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Relentless Kansas spoils good story
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The feel-good story of the year took ill Saturday night, went
home, pulled the covers over its head and fixed to die.
It wasn’t supposed to end like this for Marquette, a team
built on cohesion in a season built on a vivid dream. But end it
did, 94-61, one of those Final Four moments better forgotten if
you’re partial to blue and gold.
Kansas will do that to you, and it was the only consolation for
the Golden Eagles afterward. The Jayhawks will run you to death,
defend you to death and shoot you to death. So it was
multiple-organ failure that eventually did in Marquette.
That and really dreadful shooting. Rarely has a team missed so
many shots so badly in so big a game as the Golden Eagles did
Saturday. Spectacular misses, understandable misses, misses that
seemed to be driven by a nervous disorder. But lots and lots of
misses, 51 misses out of 74 shots.
Marquette point guard Travis Diener went 1-for-11 from the field
(to go with eight turnovers), but that wasn’t even the worst
of it. He simply stopped shooting in the second half, and that was
the final humiliation for the Golden Eagles. With Diener passing up
shots, Kansas was able to make life even more miserable for Dwyane
Wade and his friends.
“We missed so many easy shots around the basket that we
could never get that little run or get that confidence we
needed,” Marquette coach Tom Crean said. “They just
played so well.”
That’s it, isn’t it? Kansas played so well. No
reason to break down Marquette’s shortcomings. What’s
the point of describing the frame that holds the masterpiece?
Kansas simply was a bigger force than Marquette, which won Best
Supporting Actor in a one-man movie.
The Jayhawks contested every shot, managed to get the
lion’s share of the rebounds and took off like a cab ordered
to follow that car.
It wasn’t just the fact that Kansas ran in transition at
every opportunity. It was the mental energy that Marquette expended
thinking about it. Kansas wears on you.
Kansas is the guy on the airplane telling you his life story,
starting with the trauma of bottle-feeding.
Kansas won’t go away.
“It’s not us running faster than anyone, it’s
just the fact that we’re going to continue to do it,”
Jayhawks forward Keith Langford said. “I think a couple of
possessions they kind of celebrated the score. We were
1/8already3/8 on the other end attacking and scoring.”
I’m not sure what Crean could have done, short of
voodoo.
I’m not sure what Syracuse can do Monday night against the
Jayhawks in the NCAA championship game.
Kansas begins and ends with Kirk Hinrich and Nick Collison. Yes,
Langford shot 11-of-14 from the floor and scored 23 points, most of
them on drives to the basket. But Marquette had to pay so much
attention to Collison and Hinrich that Langford and Aaron Miles
pretty much had the buffet table to themselves.
The lead reached 43 points in the second half. Forty-three
points. The Marquette team that beat then-No. 1 Kentucky by 14
points last week was down by 43 on Saturday. Nobody saw this
coming. Nobody saw 43 points worth of bad.
One moment Marquette is sitting comfortably in its living room
and the next it’s spinning inside of a tornado and wondering
why the TV remote won’t work.
But even when the game was close—OK, it wasn’t close
for very long—it was apparent that these were two very
different teams out there, two teams going in different
directions.
Kansas was getting open shots, and Marquette was getting
difficult, off-balance, tortured shots. Even Wade, the most
talented player on the floor, found the going hard. It says a lot
about this game and even more about the Jayhawks’ defense
that Wade was pushed to the margins of the story line.
The best scenario for Marquette is if the Jayhawks blow out
Syracuse on Monday night. Nothing erases the humiliation of a
blowout loss quite like the next guy getting humiliated too. It
could just be that Kansas is one of those teams ascending at the
right time, squeezing the last drop out of all that talent it
has.
“This will live with us forever,” Diener said.
“But also making it to the Final Four will live with us
forever.”
Eventually, the latter will regain ground and the former will
recede a bit. “Eventually” could take a long time.
Kansas will do that to you.
“We did not play well,” Crean said.
“That’s an obvious statement. But they are very, very,
very good.”
That’s it, isn’t it?
Rick Morrissey, Chicago Tribune
