America's Team ... if only temporarily
My dear Cal State Fullerton meets Duke on Friday night in Round 1 of the NCAA Tournament. Of course I am going ... and I suspect I won't be the only one rooting for the blue-and-orange-clad underdogs
Mike Krzyzewski has never coached a game in my presence and lost.
It's a streak that spans more than 30 victories across two Summer Olympics, one FIBA World Cup and several exhibition games to prepare for each of those gold medal runs with USA Basketball. That's a lot of postgame press conferences to attend, when totted up, without ever seeing an unhappy coach.
On Friday, finally, I will catch the sideline legend in a completely different realm — for both of us. Krzyzewski will be operating in the role that made him universally known as Coach K, leading Duke into the NCAA Tournament for the 36th and final time. I'll be attending as a blatantly biased spectator rather than stoic Team USA scribe, because Duke's first-round tourney opponent in Greenville, S.C., is (no freaking way) my beloved Cal State Fullerton.
I was on a family Spring Break trip when the #SelectionSunday machine churned out a 2 vs. 15 matchup that still doesn't seem real, pitting the mighty Blue Devils against the upstarts from Cal State Disneyland and necessitating some emergency travel adjustments that won't exactly enhance my Father of the Year campaign. But how, if you're me, could you even contemplate missing it?
I can't remember too many occasions in my alma mater's humble basketball history that the opponent, so reviled nationwide beyond its own considerable fan base, will make us America's Team ... if only for one night.
I became a Fullerton fan in middle school, years before I even thought about going there, after watching them stun Jerry Tarkanian's unbeaten and top-ranked UNLV Runnin' Rebels in 1983 on the immortal KDOC Channel 56 and the tiny black-and-white TV that I somehow managed to secure for my sports nerd bedroom.
Those Titans, though, were not good enough to go dancin' out of what was then a stacked Pacific Coast Athletic Association ... not even with Leon Wood, Michael Jordan's soon-to-be Olympic backcourt mate in 1984 as chosen by Bobby Knight over John Stockton, leading the program.
This will be just the fourth time in school history that we've reached The Big Dance and, given the circumstances, Friday's assignment has to be classified as the most significant single game Fullerton has ever played.
A win, after all, instantly ends Coach K's storied career and immortalizes Coach Dedrique Taylor and these Titans.
And if we fail to emerge as America’s Cinderellas, well, at least our return to reality comes via a prime Friday night slot on CBS that will force the network to send out its Jim Nantz/Bill Raftery/Grant Hill A team. The big names have to be there just in case Titan Tech pulls this miracle off.
Just a caution to Coach K: I'm on a pretty good streak of surreal lately when it comes to my Titans. It was just a few weeks ago, on Feb. 25, that I sat courtside right next to Cedric Ceballos to watch a come-from-behind home win over our down-the-road Orange County rivals UC Irvine when Ced and I were both unexpectedly on campus. That's the same Ceballos who ranks as the only Titan of 12 who have reached the NBA to earn All-Star status. We took the enclosed selfie, with Ced's retired No. 31 poetically looming over us, and let's just say you would have had a hard time convincing Early 20s Me that any of that besides the All-Star part loomed in our futures back when my Thursday and Saturday nights revolved completely around watching Ceballos play in cozy Titan Gym.
Yet I will refrain from attempting to provide a detailed scout of how we match up with Paolo Banchero and Co. because, in all candor, I haven't watched one second of Duke basketball this season — even with Banchero generating so much top-four pick talk. The extent of my fandom allotted for college basketball affords only the bandwidth to follow the Titans and Big West Conference matters. I know USA Basketball was only his side gig, but the reality is that, for myopic me, I think of him first as Team USA's Coach K. (Full disclosure: I’m certainly infected with some of the basketball snobbery that does overtake many of us upon becoming so immersed in NBA life.)
What I can say in terms of a preview: I'm not sure I've ever seen a Fullerton team play harder than this one does. Coach Taylor, Titan lifer Anthony Santos and a thoroughly unheralded staff that also features 2008 star Scott Cutley get the max out of their ballhawking array of feisty guards and wings. Remember the names of these Titans — Damari Milstead, Latrell Wrightsell Jr., Tory San Antonio, Tray Maddox Jr. and Jalen Harris — and how well they function collectively around leading scorer E.J. Anosike, our Bernard King, and fellow big man Vincent Lee.
Our last two tourney trips haven't worked out so well, resulting in losses to Wisconsin in 2008 and Purdue in 2018 by a combined 39 points, but be warned that we have pulled off major upsets before. Fullerton's heroic 1978 squad, as NCAA debutants, KO’d Michael Cooper's New Mexico and Bill Cartwright's San Francisco before losing narrowly in the Elite Eight of what was then a mere 32-team field to Sidney Moncrief-led Arkansas.
That team and those games should really be remembered and frequently highlighted as Fullerton's finest basketball hour, but footage from those days is scarce to the point of what I fear to be non-existence. I’ve been told for decades that the school possesses nothing in terms of watchable clips. I'm still struggling, after all these years, to find any meaningful dribbles from that run. (Someone from NBC — anyone — please help!)
Those long-ago upsets were so momentous that the Titans of '78 became known nationally as Cal State Who? Coach Bobby Dye, in a nod to a prominent exit off the 57 Freeway that takes you right to the school's front entrance, was dubbed The Wizard of Nutwood.
Do I dare to dream what we’ll call Taylor if he sends Duke’s Coach K into retirement?
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Numbers Game
🏀 7
Karl-Anthony Towns' 60-point game Monday night for Minnesota made this the seventh consecutive season in which the NBA regular season produced at least one 60-point game. That's three seasons longer than any other such streak in league history, according to our esteemed research maven pal Justin Kubatko.
🏀 14
The Lakers' LeBron James, who entered Tuesday's play ranked No. 2 in scoring at 29.7 points per game, is bidding for his first scoring crown since 2007-08, which would represent a league-record gap of 14 seasons if he pulls it off. I'm not currently speaking to my Duke-educated pal Micah Adams of The Sporting News for obvious reasons, but I couldn't ignore this well-crafted tweet from Adams putting into context just how rare James' offensive production is in his 19th NBA season.
🏀 3
Some far more unpleasant reading for James and Lakers fans from Adams on Monday night: That home loss to Toronto (attended by yours truly) dropped the Lakers to 29-39 — making this just the third team in LeBron's career to fall at least 10 games below .500 at any point during the season. The other two: LeBron's first Laker team in 2018-19 slipped to 31-41 en route to a 37-45 mark in a season in which he lost 27 games to injury and his first Cavs team (35-47) as an NBA rookie in 2003-04.
🏀 1,336
Gregg Popovich became the winningest regular-season coach in NBA history last Friday when San Antonio beat Utah, giving Popovich his 1,336th victory — all with the Spurs. That's by far the most NBA coaching victories with one franchise; next in line are Utah's Jerry Sloan (1,127) and Boston's Red Auerbach (795). Also:
🏀 8
Popovich, in his 26th season coaching the Spurs, is one of just eight coaches across the four original major North American sports leagues to spend at least 25 seasons in charge of the same franchise. Check out the titans of coaching and managing that puts him with in the enclosed graphic; Popovich is the only NBA coach among 340-plus in league history to make the list:
🏀 229
One number out of reach for Popovich: Phil Jackson's record 229 NBA playoff victories. Popovich has 170, one shy of No. 2 Pat Riley's 171.
🏀 58
Miami's Markieff Morris missed 58 games due to whiplash after taking a shove in the back from Denver's Nikola Jokić on Nov. 8, which was preceded by Morris' bodycheck. Morris finally returned to Miami's lineup in Saturday's loss to Minnesota.
🏀 7
Sunday's Big West Conference championship game was the seventh time in school history that my Cal State Fullerton Titans played a single game to determine if they would reach (or miss) the NCAA Tournament. The Titans are now 4-3 in those games after a 72-71 victory over our longtime neighbors and rivals Long Beach, having previously prevailing in 1978 (also over Long Beach), 2008 (over UC Irvine) and 2018 (Irvine again) and losing in 1982 (to Fresno State), 1985 (to Nevada-Las Vegas) and 2019 (to Irvine).