Army aims to rebound from worst season

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West Point ? Coming off the worst basketball season in Army history, fourth-year coach Jim Crews isn't about to predict a reversal of fortunes, but he does see progress.
Army will open its 104th season of basketball tonight with its first appearance in the Preseason NIT. The Black Knights will play at Temple against an experienced Owls team and legendary coach John Chaney.
Army returns its five leading scorers and 12 players overall ? or roughly 80 percent of its offense ? from a club that went 3-24 (with only one win against a Division I foe) and lost its last 10 games.
With his third full recruiting class, Crews was successful in bringing more size to the team ? six of his eight freshmen are taller than 6-foot-5 and four tip the scales at more than 200 pounds. Expect Crews to use the freshmen and change the lineup frequently.
"It's a different atmosphere around the gym," said junior Matt Bell, Army's leading scorer last season (14.3 ppg.) and a Patriot League all-star candidate. "We're a lot more hungry and we're more experienced. Even though most of us are sophomores and juniors, all of us have played and we know what to expect."
Crews continues to use a motion offense, which can frustrate the opposition when Army runs it properly. Consistency on offense has been a problem.
"When you get a little older, that's when the wisdom kicks in," said Crews, whose first recruits are now juniors. "It has kicked in with some guys. Sometimes guys get a little bit bigger and quicker because they do have that wisdom and they have a better presence on the floor."
Bell said he sees a difference.
"I think we're closer to getting it," Bell said. "We're starting to understand. We're starting to become a better defensive team. Our offense, as guys are getting older and proving their skills, we're starting to get better offensively, as well."
Bell finished third in Patriot League scoring last year and was a second-team all-star. He scored in double figures 19 times, topping 30 points on two occasions. He will become Army's 25th 1,000-point scorer if he can average 16.2 points over 27 games.
"We need to get Matt Bell some help," Crews said. "We've had guys step up on occasion, but we have not provided him with consistent help."
Backcourt depth is not a big issue for Army, but an inexperienced frontcourt is a major problem.
Cory Sinning played the most alongside Bell, posting 7.6 points and 3.1 rebounds per game. Speedy Marshall Jackson has made 22 starts over two seasons and should see more time in the backcourt. Sophomores Grant Carter and Jarrell Brown are two sharpshooting guards who went off a couple times last season. Steve Stoll contributes big minutes but needs to improve his .264 shooting percentage.
Up front, Colin Harris was second on the team in scoring (9.1 ppg) and the leader in rebounds (3.6 rpg). He scored in double figures 11 times. Erik Engstrom is the lone senior on the team, but his minutes have come sparingly. Jimmy Sewell, at 6-11, set a school record with 29 blocked shots but has not become a big presence on offense. Corban Bates played in just the last two games of the season but averaged seven points and 5.5 rebounds against regular-season champ Holy Cross.
Bell said he was encouraged by what he saw from his team late last season and hopes to improve on it this season.
"I think at the end of the year, we began playing a lot more closer and competitive games," Bell said. "We were right on the cusp of pulling some of those out. Some guys have a little more experience, so that will pay off late in games and starting second halves and sustaining a good effort."
The home opener is 7:30 p.m. Friday against Division III Polytechnic of Brooklyn

 

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Owls appear headed for another strange season




This doesn't sound like John Chaney and doesn't necessarily sound promising for Temple's prospects this season. The Owls coach keeps saying, "We're going to have to be a much better team in terms of shooting."

Shooting percentage has never been a statistic Chaney has valued too much. Temple's past success was fueled by low turnovers and defense.

But Chaney is being realistic. Last season, the Owls made only 27.5 percent of their three-pointers and just 26.2 percent in Atlantic Ten play. Chaney knows what those numbers add up to: NIT.

"I've got to stop hollering at them when we hold a team to 52 points and lose, and I holler that we've got to play better defense," said Chaney, who is coming off a 16-14 season and his fourth straight NIT appearance - after 24 NCAA tournament appearances in 26 years.

"We've got to put the ball in the basket," he said. "It's just that simple."

Whether this is Chaney's last season or not, it already is shaping up as another strange campaign. The Owls thought they had two centers coming back, but neither is with them. Keith Butler transferred to DePaul, and Wayne Marshall's unsolved dizzy spells have kept him off the court.

So, should we expect a season of misery on North Broad Street?

Not so fast. NBA scouts are flocking to see Mardy Collins, and few doubt his NBA future. The Owls have one of the taller backcourts in the country with the 6-foot-6 Collins, who averaged 17.5 points as a junior, teaming with 6-5 sophomore Mark Tyndale and 6-5 junior Dustin Salisbery.

If their shooting gets untracked, that trio could cause opponents problems at both ends. Also, expect 6-6 freshman Dionte Christmas, whose specialty is spot-up shooting, to see a lot of playing time, either as a starter or sixth man.

Don't be surprised to see Tyndale handling the ball a lot. That's what he was doing for much of practice on Thursday. (At that same practice, Salisbery sat out with back problems, but that won't keep him out of games.)

Forward Antywane Robinson, a 6-8 senior, also returns, and may be the tallest player on the court at times. Without Marshall - who isn't practicing, isn't expected to play for at least the first semester, and may not be out there at all - other inside options Chaney is looking at are freshman Anthony Ivory and Nehemiah Ingram, who plays football for Temple and can't join the team until that season ends after Saturday's finale at Navy.

Ivory is officially listed at 300 pounds, but Chaney said: "He's about 380 now. He was four [hundred]. He has skill. He doesn't jump, but he doesn't need to; he's that wide. He just turns and the world turns."

Ivory has shown that if you get him the ball, he knows how to get it in the basket. The hope, Chaney said, is that Ivory can give the Owls four- and five-minute spells. Otherwise, he said, "we're all guards. They're big guards, but you've got to be able to look toward the basket, and the defense always has to be threatened by what's behind them."

"We're so small," Collins said. "I really don't think it's going to be a disadvantage for us. It might even help us... . I think it's going to help us get up the court and run a little bit more.

"Especially for me and Mark, it's going to help us a lot. Last year, with Keith and Wayne, it kind of clogged the basket [area], which is not bad. But they allowed teams to stop us from driving to the basket."

Tyndale, who averaged 12.5 points per game, is active at both ends of the court. He was second on the team in shots taken but made just 21.6 percent of his three-pointers. The Owls will be looking for that to improve, and for Salisbery, a constant offensive threat who averaged 11.6 points per game, to help defensively and on the boards.

The way Collins looks at it, the Owls weren't a good rebounding team last season with more big guys. Playing point guard, he led the team with 5.9 boards a game and grabbed seven a game in A-10 play.

"As a team, we're really going to have to box out," Collins said. "Coach Dan [Leibovitz] has been emphasizing that."

Does this team have enough parts to get back to the NCAA tournament? With nonleague opponents such as Duke, Maryland, Alabama, Auburn, South Carolina and Miami, Chaney knows the bottom line. Just playing those teams isn't enough.

"We need to win against the tougher teams," Chaney said.

 

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Collins needed to be noticed - and Temple's Chaney did

By Mike Jensen

Inquirer Staff Writer


It was close, real close. What if that high school game hadn't been scheduled for Temple's McGonigle Hall that night? Owls coach John Chaney, just off an airplane from a game at North Carolina State that afternoon, wouldn't have walked in off Broad Street and seen this skinny kid tearing it up for Simon Gratz High.

What if the plane had been late?

Then Mardy Collins might not be at Temple, ready to start his senior year tonight at the Liacouras Center against Army in the first round of the Preseason NIT, with NBA scouts making appointments to watch him.

"It was an amazing thing," said Bill Ellerbee - now a Temple assistant coach, then Collins' high school coach at Simon Gratz - remembering his senior year.

"Mardy was having a heck of a season," said Ellerbee, who was trying to sell Collins to a lot of schools. "Maybe because he came out of pretty much nowhere, people weren't taking a chance on him. Even some of the mid-majors. They'd see a kid have 28 points, 18 rebounds, 8 assists, then they'd tell you they'd want the tape on him. Coach [Chaney] saw him one time and said, 'I want him.' "

The Owls didn't have any scholarships left, but Chaney, who saw him play one other time that year, hatched a plan for Collins to walk on, then get on scholarship as a sophomore. At that point, Collins said, his only other option was Coppin State.

As a senior at Gratz, Collins was a 6-foot-5 forward - college recruiters wouldn't have known that he had just grown three inches that summer, that he had mostly been a point guard growing up. At Gratz, he played the high post. Then Ellerbee usually had him handle the ball in the fourth quarter.

That was his only year as a high school starter. He had been behind a lot of seniors the year before at Gratz, learning the system. He'd even thought about transferring, Collins said.

And there wasn't much reason for anyone to have heard of him before. As a freshman at Roxborough High and a sophomore at Bartram, Collins didn't play for the school teams.

"I really didn't play organized ball until I got to Gratz. I played with a lot of older guys on playgrounds around my neighborhood and at Gustine Lake [Recreation Center]," Collins said. "Just playing with them, I picked up things. I never left my neighborhood."

Until he had to leave East Falls after his freshman year.

"Everybody had to move out," Collins said. "They were rebuilding the whole housing development."

He ended up living with relatives in Southwest Philadelphia.

"It was tough... [because] everybody was scattered throughout the city," Collins said. "I'd go to Bartram, come back, sit in the house. I didn't play that much basketball. I didn't try out for the team."

The following summer, Collins attended Rasheed Wallace's basketball camp. Ellerbee had never heard of Collins, but he saw him at the camp, talked to him, and remembered saying that if he wasn't playing, there could be a spot at Gratz for him.

"I could see it," Ellerbee said. "He had good strong legs. He hadn't developed much up top. He was thin."

The game was always important to Collins. Bob Johnston at Gustine Lake and John Hardnett, working there in the summers, encouraged him and taught him the finer points.

Collins knew he could play. He remembered playing as a senior for Gratz at the Beach Ball Classic in Myrtle Beach, S.C. Future college and NBA players Bracey Wright, Deron Williams and Sebastian Telfair were there. Collins made the all-tournament team.

"And I still wasn't getting recruited," Collins said.

The Germantown Academy game was an obvious measuring stick, because GA had Matt Walsh (headed for Florida) and Lee Melchionni (headed for Duke). Looking back, Collins had his statistics from the game exactly right: 25 points, 14 rebounds. Gratz won by two.

That game was in January. Many college programs aren't even evaluating seniors by then. They've already signed the best of them to letters of intent and are moving on to juniors and sophomores. The system isn't set up for players who don't compete on the national summer circuit, then blossom late.

As it turned out, Collins ended up with a scholarship at Temple from the start when another freshman failed to qualify academically.

Here's what everyone else missed out on:

"His knowledge for the game is really scary sometimes, just as far as remembering patterns," Owls assistant Dan Leibovitz said. "He remembers everything basketball-related. He'll come to me and remind me of something I said when he was a freshman: 'Don't you remember you told us...'

"Or Coach will put a pattern in and do a lot of changes, options and options and options. Sometimes, the next day, we'll go back through it, and Mardy's really the guy, he'll remember everything."

"Coach's got a thousand different sets," Ellerbee said. "Mardy knows all of them. He's almost like a savant."

"His attention for basketball, I think, will really get him over at the next level," Leibovitz said. "He's going to be one of these guys, like Aaron [McKie], where you can just put him in and he's going to pick it up quickly. He's got that kind of mind for basketball."

Now Collins doesn't worry about being overlooked. Temple's schedule got him noticed, and Collins excelled last year against all-Americans from Duke and Wake Forest. This summer, he played at the under-21 World Championships in Argentina.

"It's one thing to be mentioned with those guys, that you're one of the top players in the country," Collins said of that experience. "But to go out and prove it, and be able to see just how good everybody was... Coming out of it, I realized I'm just as good as some of them."

But he hasn't forgotten all the close calls. Not just the game at McGonigle Hall. What if he hadn't gone to Wallace's camp? What if he'd never left Bartram, or hadn't been forced to leave East Falls, or if he'd transferred from Gratz as he thought about doing?

"Lots of crossroads," Ellerbee said.

Collins never lost faith in himself.

"I always had it in my head that I would get seen," he said.

The 500 Club

Temple coach John Chaney will go for his 500th win at the school when the Owls host Army tonight in the first round of the Preseason NIT.

Chaney, who was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2001, has a career record of 724-297 in 33 years as a coach at Division II Cheyney State and Temple, where he is 499-238 in 23 years.