Basketball Tournaments

Writers from around Tribune Co. discuss some of the major conference basketball tournaments, including those of the ACC, SEC, Big East, Big Ten and Pac-12. Check back throughout the day for more responses and join the discussion with a comment of your own. Shannon Ryan, Chicago Tribune Don't expect many surprises in the SEC. Kentucky will keep rolling over conference opponents as if it's still the regular season. The Big East is always filled with surprises, and this season's big winner will be Marquette, which already beat Louisville and Georgetown this season.

The Pac-12 Conference's men's basketball tournament will move from Los Angeles to the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas beginning in 2013, the conference announced Tuesday. The new agreement runs through 2015. Previously, the Pac-12 held its men's tournament in downtown Los Angeles for 11 years, but that agreement expired this year.  Rumors had surfaced that the league was going to move the tournament to Las Vegas, and Pac-12 Commissioner Larry Scott said he received "overwhelming" positive feedback from fans about the possible move.  “We were lucky that we had a lot of interest and a lot of models to look at, but there is a clear difference between being in a destination like Las Vegas that has 40 million tourists and is known as a big-time sporting and entertainment destination … and is a neutral site,” Scott said during a conference call.

The state high school basketball tournament will not be coming to Southern California any time soon, the CIF council voted Friday in San Diego. The CIF announced last spring that the tournament, which has been held in Northern California every year but one since 1981, would began alternating between north and south this season with the event scheduled for The Pond of Anaheim in 1997.

Writers from around Tribune Co. discuss some of the major conference basketball tournaments, including those of the ACC, SEC, Big East, Big Ten and Pac-12. Check back throughout the day for more responses and join the discussion with a comment of your own. Shannon Ryan, Chicago Tribune Don't expect many surprises in the SEC. Kentucky will keep rolling over conference opponents as if it's still the regular season. The Big East is always filled with surprises, and this season's big winner will be Marquette, which already beat Louisville and Georgetown this season.

For many teenagers in the Pico-Union area, contact with the Los Angeles Police Department often involves foul behavior and ends up in court. For a few dozen youths from the tough neighborhoods near MacArthur Park, there may be some fouls this Saturday, but they'll be on a basketball court, where six community basketball teams will face two squads from the LAPD's Rampart station in a double-elimination tournament.

The fields are set for two boys' basketball tournaments. The Saugus High tournament will start Wednesday at 3:30 p.m. Antelope Valley will face Glendale in the first game, followed by Victor Valley-La Canada, Canyon-Quartz Hill and Sylmar-Saugus. The Nordhoff High tournament will open Thursday at 3:30 p.m. Newbury Park will play Oak Park, followed by Santa Paula-Channel Islands, Ventura-South Pasadena and Santa Maria-Nordhoff.

The Big West Conference basketball tournament will undergo several changes next season as a result of a vote at the conference convention in Newport Beach this week. The men's tournament will run Wednesday through Sunday; the women's event Thursday through Sunday. The championship games have been changed from Saturday to Sunday. The women's tournament, which previously included only the top eight teams, now will include all teams in the conference. Neither the men's nor women's tournaments will reseed teams after each round but will follow a fixed bracket similar to those used in most other major college tournaments.

Big West officials are exploring moving the conference basketball tournaments back to the Anaheim Convention Center. Greg Smith, general manager of the convention center, said Wednesday he has held informal talks with conference officials about returning the tournament to Anaheim for the 2000-01 season. The Big West, then the Pacific Coast Athletic Assn., held its conference tournament at the convention center from 1977-82.

And how did you spend your winter vacation? If you were on one of the 16 high school boys' basketball teams invited to the Orange Holiday Classic, celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, you were hanging out in Chapman University's Hutton Sports Center last week. You came from as far away as Washington state, which sent two teams, or as close as Orange High, which is three blocks away.

So, I called up my old buddy Mud when the NCAA basketball pairings were announced, when Cal State Long Beach and DePaul were left out, when not-so-hot Notre Dame and 14-time losers Kansas State and Villanova were let in, and I told him what else was wrong with the field. "Mud, do you know who doesn't belong?" I asked. "Who?" "UCLA." Well, Mud puts up with the fertilizer I shovel from time to time. He shows considerable tolerance. "Why?" he asked. "Who did UCLA beat? Santa Clara? San Diego?

March Madness is going over the top. Turner Broadcasting, which along with CBS Corp. shares the rights for the annual NCAA college basketball tournament, is going to offer its coverage of the event over the Internet for $3.99. The 64-team NCAA tournament runs about a month and ends in early April. The championship game often draws more than 20 million viewers. Previously, people could watch games for free on the NCAA website, but not anymore. Games that CBS carries will remain available for free online.

High school point guards are not usually 6 feet 5, but that's one advantage for sophomore Bryan Alberts of Sun Valley Village Christian, and he showed Friday night why he is headed for big-time status. With his team in need of leadership, Alberts took charge in the fourth quarter, scoring nine of his game-high 18 points and helping the Crusaders defeat previously unbeaten Pasadena Muir, 58-47, in the championship game of the La Salle/Temple City tournament. Alberts, who transferred from Chatsworth Sierra Canyon, was selected the tournament's most valuable player.

Izeah Bowman sensed the ghosts of Alcatraz as the ferry delivered him to the island in the San Francisco Bay. An "eerie energy," he called it. He'd never been to a prison before and certainly never to Alcatraz, once the final stop for the nation's most-wanted murderers, mobsters and criminals. "You felt this presence of lives being taken," said Bowman, an Inglewood native and a grade school teacher in Gardena. Last September, Bowman, a 6-foot-4, 205-pound guard, and 63 others from the West Coast visited the closed federal prison to play basketball in an inaugural one-on-one, single-elimination, one-day tournament for a chance to win $10,000.

Is it too early to get excited about a high school basketball game? Los Angeles Fairfax Coach Harvey Kitani on Tuesday announced the matchups for the Fairfax State Preview Classic set for Jan. 28, and there are two games that should produce much intrigue and big interest. At 4:30 p.m., Los Angeles Price will face Los Angeles Windward in a game between two of the state's top small-school programs. At 8 p.m., there could be three-point shots en masse when Orange Lutheran and Arizona-bound guard Gabe York take on Los Angeles Loyola and its numerous top guards in the featured game of the night.

Reporting from Las Vegas — The winks, nods and thumbs up from college coaches started from practically the opening tip of Stefan Moody's first game. The diminutive point guard would race down the court in a blur, his dreadlocks flapping in the air as he finished a fastbreak with a monstrous two-handed dunk that seemed impossible for a player of his size or stature on the club basketball circuit. Particularly since he had none. Moody was an unknown to major-college coaches only four days ago, just another name in an inch-thick packet of nearly 500 teams participating in the Las Vegas Fab 48 tournament.

Although revenue was up, higher costs for rights to sporting events and a less than spectacular performance by Warner Bros. meant smaller profits for media giant Time Warner Inc. The addition of the NCAA college basketball tournament meant more advertising dollars at Time Warner's Turner networks. But it also increased programming costs. That and some disappointing movie releases from Burbank-based Warner Bros., including "Hall Pass," led to a nearly 10% drop in net income to $653 million for the company's first quarter.

Locker rooms are places where basketball players put on their game faces, much the same way actors apply lipstick and rouge. The locker room is where the late Hank Gathers used to strut around flexing and hailing himself as "the strongest man in the world," which was his way of donning his game face, a look of self-confidence supreme. Without him, the men of Loyola Marymount had a decision to make Friday night--which game faces to wear.

No one planned for the opposite sides of this year's Final Four bracket to turn out to be allegory for good versus upheaval. No one fathomed it. Only two out of 5.9 million entrants in ESPN's NCAA tournament contest picked Connecticut, Kentucky, Butler and Virginia Commonwealth to reach the Final Four. Look, though, at these slips plucked from a hat — one black, one white. Jim Calhoun and John Calipari, the respective coaches of Connecticut and Kentucky, represent blue-state, bluegrass and blue-blood aristocracy.

Southeast regional No. 2 Florida (29-7) vs. No. 8 Butler (26-9), New Orleans, 1:30 p.m. PDT, Channel 2 Florida can't be as sloppy offensively as it was against BYU if it wants to beat Butler. The Gators need to be patient against a smart Butler team on both ends of the court. Offensively, the Gators have more size up front and need to take advantage, not jack up 3-pointers. Butler runs a lot of screens, and Florida especially has to worry about Bulldogs guard Shelvin Mack from beyond the arc. Look for Butler's guards to have success applying defensive pressure against Florida's backcourt.