UConn to fire Kevin Ollie for cause citing NCAA investigation

UConn confirmed on Saturday morning that they have “initiated disciplinary procedures to terminate the employment of Kevin Ollie for just cause.”

The UConn men’s basketball program is currently being investigated by the NCAA for rules violations involving their recruiting. Ollie is owed the remainder of his contract, which was worth roughly $3.5 million per year for the next three years, but his contract states that if he is fired for cause, the Huskies can get out from underneath that guaranteed money.

Ollie is a UConn alum that has spent six seasons as the head coach at his alma mater. He reached two NCAA tournaments in those six years, including 2014, when he helped coach Shabazz Napier to the a national title. They reached the NCAA tournament in 2016 as well, but needed Jaylen Adams to make an 80-foot three to avoid missing out on the tournament that year.

In the last two seasons, UConn was under .500, the first time since 1987, Jim Calhoun’s first season in Storrs, that they managed that accomplishment.

The name to watch here as a replacement is Rhode Island head coach Danny Hurley, according to multiple industry sources. Hurley was hired by URI the same season that Ollie was hired by UConn, and while he has not had the same amount of success in the NCAA tournament as Ollie, Hurley has led URI to as many NCAA tournaments in the last six seasons as Ollie has UConn. Hurley will also be a target for Pitt.

It’s also probably worth noting here that former UConn coach Jim Calhoun has gotten back into the coaching game. He’s currently the coach at a start-up Division III program in Connecticut. If Hurley says no and UConn opts not to bring Calhoun back, some other names that could make sense would be South Carolina’s Frank Martin, who spent time coaching in Boston, and native New Englander Bruce Pearl, who was hired at Auburn by the current UConn athletic director David Benedict.

Just how good of a job is UConn? It’s probably not quite as good as it appeared to be under Jim Calhoun but this is still a program that has won two of the last seven national titles and four national titles in the last 20 seasons. They are the only school to do both of those things.

Jordan Barnett, a senior forward on the Missouri basketball team, was arrested for DWI on Saturday morning, less than two days after the team was eliminated from the SEC tournament.

According to MU police, he was arrested at 3:26 a.m. The basketball program has confirmed that they are aware of Barnett’s arrest.

The Tigers are likely headed for the NCAA tournament, but it is now unclear whether or not they will have Barnett available for that tournament. The Missouri student-athlete handbook requires a one-week suspension at minimum for a first DWI offense. Barnett averages 13.7 points and shoots 41.4 percent from three.

Any absence for Barnett would likely give more minutes and shots to Michael Porter Jr., whose return to the Tiger lineup this week was uninspiring.

NEW YORK — The change was gradual.

Duke has forever been known as a man-to-man team. It was the ethos of Mike Krzyzewski’s defense. Pressure guards, deny passing lanes, dare ball-handlers to try and beat their defenders one-on-one, let them try and run ball-screens. That is who they’ve been for years and years and years.

But that wasn’t working this season, not when what makes the Blue Devils so damn good is the fact that their front court of two freshmen fives is unstoppable. Wendell Carter is a lottery pick, a workhorse on the block that can wall-up at the rim and pound the glass and overwhelm just about any defender that comes his way, and he’s clearly and undoubtedly the second-best big man on their roster. When you can force defenses to try and figure out how they are going to slow down Marvin Bagley III with a college power forward, you’re coming out ahead more often than not.

“He’s different,” said Nolan Smith, a four-year player for Duke that was a first-team all-american as a senior, a first round pick and could very well still an NBA point guard if his health hadn’t given out on him. He’s been around. He would know. “I’ve a seen lot of guys in the NBA, and his second and third jump is second to none.”

The problem is that they just couldn’t figure out how to make it work defensively, which is not an uncommon problem to have when dealing with freshmen. There is a reason that the saying among coaches is that the best thing about freshmen is that they become sophomores, but since becoming a one-and-done factory, Coach K no longer has that luxury. He doesn’t get a couple of seasons to teach his guys how to defend the way that he wants them do. He gets a couple of months, and by early February, it was obvious to everyone.

Their man-to-man defense?

It wasn’t working.

“We tried a lot of different things in man throughout the season,” Smith said. “Icing ball-screens to blacking ball-screens to switching ball-screens.”

They had to make a change.

“We never declared it,” Grayson Allen said of becoming a zone team. “It was just, OK, we’re going to play zone this game, so we prepared zone and man. The next game we prepared zone more than man. The next game we prepared all zone. And it started to work for us. We had a stretch where three or four teams couldn’t score against us.”

It stuck.

It turned Duke from one of college basketball’s top 80 defenses to one that has climbed all the way to 7th in KenPom’s adjusted defensive efficiency metric. The defense that they have played over the course of the last nine games is on par with the defense that the likes of Virginia and Cincinnati have played all season long. It’s why they are currently the only team to rank in the top ten of both offensive and defensive efficiency on KenPom. It’s why there are many that believe Duke is not one of, if not the favorite to win the national title in San Antonio three-and-a-half weeks from today.

That was until they faced off with North Carolina on Friday night.

The Tar Heels are uniquely suited to being able to attack a 2-3 zone. The way that the Tar Heels play this season is different from any Roy Williams-coached team in recent memory. Thanks to the early and unexpected departure of Tony Bradley last year, the Tar Heels have had to embrace the small-ball ideal. Theo Pinson, a play-making wing by trade, is their power forward. Luke Maye, a stretch-four through and through, is their starting center. That’s a far cry from the UNC teams of yesteryear, when Tyler Hansbrough and Sean May and Kennedy Meeks turned the paint into a beefcake factory.

But it also allows UNC to slice up a 2-3 zone, and Pinson is the key that unlocks it all. His ability to pass from the high-post combined with the fact that the shooting ability of Joel Berry II, Kenny Williams and Cam Johnson on the perimeter makes them a nightmare offensively, one that cannot be overwhelmed by a front line the size of Duke’s. Bagley finished with 19 points and 13 boards against the Tar Heels on Friday night, but he had to work for those stats. Pinson — who stands 6-foot-6 with long arms, the physicality that comes with being a senior and the athleticism to boot — held his own on the block against a top three pick.

There aren’t a lot of college fours that are going to be able to do both of those things.

Which begs the question: Did North Carolina provide the nation with a diagram on how to beat Duke’s now-vaunted 2-3 zone, or was this simply a product of the Tar Heels being a perfect matchup for Duke at this point in time?

Let’s take a dive into the numbers, shall we?

According to SportVU, which is a service that provides spatial data on things like how open shooters are, 35 of the 42 jumpers that the Tar Heels attempted on Friday night were open jumpers, which is defined as having no defender within five feet of the shooter on the release. They made just 14 of those jumpers, a 40 percent clip and much lower than the average of roughly 60 percent shooting on open jump shots. Put another way, UNC scored just 1.02 points-per-possession against Duke’s defense, but that may had have as much to do with the fact that the Tar Heels missed shots that they usually would make more than the fact that Duke’s defense was impenetrable.

“If we were playing man and they shot 18 out of 24 from 3, then you’d be asking why didn’t you defend the 3 better,” Krzyzewski said. “But holding them to 74 points was good. They’re one of the explosive teams, as explosive as anybody. And they have two kids that can really handle the ball well in the middle of the zone in Pinson and Maye. So that’s good for us. The two games we played here, Colson can do that, too, so we got a chance to work our zone against probably two of the best teams that would work against us, and we gave up 70 and 74 points.

“The zone wasn’t bad. … It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t bad.”

I would tend to agree with Coach K here.

Let’s work through some zone theory for a second.

When the point guard has the ball at the top, the idea is to brings the wing defender so high to force passes to the corner or short corner to be thrown with air under it to give the defenders a chance to recover. The center is supposed to stay at the rim to protect against a lob to the opposing center on the baseline, and it’s the guards job at the top of the zone to keep the pass from getting to the high post. It’s the last part of that paragraph that was the biggest issue on Friday.

“Defensively, me and Tre [Duval] up top needed to do a little bit better job of trying to keep it out of the middle,” Allen said.

So there are some issues there.

But more than anything, Duke ran into a team that is built perfectly to break down the defense that they are playing.

And they still found a way to erase a 16-point lead with 5:33 left on the clock, getting two possessions in the final minute with a chance to tie.

Duke is not without their flaws this season, and we could spend another 1,500 words talking about some of the issues they have on the offensive end of the floor with their spacing.

But more than anything, Friday night taught us that this North Carolina team is one that we need to take seriously.

Duke can still win a national title this season. They still might be the favorite.

And North Carolina can win it all, too.

ST. LOUIS (AP) — Believe it or not, Arkansas’ NCAA Tournament hopes appeared all but lost a little more than a month ago.

The way the Razorbacks have played since, they’re arguably the hottest team in the Southeastern Conference and looking to do far more than just reach the NCAAs for a third time in the last four seasons.

Led by Jaylen Barford’s 27 points and 10 rebounds, Arkansas advanced to the semifinals of the SEC Tournament with an 80-72 win over No. 23 Florida on Friday night. The win is the eighth in the last 10 games for the sixth-seeded Razorbacks (23-10), a winning stretch matched in the SEC only by No. 13 Tennessee — who Arkansas will face on Saturday.

“I think we’re slowly picking up steam and we’re getting better,” Arkansas coach Mike Anderson said. “… This team is believing in each other.”

In addition to how often Arkansas has won since falling to 15-8 after back-to-back road losses to Texas A&M and LSU, it’s who the Razorbacks have defeated that’s so impressive. The win over the third-seeded Gators (20-12) was the school’s third over a ranked opponent in the last month, improving Arkansas to 5-1 against ranked opponents this season.

It also ended an eight-game losing streak to Florida team that had won three games in a row coming into the tournament.

Barford, the third-leading scorer in the SEC, finished one off his career high in points in the win and he matched his best with the double-digit rebounds. He did so a night after hitting a key late 3-pointer in the Razorbacks opening win over South Carolina , finishing 9 of 17 from the field and showing off his usual array of physical finishes around the rim for all of the SEC to see.

Arkansas freshman Daniel Gafford added 16 points and also matched his career-best with 12 rebounds, keying an effort that saw the Razorbacks outrebound the Gators 43-28. Gafford also put the exclamation point on the victory with a windmill dunk on the break in the closing minute that sent the vocal Arkansas crowd into a frenzy in the Scottrade Center.

“I think our confidence is great right now as a team,” Barford said. “We came together, and I think everybody knows what’s at task right now. It’s game time, and everybody’s ready to play.”

Keith Stone led Florida with 22 points and finished 8 of 10 from the field. Chris Chiozza added 16 points and KeVaughn Allen 11 for the Gators, who hit six of their first 10 3-pointers before hitting only seven of their next 22 to finish 13 of 32 overall from behind the arc.

BARFORD’S BARRAGE

Barford’s career high of 28 points came earlier this season in a loss at Florida, giving the first-team All-SEC guard a total of 55 points in two games against the Gators this season. “(Barford) scored on whoever was guarding him,” Florida coach Mike White said. “He scored off ball screens, he scored off step-back jumpers against our bigs. Two games this year he dominated us.”

BIG PICTURE

Arkansas: The last time the Razorbacks won a game against Florida was on Feb. 5, 2013, in Fayetteville. Since then, they had lost the eight straight games to add to a stretch of 13 losses in 14 games to the Gators. Arkansas has now won 40 straight games when leading at halftime, and it’s well on its way to a third NCAA Tournament appearance in the last four seasons.

Florida: Allen is from Arkansas and played in at North Little Rock High School with Arkansas guard Anton beard. The senior scored a season-high 28 points in Florida’s 88-73 win over the Razorbacks on Jan. 17, but he was held to a 4-of-11 shooting effort on Friday. The loss was the first of Allen’s career against his home state, coming after he had been a part of six straight victories over the Razorbacks.

UP NEXT

Florida waits for its NCAA Tournament destination.

Arkansas faces second-seeded Tennessee on Saturday.

PLAYER OF THE DAY

How good is Deandre Ayton?

The 7-foot-1 freshman put up 32 points and 14 rebounds as Arizona defeated UCLA, 78-67 in overtime. He made 13 of 16 shots and 5 of 6 from the line while also posting three assists and a pair of blocks and steals each.

Simply, he was dominant. And that’s something we need to talk more about.

There will be debates in draft rooms across the NBA about who to take No. 1, but Ayton continues to make his case that it should be a short conversation. Luka Doncic could very well be awesome, Marvin Bagley III is great and Michael Porter, Jr. is intriguing, but Ayton has put up huge numbers night in and night out for a team embroiled in chaos more often than not.

He was great again. And he’s the player of the day.

THE REST OF SATURDAY’S STARS

JORDAN DAVIS, Northern Colorado: Who cares what his numbers were. He did this. If you don’t click that link, you’re depriving yourself of one of life’s greatest gifts.
KYRON CARTWRIGHT, Providence: Had 15 points, six assists and drew a charge that might have cost Xavier its No. 1 seed.
LUKE MAYE, North Carolina: The senior had 17 points, 10 rebounds , four assists and three steals as the Tar Heels survived a late run by rival Duke to win a spot in the ACC title game.
MAKOL MAWIEN, Kansas State: The Wildcats lost to Kansas, but not because of Mawien, who had 29 points on 13 of 19 shooting.

BUBBLE BANTER: Everything that happened on the cut-line

TEAM OF THE DAY

Remember when Alabama lost five-straight to finish the year and entered the SEC tournament on the bubble? After Collin Sexton’s heroics Thursday and domination Friday, that seems like an awfully long time ago.

The Crimson Tide got 31 points and seven boards from Sexton and defeated rival Auburn, 81-63, to not only strengthen their NCAA tournament team, but to suddenly have a look of a team that should have top seeds running scared.

It’s amazing what a difference a couple of days in March can make.

GAME OF THE DAY

There are plenty of candidates for this one given what a wildly entertaining day Friday was, but let’s give it to a game that was decidedly uncompetitive.

San Diego State 90, No. 22 Nevada 73. Final.

The Aztecs led by as many as 30 and just ran roughshod over a really good Wolf Pack team. All five SDSU starters scored in double figures and they shot 51.9 percent as a team. Now they’ve got a shot to return to the NCAA tournament for the first time since 2015.

That’s good news for the Mountain West, which instantly just became a multi-bid league, but it’s really bad news for the teams hovering around the cut line.

WTF???? OF THE DAY

Tubby Smith’s lawyer accused Penny Hardaway of sabotage.

Yeah, you read that right. the Memphis coach’s long-time attorney threw a pretty big allegation in Hardaway’s direction, positing that the potential Smith replacement and the leader of grassroots powerhouse Team Penny has been steering high-level Memphis kids away from their hometown team.

It’s quite the accusation, but it’s also kind of a self-own. Smith’s lawyer is essentially admitting that Memphis would maybe, probably, potentially be getting Memphis kids – highly-ranked Memphis kids – if Hardaway took over the program. Even if there is something underhanded going on – and there doesn’t appear to be any evidence right now there is – telling the world your guy is essentially getting out-recruited by the favored replacement isn’t exactly a winning strategy. Especially on a day that Memphis was, ya know, actually winning.

WHAT ELSE DO YOU NEED TO KNOW?

Bruce Pearlgot mad.

The federal investigation into college basketball has been awfully quiet – aside from leaks detailing ASM Sports’ business plan – but the feds apparently aren’t done digging. The Raleigh News & Observer reported Friday that NC State has been served with a subpoena seeking documents.

Virginia remains a total buzzsaw.

Mississippi State’s Nick Weatherspoon suffered what looked to be a very scary injury when a Tennessee player inadvertently stepped on his head. The school later announced that the freshman, whose brother is a junior on the team, was awake and had feeling throughout his body.

NEW YORK (AP) — Mikal Bridges had 18 points and second-ranked Villanova scored the first 19 points and cruised toward its fourth straight trip in the Big East Tournament championship game in an 87-68 win over Butler on Friday night.

About 30 minutes after top-seeded Xavier was upset by Providence in overtime, the Wildcats (29-4) hit the court and showed how a favorite should play in a tournament semifinal.

The Wildcats scored five seconds into the game and used near-perfect execution on a 16-0 run before Butler coach LaVall Jordan finally called a timeout at the 15:37 mark. He could have waved a white flag to signal for the TO.

Omari Spellman buried a 3 to make it 19-0 and the Wildcats proved why the Big East tournament title always goes through the Main Line and straight to MSG. Butler finally scored and heard some mock cheers for the jumper.

Hey, at least the Bulldogs (20-13) were only down 17.

Butler called a 30-second timeout with 11:35 left in the second half and trailed by 25 points. Yes, this was a tournament semifinal game.

The Wildcats hit 10 of their first 12 shots that made for an anticlimactic final 35 minutes at the Garden. Providence had rallied from a 17-point second-half deficit and stunned top-seeded and No. 3 Xavier 75-72 in the first conference semifinal that had MSG rocking.

This seemed like a tune-up for a coronation.

Big East player of the year Jalen Brunson scored 17 points and Spellman had 12 points and 12 rebounds.

Villanova won the tournament in 2015 and 2017 and lost to Seton Hall in 2016.

The Wildcats did split two games against Providence but the Friars are coming off overtime games on consecutive nights and will be a heavy underdog.

Villanova vs. Xavier — the No. 2 and 3 teams in the AP Top 25 — had been an anticipated final. The Wildcats lost the outright regular-season title even though it beat the Musketeers twice.

The sixth-seeded Bulldogs stunned third-seeded Seton Hall 75-74 for its first career Big East Tournament victory and a win over the Wildcats on Dec. 30 made it seem like this should have been competitive.

Instead, Kelan Martin, who averaged 21.1 points, scored just four for the Bulldogs in the first half. He finished with 12.

The Wildcats hit six 3s, including Phil Booth’s at the buzzer, to send them into the break ahead 44-25.

BIG PICTURE

Butler: The Bulldogs are still in good shape for an NCAA Tournament bid and should be in the mix for No. 8 or No. 9 seed. Butler has lost three of four games.

Villanova: The Wildcats have won six of seven games and likely clinched a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament. The Wildcats have won 10 of 11 Big East Tournament games.

UP NEXT

Butler: Butler waits to find out its NCAA Tournament fate

Villanova: The Wildcats beat the Friars 89-69 on Jan. 23 and lost at Providence 76-71 on Feb. 14.

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