2002-2003 Men's Basketball Preview

By Jack Ferdon

Men's basketball coach Dick Davey would love to tell you that this year's team will be a huge improvement over last season's.

He would love to say that prized junior college transfers J.R. Patrick and Alex Kargbo are ready to start dropping in threes, that Kyle Bailey is as quick as ever and that Jordan Legge and Scott Borchart are primed to provide some much-needed post scoring.

He would love to, but he cannot. The reason - injuries, and lots of them. At some preseason practices, Davey has barely had enough healthy players to get a weave drill going, and he definitely has not been able to get an idea of what his team - which has eight newcomers - will look like when non-conference play begins Nov. 22 at the University of Pacific.

The only good news to report is that all of the injured should be healed in time for conference action. Junior guards Bailey and Kargbo should be ready to practice by next week. The same goes for sophomore big man Legge, who had arthroscopic surgery last week. Redshirt freshman Borchart, who is expected to get a lot of minutes, hurt his shoulder in a recent scrimmage against Stanford and will not be back until December. Patrick underwent knee surgery earlier in the year and will not be able to practice until next month.

As a result, Santa Clara's starting five for this Friday's exhibition game against the Olympic Club - an AAU team with a bunch of 30-year-olds from San Francisco - will be sophomore guards Bakari Altheimer and Ethan Rohde, junior center Jim Howell and seniors Brad and Cord Anderson at the three and four spots. That squad might be decent enough to defeat some has-been yuppies, but it won't hold a vanilla-scented candle to WCC titans Gonzaga and Pepperdine, or even to some of the Broncos' early non-conference opponents such as Fresno St. or Washington.

It would seem that all the injuries offer Davey a sizable crutch in assessing his team's chances this season, but he refuses to lean on it.

"It's no fun having injured players, but you can't use that as an excuse," said Davey. "You have to take the players you've got and beat the other team on the court. That's what athletics are all about."

Perhaps the most disappointing of the injuries has been Patrick's. Davey scored another Canadian coup when he signed the six-foot-four-inch native of Alberta. Not even Steve Nash was as highly sought after as Patrick, who earned second-team junior college All-American honors last year at South Dakota State College of Science while averaging 17 points a game and hitting 50 percent of his three-point attempts.

Patrick is joined on this year's team by another junior college transfer, San Jose native Alex Kargbo. Kargbo is nearly as accurate from beyond the arc, having made 46 percent of his threes while scoring 20 points a game at nearby De Anza College.

So this year's offense should be more multi-faceted than last year's, in which Bailey and the departed Steve Ross took more than a quarter of the team's shots and the team as a whole shot only 40 percent. Or maybe it won't.

Add Patrick and Kargbo to an already three-crazy backcourt with Bailey (who shot more than four threes a game from the point guard position last year) and Rohde (70 percent of his shots were from long distance), and Santa Clara might not take a two-point shot all season.

With all the potential clamoring for the ball, the offense is crying out for a textbook, John Stockton-like point guard who thinks "pass first." Bailey was serviceable at the one last season, but he had few legitimate scorers to pass to other than Ross, and was called upon to provide a lot of offensive power himself. Consequently, he scored 13.6 points a game but had an assist-to-turnover ratio of one-to-one.

Another option at the point could be Altheimer, a five-foot-nine-inch guard who had a few productive games as a freshman but shot under 30 percent from the floor for the season.

"Bakari will get some minutes at the one if he can produce," Davey said.

Santa Clara's point guard will need not only to spread the ball among the shooters, but also to distribute it down low and get some scoring out of the big men. Legge and Howell ranked first and second, respectively, on the team in shooting but averaged only a combined nine points a game and at times were hesitant to put up a shot.

Defensively, Santa Clara won't miss Ross, who too often was thinking about his next shot while guarding his man. But the frontcourt will be noticeably smaller without seven-footer David Emslie, whose size alone caused players to change their shots and Jason Westphal, who was one of the top rebounders on the team.

Legge, Howell, Borchart and redshirt freshman Linden Tibbetts (who struggled to gain weight this offseason due to wisdom teeth removal) might all prove to be too light to bang down low with the likes of Gonzaga's big men Zach Gourde and Cory Violette. But with Patrick and Kargbo now in the mix, Santa Clara should have the backcourt to match up with guard-heavy teams like Pepperdine for the first time in a number of seasons.

The infusion of eight new people to a team that was generally pretty tight last year could have altered the group's chemistry, but Davey has not seen any evidence of that.

"We feel like it's a pretty solid group of guys that likes each other and respects each other," he said. "But winning and losing will go a long way in determining that. Winning teams tend to have good chemistry; losing teams don't."

The injuries might not hurt the Broncos as much at first, as Santa Clara plays a non-conference schedule that is slightly easier than last year's. However, Santa Clara still plays four teams (Pacific, Washington, Wright St. and Nevada) that it lost to a year ago, in addition to battling Fresno St. and UNLV - teams that might paste the Broncos even if they were at full strength.

It will not get any easier once conference play begins. The WCC is probably even stronger than last year. Gonzaga and Pepperdine each return four starters and figure to return to the NCAA tournament. USF still has Darrell Tucker, perhaps the best player in the league. Saint Mary's, who knocked Santa Clara out of the first round of the conference tournament last year, should be much improved with an excellent recruiting class.

The Broncos had better get healthy, otherwise they'll be wincing from the kind of pain they felt after last year's losing season.