CHICAGO – There were some superlative moments throughout the two college basketball games comprising the 2023 State Farm Champions Classic, from Caleb Foster’s four 3-pointers for Duke to Adou Thiero’s acrobatic finishes for Kentucky to Hunter Dickinson’s buzzer-beating three to cut into Kansas’ halftime deficit against UK.
None, though, was more arresting than Dickinson’s declaration upon entering the postgame press conference a few minutes late.
“Every team in the Champions Classic is here for a reason,” he said.
Indeed.
Because they’ve been champions.
Eight times for Kentucky, five for Duke, four for Kansas and twice for Michigan State. And, above all, they were here because they desire to be champions again. I intended upon entering the United Center early Tuesday evening to write about exactly this – how these four teams must develop to have a shot at conquering March Madness – and Dickinson followed his 27-point, 20-rebound performance with a quote that went directly to that point. He left nothing undone.
This was not the most impressive Champions Classic we’ve seen. An event once visited by Anthony Davis, Zion Williamson, Cassius Winston and Ochai Agbaji, that has produced 10 Final Four teams and three NCAA champions, has some extraordinary standards to reach. Kansas’ 89-84 victory over Kentucky was an excellent game, though, and Duke’s 74-65 win over MSU was worth a couple hours of viewing.
Each of the teams produced enough moments to suggest they have the potential to improve toward March success. Each revealed enough flaws to give the coaches work to do over the next four months.
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Kansas
There’s no better point-post combination in college basketball than Dickinson on the inside and Dajuan Harris with the basketball. Harris is a savant, one of the smartest and most alert point guards of the past decade, and Dickinson has been an overwhelming offensive force since the day he walked on campus more than three years ago.
It was Michigan’s campus, not KU’s, but he’s scoring those points now for the Jayhawks.
The Jayhawks also are going to get reliable performances, at minimum, from veteran wing Kevin McCullar, who didn’t play all that well against Kentucky and still delivered a triple-double of 12 points, 10 rebounds and 10 assists. He’ll actually have much better days than that.
And they’ll get dynamic toughness from power forward KJ Adams, at last freed from having to function as a 6-7 center. I asked Bill Self if Adams was relieved to learn Kansas had landed a 7-footer to play in the middle. “Yes,” Self said immediately.
Even after he went 8-of-11 from the field and produced 16 points and 3 assists without committing a turnover, Self believes there is more to be gotten from Adams.
he really did that 👀#LevelUp x @kj_atx pic.twitter.com/Uim8XOP6LI
— Kansas Men’s Basketball (@KUHoops) November 15, 2023
“I think the thing that he can do in his own way is become a better short-roll guy and play Hunter away from the basket, things like that,” Self said. “We’ve got to figure out how to play him like we played him last year – with Hunter in the game. I think that’s a big key for us.”
The decisive factor for Kansas, though, will be getting more and better performances from the bench. Johnny Furphy, Nicolas Timberlake, Parker Braun and Jamari McDowell consumed only 38 minutes against Kentucky and scored a combined four points.
UK coach John Calipari wants his team to play fast, because he has eight capable players and will have two more when big men Aaron Bradshaw and Ugonna Onyenso are healthy enough to return. But he really wanted the running game to ignite against Kansas because of the potential to wear down the Jayhawks regulars.
It worked for a while.
It will again, if the KU bench fails to deepen.
Duke
Neither point guard Tyrese Proctor nor forward Kyle Filipowski, each a projected first-round draft pick, was dominant against Michigan State, and hotshot freshman Jared McCain did not score at all, and still the Blue Devils were able to beat a Spartans team with championship ambitions by a 74-65 score.
It happened in large part because five-year veteran big man Ryan Young contributed 8 points, 7 rebounds and 24 minutes of rugged baseline play, and in larger part because freshman guard Caleb Foster struck four times from 3-point range and scored a team-high 18 points (just four days after going scoreless in a home loss to Arizona).
This Duke team has the requisite variety of offensive options, the necessary talent and sufficient depth, but there are two bothersome issues at this point, one of which might not include a manageable solution.
Foster was the only proficient long-distance shooter against the Spartans. Filipowski is a proven performer in that area who simply had an off night, but Proctor was hoping to build on a meager 32-percent effort last year and hasn’t as yet, and wing Mark Mitchell appears even less comfortable. Teams have developed tremendous respect for senior Jeremy Roach over the past two years, so right now he’s the one Devil they’ll honor when he’s behind the line.
“We need to learn how to play with the group that we have in and really be forceful driving the ball,” head coach Jon Scheyer told TSN. “When they commit, we’ll have spacing and shooting.”
What they do not appear to have is consistent rim protection. Duke was No. 16 in defensive efficiency and 38th in block percentage last season, but so far this year they’ve declined to 125th. They’re rejecting only three shots per game. Their struggles in this area were evident with MSU forward Malik Hall’s success in backing down Mitchell, among others, to score on turnarounds and finish with 18 points on 7-of-11 shooting.
A team that lacks elite rim protection needs to find some other way to discourage teams from attacking the lane and the baseline, which Baylor managed by deploying the physicality of Mark Vital and Johnathan Tchamwa Tchatchoua to keep Gonzaga away from the bucket in the 2021 NCAA title game.
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Kentucky
If these performances were to be issued a grade on the letter system, the Wildcats' simply would be assigned an “incomplete”. We can’t know what the Wildcats will be in four months without seeing what sort of competitive shape Bradshaw and Onyenso will be in, how much ground they’ll need to cover and how much time they’ll have to do it.
The team as it is composed can beat anyone on a good day, and most anyone on a half-good one. Freshman guard D.J. Wagner shot 1-of-12 from the field in 25 minutes against KU. Wing Justin Edwards was 0-for-6. You can discuss among yourselves which of those figures is poorer. It may be worse that the guards only got big man Tre Mitchell four shots, of which he made half.
Even though they emphasized the running game and, as Calipari likes to say, “playing random”, they were haphazard enough to only tie KU in fastbreak points.
And with all of that, Kentucky built a 14-point lead in the second half. They made poor decisions in the final four minutes, and one of those probably was reinserting freshman point guard Rob Dillingham, who’d enjoyed a brilliant first half but sat through most of the second because of foul trouble. Classmate Reed Sheppard had helped the team advance to a six-point lead at the final media timeout, but he was replaced, and Dillingham surrendered consecutive 3-pointers to Harris and missed his own jumpshot with 2:15 left. The score was tied at that point, and Kentucky scored only one more point.
“But we’re learning,” Calipari said. “None of us are happy that we lost the game. I’m not happy. I’ve got work to do to help them finish games off, figure out who needs to be in at the end of those games.”
Michigan State
Playoffs? Playoffs? Are you kidding me? Playoffs. I just hope we can win a game.
OK, it’s not that bad for the Michigan State Spartans. They have lost two games in the season’s first eight days, and that’s not good. But it’s more weird than bad.
This was the No. 3 team in 3-point accuracy last year, and while a lot of that was now-pro Joey Hauser’s 46 percent shooting, he wasn’t all of it. Jaden Akins and Tyson Walker both shot better than 40 percent.
Walker’s now at 33 percent. Akins is 1-for-10. (That’s 10 percent. You can thank me for saving you the math). The team as a whole is 8-of-50 after three games. (That’s 16 percent. My iPhone helped me with that one.)
Coach Tom Izzo said following Tuesday’s loss to Duke that his primary concern with the Spartans offense is creating quality shots for his players, and that if that happens they’ll end up in the goal often enough. And for much of the evening against Duke, the Spartans did get open shots for guys who have been reliable. Too regularly, they did not connect.
According to Izzo, point guard A.J. Hoggard said upon entering the locker room, “If I’m going to go 1-of-8, you have to bench me.” The coach thought that showed a degree of maturity necessary for the Spartans to improve.
MSU ran some very nice low-post offense to start the game – having noticed the obvious weakness in Duke’s rim protection – and center Mady Sissoko fumbled away some and missed too many. Sophomore Carson Cooper was not an improvement. Together, they were 2-of-7 from the field. The only column of the box score in which they rang up big numbers: fouls.
Some of the solutions to Michigan State’s concerns will have to be outsourced to the freshman class. To have a group of players who’ve played so many games – the starting five average 100 apiece – and attempt to mix in three top freshmen is a delicate operation. Izzo expects that dynamic wing Coen Carr and sturdy point guard Jeremy Fears will find more minutes and prominent roles soon. He wants to see 6-11 Xavier Booker grow stronger, but we’ve seen the numbers the Spartans are getting from their more powerful veteran bigs.
“That’s one of the negatives that you have right now,” Izzo told TSN. “I was excited about Coen Carr tonight. Second half, I thought he played a lot better. They just need to get reps, and you don’t get reps in games that are tougher games.”
