Wounded Dancers

Injuries in basketball can hurt. They can hurt the player afflicted with the injury as well as hurting the team’s chances of winning, especially teams dancing in the NCAA tournament. Some injuries don’t hurt teams too much because they have so much other talent, but sometimes they can be fatal to a team. Illinois was plagued by the injury of their star point guard Chester Frazier (5.3 assists per game, which led the Big Ten) and ended up getting upset by 12th seeded Western Kentucky in the first round. Number 1-seeded North Carolina was really depleted when superstar point guard Ty Lawson (16 ppg and 6.5 assists per game to lead ACC) went down with a toe injury because they had lost their other point guard, Marcus Ginyard, at the beginning of the year. They managed to obliterate Radford 101-58 in the first round without him and then were very relieved when he was able to play and play well in their 2nd round victory over LSU (he scored 23 points). So some guys can overcome an injury to help their team. Levance Fields of Pittsburgh overcame back trouble to help his number 1-seeded team win in the first two rounds. Even though he didn’t perform that well in the first game win over East Tennessee State, he rebounded to score 13 points with 9 assists in the second game victory over Oklahoma State and also hit a key shot late in the game to help secure the victory. Marquette was thought to be a Final Four team in the beginning of the year after starting 23-4, but then star guard Dominic James got hurt and the Golden Eagles lost 5 out of their last 6 regular season games including the game when he was injured. They barely escaped against 11th-seeded Utah State with a 58-57 win in the first round of the NCAA tourney. James came back for the second game, but couldn’t do much as his team was eliminated by Missouri. The biggest and possibly the most influential injury may turn out to be 1-seeded Connecticut’s Jerome Dyson. He missed the 2nd half of the regular season after averaging over 13 points per game. His injury hurts Uconn depth, but they have many bench players like Craig Austrie who can try to fill in. If Dyson doesn’t return during the Huskies’ run in the tournament, they may have more of a struggle winning tough games like this week’s matchup with Purdue. Connecticut’s coach, Jim Calhoun, was hospitalized because of dehydration and missed their first game in the tourney. The good news for UConn about this “injury” is that the last two NCAA tournaments where Calhoun missed a game resulted in a national championship for the Huskies (1999, 2004). So unfortunately, some teams dancing in the tourney had their season’s cut short by a fallen dancer. But fortunately, some teams are talented enough to go on without them, and some players, or dancers, feel that the show must go on and that it’s do or die at this point in the year.