I haven't watched Minnesota much. What is that team all about? Fill me in.
Kansas loses another one, its going to interesting this year seeing who deserves a 1 seed and who gets looked over.
I'm really impressed with Minnesota. Tubby's always had the pieces there, but they've always had something standing in the way of them really breaking out. I remember a few seasons ago, I wrote something in the preseason, either for s2 or another site, about how I thought they were a Final Four caliber team, but then Royce White got arrested, Mbakwe got hurt, Nolen got suspended, and Rodney Williams hit a wall.
As for this year's team, Trevor Mbakwe isn't a real offensive threat, but he's your prototypical Big Ten enforcer, ala Reggie Evans or Aloysius Anagonye. Rodney Williams is still more of an athlete than a basketball player, but he's still able to make plays that no one else in the Big Ten has the ability to make. The real pulse of the team comes from the backcourt though, with the Hollins'.
Dre Hollins and Austin Hollins (the son of Grizz coach Lionel Hollins) are both from Memphis, and strangely enough, they're not related, despite the fact that Dre looks more like he's Lionel's kid than Austin does.
Dre's your prototypical high-scoring guard that can put the team on his back. He's one of those guys, like Dee Brown was, that will have a hand in his face all night and hit the important shots. You can look at the stats and say that he's only getting 14 ppg, but that's largely due to the low-scoring Big 10 style of play. When you get 20 points and your team only puts up 44 points, that's saying something.
Long story short, I think Minnesota finally has all of the talent to make a run in March. I think there are a lot of paper tigers in the rankings right now, but I don't think Minnesota is one of them, despite the loss tonight. They have the potential to be that dangerous 4-6 seed that winds up making a deep run in March, after being battle tested with their regular season schedule.
