The UConn Huskies are the winners of the NCAA Championship game over the Butler Bulldogs, 53-41 coach Jim Calhoun won his third NCAA Championship with Connecticut. The Huskies came into the regular season unranked in preseason polls.
Junior guard Kemba Walker was the catalyst for UConn the entire year, but he couldn’t do it without freshman guard Jeremy Lamb. Lamb has been Walker’s calm and collective teammate that has seen his game improve through playing with Walker.
Walker is a one-of-a-kind basketball player. He has the skill set of an NBA player and exerts a great amount of tenacity defensively. Walker finished the night with 16 points and nine rebounds, while Lamb had 12 points and seven rebounds.
The Huskies faced last year’s NCAA Championship runners-up in the Butler Bulldogs under coach Brad Stevens. The Bulldogs displayed what CBS broadcasters said was a terrible shooting performance (18.8 percent), and relied on their defense to keep them within striking range.
The Bulldogs have made non-believers into to believers with their Cinderella play in the last two NCAA Tournaments. They have shown mid-major teams in the NCAA that they belong in the world of college basketball. But for the second straight year they have come short in the big game.
This year the Bulldogs were led by senior forward Matt Howard and junior guard Shelvin Mack. Howard and Mack combined to shoot 5-for-28 from the field and 4-for-15 from the three-point line. Mack had 13 points and nine rebounds while Howard had seven points and six rebounds. The Huskies have a good defense game plan, but many speculate it was more Butler’s inability to score than it was good defense from Walker and his teammates.
Credit should be given where it has been earned and deserved. The Huskies are the National Champions in collegiate basketball, and they did it by stepping their game up in tournament play. The Huskies ended the year by playing their best basketball down the stretch. They were 14-0 in tournament games this year, going 11-0 in the final two tournaments.
In spite of all the accomplishments the Huskies achieved this season, let us not forget on Calhoun’s 25th-year as a coach he was suspended the first three games of the 2011-2012 Big East season for failure to monitor and promote an atmosphere for compliance.
Will the Huskies be favored to win it all next season? I think not. The Huskies are bringing talent back next season with a probable good recruiting class, but this year’s tournament was a great example of why it is better to pick the field than the favorite to win it all. Look where Ohio State ended up in the NCAA Tournament — beaten by a young athletic Kentucky team that went to the Final Four after losing its best players to the NBA draft last year.
The NCAA Tournament was great this season, as it always has been. The championship game could have ended with a little better shooting from both teams, but the road to the Final Four did not disappoint.
There were upsets, Cinderella teams and player-of-the-year candidates who made the tournament the big stage that college fans around the world were following.
Because of this tournament, we now know Jimmer Fredette can shoot from the moon, that Derrick Williams is a man playing among boys and Walker is good enough to lead his team to an NCAA championship and win it all.