The NCAA Tournament provides the greatest basketball entertainment in the world, and here’s a different list of winners (or losers) from the Big Dance
The NCAA Tournament is an annual celebration of collegiate athletics at its finest, and in its finest sport: Basketball. Every March, 68 Teams from across the nation gather for sports’ grandest battle royale. It’s a magical time. Fairytales are written. Legends are born. And champions are crowned. The three-week basketball carnival produces its share of highs and lows for each of its participants, but rewards college basketball enthusiasts with an unrivaled slate of contentious matchups, inevitable chaos, supreme unpredictability, and an exuberant spirit of competition. When the confetti settled this year, Virginia stood victors over Texas Tech. That lone yet remarkable ball game decided the sole proprietor of 2019 glory but fails to encapsulate the Tournament’s extensive entertainment. Here’s to the entities which also earned their spot in NCAA Tournament lore–and are deserving of recognition, good or bad.
Without further ado, here are my awards for the 2019 NCAA Tournament:
The Kemba Cup
Since 2011, the year of “Cardiac Kemba,” where now-NBA-superstar Kemba Walker dragged 4th-seeded Connecticut to Jim Calhoun’s second championship banner behind his herculean one-man offensive outbursts, which became more ridiculous by the round, the mold for a team offensively dominated by a single man was born. Walker led his team in points in each of the Huskies six victories en route to winning the national title.
He averaged 23.5 points per game (which doesn’t jump off the page), but on a UCONN team which thrived defensively and played at a pace in the NCAA Tournament similar to Virginia in recent years. Kemba etched his name into the Rosetta Stone of College Basketball and constructed an archetype for one-man scoring dynamos in the NCAA Tournament. And this year, the basketball gods blessed America with a plethora of “Kemba Candidates.” I’ll hit the two that stood out.
Cassius Winston, Michigan State
Michigan State ran the gamut of injury detriment. Starting shooting guard and second-leading scorer Josh Langford’s season was abruptly cut short due to some kind of foot injury in January. Starting Center Nick Ward and reserve wing Kyle Ahrens each missed a significant amount of time as well, with Ahrens missing the end of State’s season and Ward never fully healing from a broken wrist. Point guard Cassius Winston was the stalwart.
Through the unending lineup turmoil and the unpredicted ensuing success, Winston manned the ship. In the NCAA Tournament, Cassius was the Ali to the East Region’s Joe Frazier’s (Duke, namely). Rather than dominating with ungodly scoring outputs, Winston was brilliant in a verbose manner. Vision, control, and big shot-making are his calling cards. His ability to circumvent the Spartan offense and fix teammates with the perfect shot, while also serving as the primary scorer made defenses uncomfortable, and helped Sparty thrive in late-game situations.
Winston seemingly made every right decision and sunk every open shot, all in a timely and winning habit. His run in the postseason will likely be forgotten by the nation at-large. I’m sure he’s won the hearts of Michigan State fans for eternity. After all, he was the David who slew the Goliath, THE Zion.
Winner: Carsen Edwards, Purdue
Purdue considerably overachieved their preseason expectations after losing four of five starters off a top-two-seed in 2018. The leading scorer, Edwards, would return, and you’d have been locked in the College-Basketball-Take asylum with Graham Couch and Jason McIntyre had you claimed Purdue would come within seconds, literally, of the Final Four.
All respect to Matt Painter and Boilermaker supporting cast, but this was a direct result from one man’s (though I might consider Edwards in the Rothstein ranks of More Machine than Man with Zion) heroics. That man, Carsen Edwards, put together a Kemba candidacy rivaling the founder himself, and he only played in four games! Had Purdue cut the nets down (a laughable premise given the lacking pot of talent in West-Lafayette), Edwards would’ve usurped naming rights of this award. In his four tournament games, Carsen Edwards amassed 139 total points, just two shy of Walker’s 2011 total. Since the dawn of the Kemba Cup, there has never been a stronger candidate, albeit one who exited during the second weekend.
Edwards’ gallery of shot-making miracles trumps all since the invention of the three-point line. I’ll just link the highlight tapes from his 40-point outings versus Villanova and Virginia. In those contests, Edwards was unconscious. He obliterated the nets at the KFC Yum! Center in what wound up being a heart-crushing defeat. For 45 minutes of basketball, Carsen Edwards morphed into a mutant Steph Curry. Yes, I said it: A BETTER STEPHEN CURRY.
He tattooed the nylon with his name. Bucket after bucket after bucket. The sub-six-foot Edwards and his floppy bowl-cut dreadlocks single-handedly controlled games with the likes of Grant Williams, De’Andre Hunter, Ty Jerome, Admiral Schofield, and Eric Paschall involved. This was an unprecedented offensive explosion. We may never see shot-making dynamite with that level of force for a long, long time. Take your trophy, Carsen, you earned every inch of it.