Tigers surpass drama with beautiful basketball
By SAM MELLINGER
The Kansas City Star
The first thing you might think about this Missouri basketball team right now is that nobody else in the league wanted this. Mizzou is gone, and the bitter feelings have spilled all over the place. You can bet that people who make money from the Big 12 are cussing Mizzou for taking home the last Big 12 basketball trophy it’ll ever play for.
The commissioner calls MU selfish. Bill Self says Kansas City is more a Kansas and K-State town. Mizzou players joke — they are joking, right? — about having to score a thousand points to win league player-of-the-week honors.
The feeling is mutual, of course. MU fans boo Chuck Neinas’ name. They hold up signs about the SEC and chant those three letters at every opportunity. Many conversations eventually lead to, “We’re just looking forward to going to a league where everyone’s treated equally.”
All of that makes No. 5 Missouri’s 90-75 victory over No. 12 Baylor in the Big 12 tournament championship even more fascinating.
This is that rare conference postseason that we’ll remember years from now, about the time KU came up lame in the semifinal that would’ve given us Border War III, and about the year Mizzou won the last Big 12 game it ever played.
This whole season has become about hatred and hurt feelings and exit fees, about college kids somehow carrying the baggage of the adults in charge, every sensitivity on every side amplified, and you know what?
We’re missing a heck of a show.
If we could strip away the drama and the realignment and what all of this does to our Kansas City sports scene, we’d be able to better enjoy one of the most beautiful college basketball teams in recent memory.
Missouri leads the country in offensive efficiency. That’s a detailed and nerdy way of saying the Tigers play the smoothest, cleanest, most unselfish brand of basketball among the 345 teams in Division I.
Phil Pressey is the artist here. Coach Frank Haith calls him “the conductor.” Pressey is 5 feet 10 and almost always the smallest man on the floor and just as often driving past the bigger men on his way into the lane.
Ricardo Ratliffe might have the best hands of any post player in the conference, which is a good thing because he gets at least a layup or two every game by catching highlight passes that at some point became routine.
In the last game, in front of a rocking crowd of 19,006 that was virtually all MU fans, Pressey scored 15 points on eight shots with eight assists and — this is the killer — only one turnover.
As a team, Mizzou shot 54 percent with 14 assists and eight turnovers — incredible numbers that are incredibly not far off the Tigers’ season averages.
To watch this MU team play is to watch college basketball the way a lot of us wish every team played. It is a blurry run of no-look passes, off-ball screens, clean jumpers and layups.
When a teammate falls down, a teammate helps him up. No substitution happens without a high-five. After the game, they get on the bus and have freestyle rap contests.
Ricardo Ratliffe calls this the most unselfish team he’s ever played on. Michael Dixon has long grown accustomed to the other team’s coaches thanking him for playing the right way. Bob Knight told Frank Haith this is the best-coached team in the country — and after the wretched way this same group finished last season, who could’ve seen any of this coming?
This is the team of Ratliffe’s spin moves, Steve Moore’s constant motion, Matt Pressey’s defense, Marcus Denmon’s hard drives to the rim and Kim English’s long jumpers.
Some more numbers: MU is ranks second nationally in assist-to-turnover ratio, is one of only three teams shooting above 50 percent and ranks among the top 10 in scoring, fewest turnovers, and turnover margin.
Rip away the baggage that comes with playing for the school (too) many blame for blowing up the Big 12, and the gorgeous on-court product would be easier for everyone to appreciate.
This team has flaws. They’re not great defensively, particularly around the rim. They have only seven scholarship players and a very specific way to win, so matchups, injuries and foul trouble means more here than other places.
But, my gosh it’s fun to watch.
Drama be darned.
Everything that happens around this team seems to be assigned some greater meaning. Even a relatively routine win over Texas in the tournament semifinal was read by some as MU sticking it to the school that drove it out of the league.
And everything the Tigers say seems to be assigned some political message, right or wrong, intended or not, so that when Dixon says, “this is Kansas City, Missouri,” or athletic director Mike Alden says, “to see 17,000 or 18,000 fans in black and gold in the Sprint Center is proof positive that this is a Mizzou town,” it’s automatically thought to be a shot back at Self.
Maybe it is.
Maybe it isn’t.
It’s just that the more effort we spend trying to figure out the bigger meanings of things happening around a group of players who had nothing to do with a decision that’s already been made, the more we miss enjoying one of the most beautiful college basketball teams in recent memory.
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