Atlantic 10 Conference Basketball - CBI Tournament Recap

CBI Semifinals Recap - Saint Louis vs Princeton

Saint Louis 69, Princeton 59

So, if you're a casual basketball fan - and especially if you weren't able to watch this game on the "widely-available" network called HDNet (cough, cough) - you might be looking at this score and saying to yourself, "Gee, not a whole lot of action."

For a Washington-Marquette game, a Syracuse-Villanova game, or a Wake Forest-Virginia Tech game, yes.

For Princeton and Saint Louis, absolutely not. Given the styles of these two teams, this was a veritable track meet. The Billikens were the ones with the better running shoes, apparently.

Princeton and Saint Louis both like to take the air out of the ball in the shot-clock era. Coach Sydney Johnson's Tigers and Rick Majerus's Billikens place a considerable emphasis on defense before anything else. They also demand patience and structure in their offensive sets, a point of importance which makes sense for both clubs. PU and SLU lack blinding athletic talent, for one thing; neither one of these squads plays above the rim the way Kansas and Kentucky do. The Tigers and Bills need to win by working smarter as well as harder; they have to run their stuff with precision in order to generate good looks at the basket.

In addition to that series of reasons, the need for cohesion in halfcourt offense is important for the coaches of these teams because bad shots and generally unintelligent offense are what often lead to run-outs and easy baskets for opponents. If an offense rarely takes bad shots, the process of getting back on defense becomes easy. As a result, a team won't get smoked on a break (be it primary or secondary) and can pace the game the way it wants to.

What was unique, then, about this College Basketball Invitational semifinal showdown is that it pitted two of the same kinds of teams against each other. A more fascinating sporting event usually unfolds when a contrast in styles can be found. Tomorrow's Cornell-Kentucky game is a classic case in point. Nevertheless, when two teams with the same personalities collide on the court, the nature of the competition has a certain purity about it. Princeton and Saint Louis fought to see who could play the same style of basketball at a higher level. The winner of this game would truly establish superiority by any reasonable measure.

After 40 minutes, the winner clearly turned out to be the Billikens, who earned the right to play in the best-of-three CBI Championship Series against the Virginia Commonwealth Rams.

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This was not a boring game, despite what the final score would suggest. The reason for this prolonged focus on the topic is that modern-day basketball analysis is evolving. In older days, no one would have given much of a thought to considerations of tempo, especially in the pre-1986 era when a shot clock wasn't used and could level the playing field in an instant. However, now that the shot clock is with us in college basketball, teams have a choice: Use the full 35 seconds or attempt to strike quickly? Princeton and Saint Louis both opt for the former choice, not the latter. This has consequences for the way in which their Wednesday night tussle should be evaluated.

As a point of comparison, let's take a women's basketball game from Saturday, a clash between Gonzaga and North Carolina in the women's NCAA Tournament. The two teams combined to take 85 shots in the first half. That's a tremendously fast pace and a reflection of two coaches' desires to accumulate as many possessions as possible. The Tigers and Billikens do things differently; they want a minimum of possessions so that they can shorten the game and stay competitive with their inferior athleticism. On SLU's home court, the Bills were evidently able to execute their offense more crisply than the runner-up from the Ivy League. In so doing, Majerus's men proudly carried the banner for the Atlantic 10 Conference.

Whereas that Gonzaga-UNC women's game featured 85 first-half shots, Princeton and SLU took a total of 89 shots for the entire game. That comparison of statistics shows that this game was low scoring not because of poor shooting - PU was a reasonable 44 percent from the field - but because both teams chose to have fewer possessions. St. Louis might play slowly, but the Bills played an attractive brand of ball on Wednesday because they simply shot the cover off the ball.

The familiarity of the shooting backdrop at Chaifetz Arena helped Billiken forward Willie Reed (9 of 13 from the field) and guard Kwamain Mitchell (7 of 12) combine to hit 16 shots in 25 tries, a sizzling 64 percent conversion rate. Given the 89 total shots in this game, the Reed-Mitchell combo took roughly 30 percent of all shots. Therefore, by making such a high percentage of shots in a game which had few of them, it's no wonder that St. Louis won the game. It's also not a surprise - or at least, it shouldn't be - that the 10-point final margin felt like 20 instead.

Was this game boring or low-scoring? For the final time: no and no. Speaking of finals, SLU is in the finals of the CBI.

WHAT'S NEXT

Rick Majerus will lead the Billikens into the CBI Championship Series against the VCU Rams in a best-of-three-game set. Dates, locations and tip times have not yet been announced.

By: Matt Zemek
A10-fans.com Senior Staff Writer