Mark Titus on the Pac-12

Mark Titus, informative and usually a hoot to read, previews the Pac-12 Conference. Do sit back and read this one.

Choice items:

"...UCLA, Colorado, and Stanford all look good enough to win at least one NCAA tournament game this season. Throw in wild-card teams like Cal (Cuonzo Martin has some talent to work with), Oregon (assuming it still has five eligible players come March)..."

and

"Best College Player: Delon Wright (Utah)

Here’s the list of players who averaged 15-plus points, five-plus rebounds, five-plus assists, two-plus steals, and one-plus blocks per game in all of D-I basketball last season:

Delon Wright.

That’s it.

I’ll admit it’s not hard to come up with a set of parameters that makes any player seem way better than he actually is. But I don’t think that applies in this case, since these are major, straightforward statistics with logical cutoff points, and not just Wright’s stats. Those stats, by the way, were 15.5 points, 6.8 rebounds, 5.3 assists, 2.5 steals, and 1.3 blocks per game.


The only four other players who were even close to these metrics last season were Marcus Smart, Elfrid Payton, Shabazz Napier, and Kyle Anderson. All four were first-round picks in the 2014 NBA draft, and Payton has emerged as an early rookie of the year contender. Go ahead and guess which of those players has a similar body type to Wright’s 6-foot-5, 190-pound frame. Here’s a hint: It’s not the bruiser (Smart), the short and quick guy (Napier), or the tall and lanky guy (Anderson)..."