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College basketball rankings: Tennessee vaults to No. 1 after season’s first week – The Athletic
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Read The Athletic’s latest college basketball rankings.
Welcome to The Athletic’s new version of the Top 25. My favorite weekly rankings of all time was Luke Winn’s Power Rankings at Sports Illustrated. I never cared where he ranked teams. I read them every week knowing I was going to learn something. I’ve been trying to convince my editors to let me do a copycat version for years now that Winn is with the Toronto Raptors. Looks like they’ve finally given in.
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Rather than boring you with my logic for moving teams around, I’ll give you some little nuggets about ranked teams. I’ll choose which teams to write about each week. It’s never going to be a set number. But it will get nerdy. Hopefully, Winn will be proud.
I’m running for president of the Dalton Knecht fan club. He is the All-American no one saw coming. We had Knecht at No. 44 in our transfer portal rankings, so it wasn’t like he was completely off the radar. But Knecht was on a losing team and a second-team All-Big Sky selection last year at Northern Colorado. Second team! If we had a do-over on the transfer rankings, I’d have him neck and neck with Hunter Dickinson for the top spot. He’s that good.
Tennessee has had the most impressive start to the year, with an exhibition win at Michigan State — which came without Santiago Vescovi and Zakai Zeigler — and now a road win at Wisconsin that I bet will age well. Tennessee still has an awesome defense. The Volunteers were probably in the second tier of elite teams coming into the season. Knecht changes the math. The Vols look like they should be one of the country’s best teams, and I’ve bumped them up for actually beating good teams the last two weeks. Knecht will be 23 by the time of the NBA Draft, but I’m calling it now: He’s going to be a first-rounder. Hard to find his combination of size (6-foot-6), athleticism and skill. Just check out a sampling of his finishing so far. Both hands. In traffic. Special. Here’s betting by the end of the Maui Invitational, Knecht is a household name in college hoops.
We’ll know a lot more about Kansas after the next two weeks — a Champions Classic matchup with Kentucky on Tuesday and then the Maui Invitational — but here’s what is clear already: This is an elite passing team. The Jayhawks have assisted on 76.6 percent of their baskets so far and lead the country in effective field-goal percentage (72 percent). Bill Self’s teams always move the ball well, but this group is on another level. Their outside shooting is the big concern offensively, and we’ll see how that holds up when they get in some pressure-packed games, but so far so good — 46.9 percent from 3.
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Marquette only lost one rotation player from last season, and you can tell by the way the offense is already humming. Last year I wrote about how Marquette uses the sides of the floor to maximize space and stretch the help. This is an example of the spacing. Watch this clip, as Oso Ighodaro and Kam Jones work their two-man game.
That spacing allows these two to work their magic and simply play two-on-two. Now watch the creativity of Jones and Ighodaro. They’ll make you dizzy. Make or miss, this is beautiful basketball.
Tommy Lloyd had an elite offense last season, but his defense was never going to be good enough to compete for a national title. The Wildcats were too slow and just didn’t seem to care enough about that end of the floor. Lloyd made sure to address that with his recruiting class, the main difference-maker being San Diego State transfer Keshad Johnson. The early returns: With Johnson as the primary defender on Friday night against Duke, the Blue Devils went 0-of-11 from the field and had two turnovers.
GO DEEPER
Caleb Love does just enough to help seal Arizona’s victory over Duke in return to Durham
The Fairleigh Dickinson plan of surrounding Zach Edey and living with Purdue jumpers will be employed this season. Here’s Samford giving it a try:
Three positives from this play: 1.) Braden Smith made it clear that he wanted the ball and wanted to take that shot; 2.) Edey made the pass on target; and 3.) Smith buried it.
The Boilermakers have to make defenses pay for selling out on Edey. They shot 5-of-26 from 3 against FDU and only 32.2 percent for the season, which was shocking considering their personnel. They’ve got shooters. And they’re off to a good start so far, making 46.2 percent of their 3s through two games. The 16-of-29 performance in the opener was notable, because not once last season did they top 50 percent from 3.
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Freshman Ja’Kobe Walter made headlines with his 28 points in the season-opening win against Auburn, but it was fellow freshman Yves Missi who made the two biggest plays of the game, a steal and and-one dunk followed by swatting a Denver Jones layup off the backboard.
I asked Baylor strength coach Charlie Melton if he had any data that quantified Missi’s shot-out-of-a-cannon burst. His answer: Missi reaches 12 feet, 7 inches on his max vertical jump, which is four inches higher than the next-best of anyone he’s ever tested at Baylor. (Melton is in his 19th season.) Baylor’s defense stunk last year. It will not stink with this dude on the floor.
The Illini beat Kansas last month in a game that didn’t count, but it got my attention. Their perimeter guys gave KU problems with their size — they start three 6-6 guards — and then center Coleman Hawkins pulled Dickinson away from the basket with his shooting. It also helped that Terrence Shannon Jr. cooked. He had 28 points. He’s the hardest cover in the country when he’s on. I had him as a preseason first-team All-American. (Humblebrag.) If he plays to that, the Illini will be a Top 10 team all season.
Vladislav Goldin had one of his worst performances in the Final Four. He came to crush in the opener against Loyola Chicago — 19 points, 10 boards, five blocks, four steals, two assists, 9-of-12 at the line in 22 minutes. That’ll play. He’s your way-too-early leader in the KenPom Player of the Year standings.
The Cougars forced a turnover on 39.7 percent of Louisiana Monroe’s possessions in the opener. That seemed like a lot, so I did some digging. That’s the highest turnover rate in the Kelvin Sampson era. The best defense at turning opponents over ever in the KenPom database was Alabama A&M in 2002. The highest turnover rate in one game for that defense: 37.8.
The best perimeter trio in the country might belong to the Trojans. Isaiah Collier and Boogie Ellis get all the buzz, but watch for Kobe Johnson to shoot up draft boards as a 3-and-D guy. Johnson had four steals and created five other turnovers (nine total) in the 82-69 win against Kansas State. And his main assignment — former Creighton wing Arthur Kaluma — scored six points on 1-of-11 shooting.
Ummmm, what’s this?John Calipari is playing through his center? And shooting a ton of 3s? With real spacing and cutting? This is very un-Kentucky-era-Calipari-like. We shall call this team the Modern Cats.
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The 3-point rate tells the story. They are shooting a 3 on 39.4 percent of their attempts. Cal had some 3-point-happy Memphis teams, but his highest 3-point rate at Kentucky was 32.4 in 2011. His last two teams ranked 351 and 330 in 3-point rate. Could it be the John Welch effect? If so, that could be his smartest hire in years.
This is the Steph Curry generation. Curry has made it allowable to bomb from just about anywhere. College basketball’s next distance-does-not-matter launcher has arrived in Auburn freshman Aden Holloway. Auburn played its opener at the Sanford Pentagon, which was convenient because it has the NBA 3-point line and made it even clearer how deeeeeep Holloway was firing from. He attempted eight 3s against Baylor (making four), and every one was beyond the NBA line. Often well behind. Here’s an example of one he made:
Bruce Pearl hasn’t had a good 3-point shooting team since his Final Four squad in 2019. Holloway and FIU transfer Denver Jones should fix that.
Reason not to worry too much about the Spartans losing to James Madison: They shot 1-of-20 from 3 and missed 14 free throws. The analytics site Shot Quality generates an expected score based off the quality of shots; it had Michigan State winning 104-85.
But it wasn’t all about shooting. Michigan State’s pick-and-roll defense was pretty bad in that game. Early, the Spartans got killed by slips and not having anyone tagging at the rim. Then this was the go-ahead basket:
Coen Carr tagged the roller, but there’s no communication between him and Jaden Akins on the left side of the floor, and Terrence Edwards cuts baseline and is unguarded. And that’s Edwards who is by himself for the put-back. The shooting is a concern, but this is the kind of stuff Michigan State needs to clean up.
Keeping an eye on: Texas, UCLA, Mississippi State, Alabama, James Madison, Iowa State, Memphis
(Photo of Tennessee’s Dalton Knecht: John Fisher / Getty Images)
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C.J. Moore, a staff writer for The Athletic, has been on the college basketball beat since 2011. He has worked at Bleacher Report as the site’s national college basketball writer and also covered the sport for CBSSports.com and Basketball Prospectus. He is the coauthor of “Beyond the Streak,” a behind-the-scenes look at Kansas basketball’s record-setting Big 12 title run. Follow CJ on Twitter @cjmoorehoops