BY MIKE LUCAS
UWBadgers.com Senior Writer
MADISON, Wis. — For one week in February — in what amounted to a revealing two-game window — there was no greater example of parity in the Big Ten than the top four teams going a combined 1-7.
"How wild is that?" Wisconsin assistant coach Joe Krabbenhoft posed incredulously. "It's so balanced and there's just a lot of parity. You can see it night-in and night-out."
Purdue beat Penn State in overtime but lost to Michigan. Wisconsin lost at Ohio State and Michigan State. Maryland lost to Minnesota and Iowa. Northwestern lost to Illinois and Indiana.
Outsiders might look at those results and suggest parody, not parity.
But that would be fake news to Michigan State's Tom Izzo.
"Parity doesn't mean poor," Izzo stressed during Monday's teleconference advancing this week's Big Ten tournament at the Verizon Center in Washington, D.C., a first-time site for the event. "Sometimes parity means we're deeper from top to bottom. I think the tournament is wide open more so than it has ever been."
By the time the Badgers start play Friday night against either Indiana or Iowa, it's likely that a higher seed will have fallen to a lower one based on the wild momentum swings, the plethora of overtimes and the unpredictability of a regular season that has given hope to everybody that they can come to our nation's capital and create some memories.
"The games will be ultra-competitive," predicted UW associate head coach Lamont Paris. "No team would probably ever admit this, but my guess would be in the past there have been a couple of matchups where teams don't really expect that they can have a great chance to win a game. Not this year. There won't be any teams that don't feel they can win any game at the tournament."
Krabbenhoft wasn't trying to sell tickets but he couldn't curb his enthusiasm.
"If I'm a basketball fan, I'm sitting in the Verizon Center because each game is going to be a coin toss," he said. "Coach (Greg) Gard said it best. There are no get-well games in January and there aren't any at the Big Ten tournament. You'd better be ready to go, one through 14, because if you're not, you're going to get beat."
While the competition has been healthy, the national rankings have been sickly. Purdue (No. 12) and Wisconsin (No. 23) are the only Big Ten teams in the Top 25 Coaches poll, a point of contention for Izzo. "I'm not playing the respect card or anything like that. But I've been in this league for 30 some years … Go ahead, tell me you'd rather play No. 12 or No. 7? Tell me, you'd rather play No. 13 or 5? There's a lot of parity and it means a lot of people beating up on each other."
Big Ten Network analyst Jon Crispin, a former Penn State and UCLA guard, subscribes to Izzo's reasoning. Before Sunday's game at the Kohl Center, the 30-year old Crispin said, "The conference, as a whole, goes into the league tournament with a little more so to prove. You heard Tom Izzo's comments. He's 100 percent correct. We haven't done enough marketing on how good this conference is."
When Crispin was asked what he expected to see over the five days at the Verizon Center, he said, "I would say it's going to be as unpredictable as the season, because the teams that you saw the first time around are completely different. For instance, Iowa is a much different team. Rutgers is a much different team. Indiana, not in a positive way, is a much different team. I look at Illinois, even though they lost to Rutgers, nobody wants to play Illinois right now."
He put Iowa in that category, too. "They look great, then they look awful," Crispin said of the Hawkeyes. "All of that is growth. Michigan State went through it. So now you have teams finally coming together where they're a little bit more consistent. They've finally developed the chemistry they need — understanding roles, redefining roles, all that stuff that happens during the course of a season."
Underscoring that developmental phase, Maryland's Mark Turgeon said, "We've got a tremendous league that has just gotten really, really good in the last month because we have great coaches in the league that make their teams better and we have young teams that got better. It's going to be some big-time basketball and we're just glad that we get to do it in our backyard."
The Verizon Center is 10 miles from the Xfinity Center on the College Park campus.
"I know we've sold all our allotment and I'm sure Terp fans have been trying to snatch up tickets," Turgeon said. "On Friday night, we should have a pretty good group. If we're lucky enough to advance … which is not easy to do at this time of the year … if we continue to advance our crowds will continue to grow. We're looking forward to playing in an arena that we feel comfortable in."
On Nov. 15, Maryland rallied to nip Georgetown, 76-75, at the Verizon Center.
"It's going to be pretty wide open, kind of like the season has been," echoed Big Ten Network analyst Shon Morris, a Northwestern grad. "You don't have three or four teams at the top that are consistently night-in and night-out demonstratively better than everyone else. The bottom quartile of the league is better than it has been. A lot of the talent is young."
Very young. Michigan State started three freshmen (Miles Bridges, Nick Ward, Joshua Langford). So did Maryland (Anthony Cowan, Justin Jackson, Kevin Huerter). So did Penn State (Tony Carr, Lamar Stevens, Mike Watkins). Iowa started two (Jordan Bohannon and Tyler Cook). And both were named to the Big Ten's All-Freshman team, along with Bridges, Carr and Minnesota's Amir Coffey.
"There are some pretty good freshmen," Morris observed, "that I think will stick around for a couple of years. In a couple of years, you'll probably have some teams at the top of the league that are more senior or junior-laden that will be maybe a little more dominant than some of the top teams we see now. All of this stuff is cyclical."
Brands are forever, though. As Gard opined, "The league has traditional powers and if they aren't necessarily at the top then it's viewed as the league is down. With the youth in the league, you've seen surges throughout the year. But then you've seen where they've shown their youth at times. There's maybe not a dominant team, you'd say, but the bottom teams have been very competitive."
Northwestern's Chris Collins doesn't believe the Big Ten has to take a backseat to anyone.
"We've been very undersold during the season," asserted Collins, the former Dukie. "This is a really good league. I think what you're going to see is once we get on the national stage and the teams that have the opportunity to play (in the NCAA tournament), when it's all said and done are going to do very well. There are many teams in this league that are built to win in the postseason."
Purdue's Matt Painter added the NCAA caveat, "We have to prove that we have a good league."
Crispin, for one, believes that the top Big Ten teams will benefit from a change of scenery.
Speaking directly to Wisconsin, he said, "This is like the perfect team to say, 'They need to get the heck out of the conference.' I think they'll thrive once they do. Teams in this conference understand how to take away what they want to do. And the way to take away what they do is to force them to do things that they don't want to do. If you're following me and what I'm saying."
Opposing defenses, he noted, have adjusted to Ethan Happ by doubling the post.
"When you double team," Crispin said, "you force a quick open shot within 15 seconds of the shot clock and they don't want to take it, so there's no rhythm for them. They want to operate the offense, they want to execute and they want to beat you at the basket. That's really what Wisconsin teams want to do. I just think teams have gotten more comfortable playing against this team."
Morris offered a similar viewpoint on the Badgers.
"They really have to figure out the best way and the most efficient way for them to attack those double-teams," he said. "Is it going to be getting the ball out of Happ's hands quickly? Is it going to be using the fan dribble and utilizing some cuts? And then guys just have to make some shots. That sounds simplistic. But it's the truth. Somebody has to make some shots.
"Just watching them," he said prior to Sunday's win over Minnesota during which the Badgers shot 50 percent in the second half (8-of-10 on 3-pointers), "it's more of a mental hurdle than physical. The biggest thing they can take out of the conference tournament is figuring that out."
Singling out the UW's low-post tandem of Happ and Nigel Hayes, Morris said, "The two guys who are getting fouled the most, Happ and Hayes, don't have to become Rick Barry at the foul line. But they have to see the ball go through. If you're playing them right now, you can say, 'Hey, I'm going to come with that aggressive double-team and if we foul then we foul. We'll take our chances with that."'
Crispin outlined a potential scenario for the No. 2-seeded Badgers at the Verizon Center. "Getting out of the (Big Ten) tournament with a win or two would be just fine," he said, "because I think they'd have all the confidence in the world getting into the NCAAs."
Of course, he could be saying that about many teams, maybe as many as seven or eight.
"There are a bunch of teams I wouldn't want to play," Morris said. "Even though they're kind of struggling right now, I wouldn't want to play Nebraska in that setting because no one really shoots the ball very well in that environment (an NBA venue). And the way they can throw sand in the gears, I'm not going to be surprised if they win the 12/13 game and beat whoever they play the second day.
"I think it's going to be that kind of tournament."
