HOUSTON EARNS NO.1 SEED
Here are the keys to another Cougar's conference championship
Mar 10, 2022, 12:57 pm
The Coogs are back in action this Friday at noon. Photo by Bob Levey/Getty Images.
Sampson: A lot of coaches are scared of confrontation, I’m not
After finishing the regular season with a 26-5 (15-3 conference) record, the Houston Cougars look to earn their second consecutive American Athletic Conference Men's Basketball Tournament championship.
Last year, this team won their conference tournament, earned a #2 seed in the NCAA tournament and finished with a Final Four appearance. This squad looks to continue that trend as the #18 ranked Cougars obtained a number one seed in the AAC.
Although Houston finished with a better record last season, this year’s team had to overcome injury issues in addition to losing four of their five starters from last year's Final Four squad.
Coach Kelvin Sampson and his staff wasted no time during the offseason as they added three key players from the transfer portal in Josh Carlton from Connecticut, Taze Moore by way of CSU Bakersfield and Kyler Edwards via Texas Tech.
The trio started in almost every game and developed instant chemistry in coach Sampson’s system.
Junior guard Marcus Sasser finished last season as the team’s second leading scorer (13.7 PPG) and was in position to take over as the number one offensive option, but suffered a season ending toe injury in December.
A similar fate happened to sophomore guard Tramon Mark who played in seven games before missing the remainder of the season due to shoulder surgery.
Without their two best guards, coach Sampson inserted sophomore Jamel Shed into the starting lineup. The Texas native was no stranger to the court, as he played a significant amount of minutes last season off the bench during their Final Four run. It was a seamless transition to have Shed take Mark’s spot in the lineup and become the floor general Houston needed.
Replacing the high scoring Sasser would be accomplished by committee and not one particular individual stepping up. The aforementioned transfer trio of Carlton, Edwards and Moore all had their spectacular performances throughout the season and proved why they were perfect fits for Sampson's system.
The stellar showcases of the transfer trio and the improved play of fifth-year senior Fabian White Jr. put Houston over the top most games.
The 6’8” forward is the longest tenured Cougar on this squad and averaged a career high 13.2 points per game this season.
White came off the bench last season as he was recovering from a torn ACL and proved to be an integral part of Houston’s depth during their Final Four run.
This season saw White return to the starting lineup and showcase why he continues to be a threat on offense and defense, as he averaged a team best 1.6 blocks per game.
It took no time for this new group of starters to develop chemistry in coach Sampson’s defensive first style of play.
"These guys have worked hard," Houston coach Kelvin Sampson said. "They've listened. They've followed instructions. They believe in the culture of our program. They've embraced it."
Houston outscored their opponents by double digits in 22 of their 26 victories this season, and reached as high as the number six ranked team in the country. This massive success put Houston atop the AAC early on and led to a regular season conference championship.
The AAC Tournament will begin on Thursday at Dickies Arena in Ft. Worth and will conclude on Sunday.
Houston’s first game will be Friday at noon as they await the winner between East Carolina and Cincinnati.
The Cougars won all but three of their conference games this season as they lost on the road against SMU, and suffered a season sweep at the hands of the Memphis Tigers.
For some reason, coach Penny Hardaway’s team seems to play their best ball against Houston year after year. This season Memphis won at the Fertitta Center by 10 points on February 12th, and defeated the Cougars again on Sunday at home by 14 points, Houston’s worst loss this season.
The latter could be explained due to the fact the Cougars locked up their regular season conference championship earlier in the week, but a coach Sampson led team wouldn’t just throw away a meaningless game at the hands of their rival to end the season.
Memphis possesses the biggest threat for Houston to win back-to-back AAC tournament championships, but the Cougars haven't lost to a conference opponent three consecutive times in a season since coach Sampson’s first year as the head coach in 2015 against Tulsa.
As long as Houston doesn't overlook any of their conference foes (especially Memphis) it's safe to say that the Cougars should leave Ft. Worth on Sunday as conference champions once again and earn a spot to their 4th NCAA Tournament in five seasons.
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The Celtics are on pace to join the 2018-19 Rockets and 2020-21 Jazz. Photo by Alex Slitz/Getty Images.
The NBA is on the cusp of accomplishing something that it hasn't seen before. The jury's still out on whether it's a good thing.
With about seven weeks left in the season, 2-point shots are accounting for 49% of scoring. And if that stat holds up — there's no indication that it won't — this will be the first season in which 2-pointers make up less than half of the league's point production.
The current breakdown: a record-low 49% of scoring comes from 2-pointers, a record-high 36% comes from 3-pointers, and a near-record-low 15% comes from the foul line. Those numbers are just more proof of how the 3-point shot continues permeating the game, and that's why plenty of people are wondering aloud if the league has a real problem on its hands.
“I don’t have any problem with guys and teams shooting a lot of 3s,” said Golden State's Stephen Curry, the league's all-time leader in 3-pointers and someone closing in on 4,000 such makes for his regular-season career. “Obviously, that’s the way that I play, and I love that factor in the game. But you’ve also got to put the work in behind the scenes to take full advantage of it.”
This isn't a new phenomenon.
Barring some sort of major shift in how the game is played over the next seven weeks, the league is on pace to break the record for 3-pointers in a season (it’ll be the 15th consecutive season in which the 3s-per-game record falls) and 3-pointers attempted in a season (a new mark will be set there for the 19th time in the last 22 seasons).
Boston is leading the 3-point assault this year, though the Celtics are hardly the only 3-happy team. But the defending NBA champions are clearly more reliant on the shot than anyone else, with 46% of their points this season coming from beyond the arc. They'll almost certainly become only the third team in NBA history to finish a season with more points from 3s than 2s, joining the 2018-19 Houston Rockets and 2020-21 Utah Jazz.
“Everybody can’t play the same way," Celtics All-Star forward and two-time Olympic gold medalist Jayson Tatum said. "You've got to have the right personnel. But, you know, the way we play works for us. So, we play to our strengths.”
The Celtics are the only franchise in NBA history to have eight different players make 100 3s in a season; they've done it in each of the last two seasons and are on pace to do it again this year. For them, the 3-pointer is the golden ticket; they're 33-6 this season when they make at least 17 3s, and just 8-10 when they don't make that many.
They had five 3-point shooters on the floor together last season and the result was an NBA championship. It was, at times, impossible to guard. Golden State rode the brilliance of Curry and Klay Thompson to four NBA titles in their years as the Warriors' “Splash Brothers," a duo that helped usher in a new era of 3-point reliance. And the math is simple: shooting 40% on 3s gets you more points per attempt than shooting 50% on 2s does.
“Right now, I think the defense has to catch up and maybe NBA teams will shoot less 3s,” San Antonio star Victor Wembanyama said at the All-Star break, before he was shut down for the year with deep vein thrombosis in his right shoulder. “But analytics back it up, so it makes sense.”
Wembanyama was averaging 8.8 3-point tries per game this season, the most of any center in the league, and his 403 attempts on the season from beyond the arc is still more entering this week than some of the game's best shooters — a list of players that includes Phoenix's Devin Booker, the Los Angeles Lakers' Austin Reaves and Miami's Duncan Robinson.
But the numbers say it's a good shot. So, Wembanyama took them. A lot of them. The Spurs, for years, were a team that didn't prioritize the 3-pointer. And now, it's a weapon for them and everyone else in the league.
“The game has evolved,” said Golden State coach Steve Kerr, an elite shooter in his playing days.
It keeps evolving. Commissioner Adam Silver said earlier this month that he listened to an off-the-record conversation between Kerr and broadcaster Bob Costas at the tech summit during All-Star weekend, the keynote address of sorts for those who were invited to that event. Silver later shared that Kerr conceded there may be a bit too much 3-point shooting in today's NBA, but that he liked the current state of the game and wouldn't recommend any changes.
Silver thinks it's all cyclical. He said when the All-Star weekend last came to the Bay Area in 2000, “many people were saying it was too physical, we were too dependent on the dunk, that players weren’t sufficiently skilled as they were than in the old days.”
It's all very different now.
“The fact now that you can’t play in this league unless you can shoot, that even 7-footers have to be able to shoot these days and have to be able to shoot at long range, I actually think that’s a beautiful thing,” Silver said.