Do you realize that college basketball teams can start practicing next Friday?
Hard to believe. Pitt’s first exhibition game will be November 1 against Carnegie Tech.
Honestly, the whole month of September has been a blur. The last couple weeks we’ve seen gaggles of high school kids all dressed up for homecoming or fall formals. Totally threw us off to realize it was the end of September.
Preview magazines for college basketball are trickling onto the newstands and I haven’t had a chance to review them.
Give some credit to the Pitt football team for at least holding our interest. They may not be ready to be a top-25 or contending team, but they are a bowl team and they have lots of potential.
Back to B-ball.
A couple weeks ago, there was an article in the Trib. focusing on transfer Mike Cook.
“Who is Mike Cook?”
It promises to be a popular query among Pitt basketball fans when the Panthers open the season with a pair of home exhibition games in early November.
Cook is a transfer from East Carolina, where he led the Conference USA Pirates in scoring two years ago. He figures to blend in nicely with a veteran Pitt team that is being touted as a preseason favorite in the Big East Conference.
I’ve been very eager to see Cook in action since it was announced that he was transferring and sitting out all of last year. Cook spent the summer in Pittsburgh playing in the local college league and just further bonding with his teammates rather than go back to Philly for the summer and where the summer leagues are traditionally very competitive.
Well, the B-ball writer for CBS Sportsline decided to answer the question about Cook in his blog (Sept. 19 entry).
Allow me to supply the answer.
Cook is a 6-foot-4 guard from Philadelphia, one who played his first two years of college basketball at East Carolina for Bill Herrion. There, he was great, averaging 12.8 points per game — including 15 points per game as a sophomore — while reaching double-figures in 41 of 55 contests. And keep in mind, this was not the depleted version of Conference USA that now exists. Cook did this in the C-USA that featured Louisville, Cincinnati, Marquette, Memphis and Charlotte, the C-USA that put two schools in the Final Four in a three-year span (Marquette in 2003 and Louisville in 2005) and was one of the better basketball leagues in the country.
At Pittsburgh, Cook — who was featured in my list of top 10 transfers a few weeks ago — will be the dynamic backcourt scorer any Final Four hopeful needs. He’ll create off the dribble, get into the lane and toss runners at the rim. In the process, the opposing big man will be forced to help, which should lead to some easy stickbacks for Pitt senior Aaron Gray, the 7-foot center whose return to school was wise and makes the Panthers the Big East favorites.
Who is Mike Cook?
He’s a difference-maker, a key part to a puzzle that when put together should be great. He’s a name not many know right now, but a guy I’m sure Marquette’s Tom Crean and Louisville’s Rick Pitino (two coaches who have seen Cook up close from that old C-USA) aren’t wild about dealing with this season.
The list Parrish made had Cook at #7. Parrish is doing positional rankings this week (he gets to Centers on Friday). So far the only Pitt player listed is Sam Young at #20 among Small Forwards.
Luke Winn at SI.com blogs today about his “all-breakout team” (hat tip to Mike).
G: Ronald Ramon, Pitt, Junior LAST SEASON: 8.0 points, 2.2 assists in 24.9 minutes/game< BREAKOUT FORMULA: The Panthers operated under a low-efficiency arrangement last season. Their point guard and leader, Carl Krauser, took an overwhelming amount of the team’s shots — 391, compared to star center Aaron Gray‘s 323 and Ramon’s 175. The problem? Krauser was hardly the team’s most efficient player: He fired at a pedestrian 40.2 percent clip from the field and 36.8 from long distance.
The division of labor in Pitt’s backcourt will be more traditional this year: Levance Fields will handle the ball and distribute, and Ramon will likely fill some of the 15-points-per-game scoring void left by Krauser. Putting the ball in Ramon’s hands should pay off: With limited opportunities in ’05-06, he led the Big East in 3-point percentage at 50.8 during conference games. More importantly, Ramon’s personal efficiency rating of 124.6 was more than 19 points higher than either Krauser’s (104.5) or Gray’s (105.3). Those numbers mean that if one had given Krauser and Ramon 100 possessions each to score last season, Ramon would have produced 20.1 more points than his fellow Bronx product.
Thankfully, the meat of Pitt’s non-con really doesn’t start until December (yes, there are a couple good games in November as well).
