Roll out the red carpet. Let the champagne flow. There are three games left in the NCAA tournament, but here at GK Central, we don’t want to wait any longer to start handing out hardware. So without further ado, allow us to present this year’s awards for the best performances in a Giant Killing role for 2015.
The 2015 Ronell and Donell Taylor All-Giant Killers Team
Travis Trice, Michigan State Spartans (Captain)
The only member of the All-GK team who is still playing, Trice follows in the footsteps of Aaron Harrison as captains emerging from power programs. Trice hit four 3-pointers in Michigan State’s slaying of second-seeded Virginia, and his 23 points topped the combined effort of Virginia’s starting perimeter trio of Malcolm Brogdon, London Perrantes and Justin Anderson (22 points). Trice is averaging eight 3-point attempts per game in the tourney, just the kind of high-variance strategy a good Killer needs, and he’s hitting 40.6 percent of those. All hail the captain, as he aims to claim another victim Saturday night.
Alford needed some help from Yanick Moreira and three guys in stripes at the end of UCLA’s upset victory over SMU. Still, the controversial goaltending call doesn’t change the fact that Alford was cooking from long range all night. He ended up hitting 9-of-11 3-pointers en route to 27 points, and followed that up with a 22-point performance in UCLA’s (non-GK) victory over UAB in the round of 32. As longtime reader Zach R. writes: “He is the ultimate boom/bust type of player. The boom was the SMU game, the bust was against Gonzaga. Alford just screams to me, 'GK special.' "
R.J. Hunter, Georgia State Panthers
He capped 40 minutes against Baylor with nine straight points, and his three steals and a block helped pressure the Bears into a complete collapse. Then, with 3 seconds left, he drained an NBA-distance 3-pointer to seal the round-of-64’s most memorable upset. Not only did he make his dad fall off a stool, he even got golfers to react like this. And now he’s the leading vote-getter for this year’s All-GK team.
The leading vote-getter for last year’s All-GK team, Pierre led all scorers with 20 points in Dayton’s round-of-64 upset of Providence. And if our statistical model inhaled or exhaled, it would have let out a sigh of relief, because with that Flyers win, one of our “Best Bets” finally delivered. Dayton, slammed by injuries and ineligibility, essentially gave up offensive rebounding this season, but otherwise got as much as any team in the country out of focusing on Giant-Killing traits.
Incidentally, we have heard analysts say that the silly technical foul called on Friars coach Ed Cooley, when he knocked over his chair, cost Providence its momentum. Do you know what happened before that T? The Friars missed two jump shots and 1 of 2 free throws, and Pierre hit a 3 to put Dayton up by eight points with less than five minutes left in the game. Then, sandwiched between a Providence turnover and a foul, he grabbed an offensive rebound. Because of Pierre, the Friars didn’t have any momentum to lose/
Evan Wessel, Wichita State Shockers
We are proud to say we’ve been Fred VanVleet fans from the beginning, but Wessel was the Shocker who fried Kansas, nailing 4 of 6 3-pointers, and for good measure led the team with three offensive rebounds. And we’ve come up with a great nickname for him! No need to thank us now, Evan -- just be sure to vote for next year’s All-GK team.
Honorable mentions: UAB’s Tyler Madison grabbed nine offensive rebounds in 14 minutes against Iowa State, and is only 6-foot-4 . . . Abdul-Malik Abu’s 12 rebounds -- including six at the offensive end -- helped spur NC State’s upset of Villanova.
GK Coach of the Year: Ron Hunter, Georgia State Panthers
It would be an understatement to say Hunter doesn’t like analytics. Now we could say, well, neither does Larry Brown, and who made it further this year? But that would be flip. Instead, we’ll point out that there are several ways to, um, skin a Bear. Hunter assembles guard-centric teams that can handle the ball, force turnovers and shoot, and he welcomes players looking for fresh starts. He’s not using metrics from regression analysis to build his undersized, undervalued squads, but they play a style our model admires -- and played it even better than we expected this season. Also, while nobody has quantified the bonus value of a torn Achilles, it never hurts an underdog to show you’re willing to pay a price for the ecstasy of victory.
TBD Lifetime Achievement Award: Donnie Tyndall, Tennessee
We would name this award after Blaine Taylor, except we don’t want to consign him to history just yet. Giant Killers fans should remember Taylor: He turned Old Dominion into the top offensive rebounding team in the country (read that again carefully) and upset Notre Dame in a classic GK matchup in 2010. The guy deserves another shot at coaching. From a purely statistical standpoint, our model would say the same thing about Tyndall, this year’s winner, but he may be out of second chances. This blog is not the place for us to comment on the NCAA investigation into alleged recruiting violations at Southern Mississippi that got Tyndall fired at Tennessee.
Instead, we want to bid an underdog-analytics fare-thee-well to a coach who guided Morehead State to an all-time Giant Killing over Louisville in 2011, and who installed a fairly reckless high-risk/high-reward style at Southern Miss, which was among the top 10 teams in the nation at both offensive rebounding and forcing turnovers in 2013-14. We will also note that Rick Barnes, Tyndall’s replacement at Tennessee, has the opposite knack: Instead of making teams into dangerous Killers, he turns them into Vulnerable Giants. Caveat emptor, Vols fans.
Georgetown Award for Giant Failure: Baylor Bears
We love it when our readers come up with new ways to mock us when our model’s predictions don’t pan out. We really do: If you didn’t care, you wouldn’t spend time coming up with hashtags like “#GiantThreateners.” But here’s a pick we’re just not going to take the fall for: Georgia State was a cool underdog, but should never have upset Baylor. Take one more look at the stats from their game: The Bears outshot the Panthers on 2-point attempts and from beyond the 3-point arc. Baylor collected 48 percent of available offensive rebounds and 75.7 percent of available defensive rebounds. It even had more assists.
But it also had 21 turnovers, including four in the last three minutes of the game. The Bears threw the ball away more than one of every three times they touched it. Yes, they were sloppy in that regard all season, and yes, Georgia State forces lots of steals. But that shouldn’t have been enough to close the gap between these teams, and yet it was. Thus, the Baylor Bears richly earned our inaugural Georgetown Award for the worst Giant of the Tournament. This time around, they deserved it far more than Georgetown!
Survivor Award: Georgetown Hoyas
Congrats, Georgetown. You went the distance. Now you’re back on your feet. For the first time in six tries, the Hoyas made it through an NCAA tournament without losing to a Giant Killer. Oh, Eastern Washington tried to made it six, but Georgetown didn’t lose its grip on the dreams of the past. D'Vauntes Smith-Rivera rose up to the challenge of his rival by scoring 25 points and grabbing eight rebounds to offset Tyler Harvey’s 27-point night for the Eagles. So what if Georgetown fell to Utah two days later? The Hoyas had the guts, got the glory.
Top Mongoose Award: Tarik Phillip, West Virginia Mountaineers
You know what they say. Well, maybe not, but here’s what we say: If Killers are like snakes, striking Giants from below, players who can turn the tables and stomp them out are like the mongoose. And after New Mexico’s Kendall Williams (who now plays for Fileni Jesi in Serie A2) shut down Long Beach State’s Casper Ware (who now plays for EWE Baskets Oldenburg of the Bundesliga) in 2012, we began this award for the tournament’s top Giant Killer-killer. This year, it’s Phillip. (Knew we would work them into our wrapup somehow, didn’t you?) Buffalo climbed all the way back from a 10-point deficit to tie the Mountaineers late in the round-of-64 contest, but Phillip buried a bomb with 28.4 seconds left to quash the Bulls -- and validate our advice to stay away from this trendy upset pick. It was just Phillip’s sixth 3-pointer of the entire season. Now, that’s high-risk/high-reward.