NASHVILLE, Tenn. – Vanderbilt will likely need to win the SEC Tournament next weekend in order to get to the NCAA Tournament. Even so, this season will hardly go down as a failure and especially when one considers where this team was just a couple of months ago.
The Commodores went 11-3 in non-conference play, winning the Cancun Challenge by knocking off VCU in the final. They also knocked off South Florida and blew out UMass on the road. But this youthful team, which doesn’t have a senior, also lost to UIC by 19 while giving Illinois and Georgia Tech a battle before succumbing to each as well. All told, that wasn’t bad.
Once the calendar turned to 2009, it was on to SEC play after the win at UMass. The Commodores lost at Kentucky, then lost four in a row after beating Georgia at home. They were 1-5 and could easily have been described as simply a team of the future given their youth.
After Sunday’s 75-58 win over Arkansas, the Commodores finish the season with three straight wins and an 8-8 mark in SEC play. Only one SEC team will enter the tournament with a longer winning streak (Auburn has won four straight) and no team has a better record in the last ten games than their 7-3 mark. Those all point to a team that has grown as the season went along.
“To start out 1-5 and be able to claw your way back to get to 8-8 is an accomplishment,” said head coach Kevin Stallings. “Obviously, we would like to be a few games better, but we’re not. I’m proud of our team’s effort, performance and character in the second half of the conference season, when we kind of got behind the eight ball.”
Stallings’ opposite number on Sunday had similar sentiments.
“I know what it’s like to be staring at 1-5, and for Coach Stallings and his basketball team to continue to plug along and get themselves where they are today, they’re to be commended for that,” said Arkansas head coach John Pelphrey. “That is a very difficult hole to come out of, and they should be applauded for that.”
The SEC is young this season, and the Commodores fit right into that mold. According to KenPom.com, they are the eighth-least-experienced team in the nation (out of 344 Division I teams). In the last eight games, they started three freshmen, a sophomore and a junior, and went 5-3 in that time; that starting lineup as a whole has gone 9-5 on the season.
Stallings doesn’t think the starting lineup has much to do with the turnaround, although it might appear to at first glance. It would seem he’s found the right combination to start with, and perhaps there is a degree to which it has helped and not so much because of who starts, but because everyone knows their role more. But his feeling is that the team simply didn’t quit and grew up during the SEC season. He noted that he didn’t finish the game with the same guys who started, although by the time the game was over they had a double-digit lead they didn’t have at the beginning. (They didn’t have five little-used players in the game.)
“I think the key has been not who’s playing, but how they’re playing,” Stallings said, noting that key players like A.J. Ogilvy, Jermaine Beal and Jeffrey Taylor in particular have played well. “I just think we have a number of guys playing well, as opposed to before when we had a lot of guys playing not so hot.”
One of the freshmen starters, Brad Tinsley, was quick to cite the leadership of the older players in the team’s growth. Beal and George Drake are the only scholarship juniors, so they’ve been the leaders along with Ogilvy, who had a career-high 33 points in their win over LSU earlier in the week and then a double-double against Arkansas. They helped freshmen like Taylor, who showed promise early, as well as Tinsley and Steve Tchiengang come along during the season.
The Commodores haven’t been a team whose talent will leave anyone in awe, and this team is no different, but there’s certainly good talent to work with. Beal has become more of a scorer while still running the show capably and he and Tinsley basically split up ball-handling and scoring. Ogilvy has a lot of talent but still room to grow, while Tchiengang has a solid body and has improved all along from his high school years and Taylor is living up to his billing as the team’s top recruit. Festus Ezeli and Lance Goulbourne have potential and are solid reserves.
Although there were growing pains, Vanderbilt is in a better place right now than they were earlier in the season. It’s not just the 8-8 record and 19 overall wins, but more how they got there considering their SEC start.
“I think it says a lot about our team’s character,” said Taylor. “We were never down, we trusted what the coaches were telling us, and we believed in ourselves.”
That has Stallings feeling good entering the SEC Tournament.
“I’m feeling good because I think we’re playing probably our best basketball of the season,” said Stallings. “I feel good because I think they feel good. I think they feel good about where they’re at and they feel good about the way things are going, and that’s 90 percent of the battle. I like where we’re at.”
