some analysis that looks past just the box score and gives you real insight into how Marshall is helping Carolina’s offense by getting everyone involved.
