ESPN Men's Basketball

For the next month or so, our friends at The Mag are previewing one high-profile school per day for their Summer Buzz series. For the sake of all that is synergistic, yours truly will be attempting the same, complementing each comprehensive Insider preview with some adjusted efficiency fun. Today's subject: Baylor . Up next? Michigan State.

The Baylor Bears were not a great defensive team in 2009-10. This was less obvious than it sounds.

When you watched the Bears play, it seemed like they were everywhere. Ekpe Udoh and Quincy Acy prowled the paint, Tweety Carter and LaceDarius Dunn roamed the perimeter, and the net effect was a team fast and athletic enough to give anyone fits.

A closer look at Baylor's efficiency numbers, though, reveals a team that was far more adept at scoring than stopping. The Bears were, in fact, a team with a potent offense and a merely OK defense. Baylor ranked No. 3 in the country in adjusted offensive efficiency and No. 34 in adjusted defensive efficiency. Baylor was good at preventing good looks -- they were ranked No. 20 in the country in opponents' effective field goal percentage -- but failed to keep opponents off the glass and didn't force nearly as many turnovers as you'd expect.

Entering the NCAA tournament, I sheepishly predicted that if Baylor met Duke in the Elite Eight, the Bears' interior athleticism would be too much for the more ground-bound Dukies. Naturally, I was wrong. Baylor ended up being just as soft on the defensive end as their numbers suggested. The lesson, as always: Never doubt the numbers. The numbers do not like to be doubted.

What does this mean for the 2010-11 Bears? It means Perry Jones has to be as good as advertised, and maybe better.

Replacing the talented Udoh after his No. 6 overall selection in the 2010 NBA draft won't be easy. That task will fall on Jones, the No. 3 overall power forward in the class of 2010. Jones is an athletic and versatile 6-foot-11 forward who, according to our ESPNU recruiting service , "has off the charts talent and skill." Sounds great, right? The only problem: Jones' "production is no where close to what it should be." Gulp.

The rest of Baylor's stars are easier to read: Dunn will still be a ruthlessly effective shooting guard, Acy will still be a skilled scorer with an elite offensive rating (the best in the Big 12 at 125.0) and should see even more of the ball with Udoh and center Josh Lomers out of the picture. Baylor will still score in bunches. That much is clear.

What's missing here is what was missing from Baylor's 2009 team: defense. The key, then, is Jones. If the first-year player is good enough to affect the defensive interior -- to at least marginally shore up his team's own glass, and to prevent good looks in the post -- Baylor could be even more dangerous in 2010. At this point, given what we know about Jones' skills, that's a possibility.

But it's far from a certainty. Which means the 2010-11 Baylor Bears could be very similar to the 2009-10 version. Considering where Baylor was at the start of the decade, that's still awfully impressive.

For the next month or so, our friends at The Mag are previewing one high-profile school per day for their Summer Buzz series. For the sake of all that is synergistic, yours truly will be attempting the same, complementing each comprehensive Insider preview with some adjusted efficiency fun. Today's subject: Louisville . Up next? Baylor.

The three teams we've previewed thus far in Summer Buzz all have one thing in common: speed.

North Carolina always plays fast, and that won't change in 2010-11. Duke crept to a halt in 2009-10 on their way to an NCAA title, but new personnel dictates a major increase in tempo. And Kentucky, which eschewed the dribble-drive motion offense last year, plans on returning to the fast-paced system that helped lead John Calipari to his greatest successes at Memphis.

Fitting then, that the fourth team in these previews plans on doing much the same. This bit from Rick Pitino in today's Summer Buzz Mag feature pretty much says it all:

"We're going to play faster than we've ever played here before," he says. "We're going to break on every opportunity and try and get the ball past midcourt in fewer than four seconds. And we're going to incorporate our own personal 24-second clock. We feel we can manufacture points that way." [...] Pitino also plans to press off of every made basket and dead ball and will implement varying types of full-court pressure, depending on the type of field goal converted. Also, expect a lot more man-to-man defense.

Last May, New Yorker writer and all-around Famous Author Guy Malcolm Gladwell wrote a piece called "How underdogs can win." Gladwell's thesis argued that underdogs give themselves the best chance of winning when they change the method of competition. In ancient war, this meant "waging war over the broadest territory possible." In basketball, it meant pressing.

There were a few problems with Gladwell's thesis, one of which involved Pitino's time at Kentucky. Gladwell saw Kentucky's success in the late 1990s as a product of Pitino's relentless full-court press and fast-break system, as though Pitino's talent-laden Kentucky title teams were somehow underdogs in college hoops. They weren't. They were, for all intents and purposes, Goliath.

The 2010-11 Louisville Cardinals are not that. A recruiting drought -- thanks largely to the arrival of Calipari at Kentucky -- and the early departure of forward Samardo Samuels mean Louisville will, in fact, be less talented than most of the elite teams in college basketball in 2010-11. Can Pitino minimize that gap in talent by running all the time? Can his old-school fast-break tactics change the nature of the competition? We get to watch the uptempo underdog thesis in action this season, and it couldn't have happened at a more appropriate school.

Given the Cardinals' 2009-10 output, their fans will just be happy to see some entertaining basketball again. Louisville ranked No. 170 in adjusted tempo last season, averaging 67.3 possessions per game, a speed more appropriate for the Big Ten than any team coached by a full-court guru. That pace will have to skyrocket if Pitino's hopes of uptempo efficiency are to bear fruit.

More than anything, though, the Cardinals must learn to play defense again. Louisville ranked No. 79 in adjusted defensive efficiency in 2009-10. When the full-court press didn't work, Pitino sat his team back in a zone, which, in turn, made things even easier for opponents. If Louisville adopts the pace Pitino is talking about, they don't have to be a great defensive team. But they have to be a good one.

This is, more than speeding things up, perhaps Louisville's biggest impending challenge. Can untested sophomore Peyton Siva pressure the ball for 80 feet? Can Memphis transfer Robert Sallie complement his shooting with defense? Without top recruit Justin Coleman (ineligible for academic reasons), does Louisville have the backcourt depth to play all-out? Can Louisville's athletic young front court keep up?

The most important question in all this: What if they can't? Could Pitino's system be enough? Does uptempo basketball really level the playing field? Louisville won't be a contender in 2010-11, and they might not factor much into your bracket, but watching them find the answers to these questions should be more than enough to keep fans -- not just Louisville fans, but hoops heads in general -- interested.

For the next month or so, our friends at The Mag are previewing one high-profile school per day for their Summer Buzz series. For the sake of all that is synergistic, yours truly will be attempting the same, complementing each comprehensive Insider preview with some adjusted efficiency fun. Today's subject: Kentucky . Up next? Louisville.

Tuesday, I spent much of the Duke post using the word "change." At the risk of getting repetitive ... ladies and gentleman, your 2010-11 Kentucky Wildcats!

John Wall is gone. DeMarcus Cousins is gone. Patrick Patterson, Eric Bledsoe and Daniel Orton are all gone. Each was taken in the first round of this summer's NBA draft. And that's exactly how John Calipari likes it.

Either by design or by accident, Calipari is forging a new talent strategy at Kentucky. That strategy doesn't mind recruiting one-and-done players. In fact, it actively encourages it.

The difficult part of this strategy is knowing just how good Kentucky is going to be. The 2009-10 Cats were easier. Wall was always going to be a force and Patterson was a star under former coach Billy Gillispie. Bledsoe had the combo-guard skills to start alongside Wall; Cousins was, at the very least, going to rebound. (He ended up doing much more than that.)

The 2010-11 team is much more difficult to predict. Can new point guard Brandon Knight lead as intuitively and seamlessly as Wall? Will Enes Kanter replace the rebounding and interior defense of Cousins? (Related question: Can Kanter get eligible in time for it to matter?) Can new guards Doron Lamb and Stacey Poole give Kentucky some measure of outside shooting? Is Terrence Jones, the most indecisive UK commitment of all-time, good enough to replicate Patterson?

All of that seems doubtful, which is why the Wildcats aren't likely to be as dominant in the SEC as they were in Calipari's first season on the job. There is reason to think this team can be awfully good, though, and the reason is Calipari.

Coach Cal is often maligned as a master recruiter who lacks the X's and O's ability of his successful contemporaries. There might be some truth to that. (The decision not to foul in the 2008 Kansas-Memphis title game might haunt him the rest of his life.) But since the coach hit his elite-level stride at Memphis in 2005-06, Calipari's teams have always been good at two things: Chemistry and team defense.

The former alleviates concerns about mixing in new talent. It also points to a simple fact that some Calipari haters oftentimes forget: The dribble-drive offense. His system works because it reduces responsibility and makes the game simple. In 2009-10, the style of the Cats dictated a slower tempo, but Kentucky's new blood will be running again in 2010-11. Freshmen might take a while to learn college hoops, but it doesn't get much easier than learning it Cal's way.

The latter in that equation -- team defense -- is where Calipari's teams are always underappreciated. Take a look at the defensive efficiency of his last five teams (stats, as always, courtesy of Ken Pomeroy):

• 2005-06 Memphis Tigers: 87.4 points per 100 possessions. Ranked No. 6 in the country.
• 2006-07 Memphis Tigers: 86.9 points per 100. Ranked No. 11.
• 2007-08 Memphis Tigers: 83.9 points per 100. Ranked No. 4.
• 2008-09 Memphis Tigers: 82.5 points per 100. Ranked No. 1.
• 2009-10 Kentucky Wildcats: 86.3 points per 100. Ranked No. 6.

You get the idea. Calipari's teams can play defense. So can a lot of other teams, right? So what?

The reason why this is so important for Kentucky is because of Calipari's recruiting style. All of the teams mentioned above featured a bevy of young players. A portion of those players were elite one-and-done talents.

Coaches often complain that AAU and high school basketball is so easy for the best players in the country that they learn bad habits, and those bad habits manifest themselves in poor team defense. "Everybody knows how to score, but not everybody knows how to play basketball." How often do you hear college coaches say that?

Not Calipari. He manages to take the best talent in the country and unleash it on the college hoops world, but he doesn't just do so by playing to that talent's desire for stardom or scoring or high-flying alley-oops. It's easy to picture teams with so much young talent lapsing into lazy summer league defense. Instead, Calipari makes them buy in. On both ends. The result is teams that combine those dribble-drive-created offensive flurries with stifling, harassing team defense. It's just what Calipari teams do. There's no reason to expect the 2010-11 Cats to be any different.

There was simply too much turnover in Lexington this summer to know much about the 2010-11 Wildcats. We don't know how they'll respond to adversity. We don't know whether Brandon Knight can be John Wall. We don't know if they'll rebound, especially now that Cousins isn't hoovering everything in sight on the offensive end. We don't know whether this is an Elite Eight team or a No. 6 seed. We don't know how good they'll really be.

What we do know is that Kentucky will play incredibly efficient defense. We'll see if the rest, as it so often has for Calipari, can take care of itself.

For the next month or so, our friends at The Mag are previewing one high-profile school per day for their Summer Buzz series. For the sake of all that is synergistic, yours truly will be attempting the same, complementing each comprehensive Insider preview with some adjusted efficiency fun. Today's subject: Duke . Up next? Kentucky.

The 2010-11 Duke Blue Devils aren't supposed to happen.

After all, it's a new era in college hoops. Back-to-back title winning teams have always been a rarity in the sport, but the one-and-done era is something different. Compared to the pre-2006 NBA rule change, the talent level isn't nearly as watered down. But because so many of those talented young players leave after one season, it's hard enough to build a title contender with the requisite veteran verve. Building a dynasty? It would seem impossible.

Still, that's exactly what Duke has positioned itself to do. So how do the Blue Devils follow through?

Simple, really: If Kyle Singler, Nolan Smith and company want to become the first team since Florida to win back-to-back NCAA championships in 2006 and 2007, all they have to do is ... change absolutely everything. No sweat, right?

It's not something you'd suggest for a team that just won a national title and returned two of its top three scorers for likely All-American seasons. In Duke's case, though, it's true. The Blue Devils won the 2010 NCAA title with a plodding tempo, a slow-down offense, and the overpowering offensive rebounding prowess of Brian Zoubek.

Zoubek, like fellow senior Jon Scheyer, thrived in a down-tempo role. Zoubek was far too slow to get to both ends of the court in a fast-paced game, and needed time at the offensive end to gain the rebounding position that allowed him to keep so many Duke possessions alive. Scheyer was far better suited to a cautious, precise offensive attack, the style that allowed him to turn the ball over so infrequently during Duke's title run.

The result was the No. 249-ranked tempo in Division I hoops, a pace that saw Duke play about 65.5 possessions per game. With Zoubek, Duke had the seventh-highest offensive rebounding percentage of any team in the country, culminating in a dominant NCAA tournament.

Scheyer and Zoubek defined Duke's style. They're gone now. And so Duke, as a matter of sheer efficiency, must change.

That change will be most noticeable in the backcourt. Top recruit Kyrie Irving already has Mike Krzyzewski talking about pushing the pace, a style he adopted (and then discarded) after his work with up-tempo guru Mike D'Antoni coaching the U.S. Olympic team. Seth Curry will add to that speed, and hot-shooting sophomore guard Andre Dawkins could be the perfect spread-the-floor candidate. Scheyer was a great, if limited, college player; Irving and company could arguably be even better.

Filling Zoubek's shoes will be less easy. That task will fall to Mason and Miles Plumlee, two athletic bigs who are at their best in the open court. The loss will also likely force Singler to play more power forward, making Duke considerably smaller -- and considerably quicker -- at the forward positions.

All of which adds up to a pretty enticing scenario: Coach K's familiarity with the fast-break offense, a lightning-quick point guard wreaking havoc in the open court, two multi-talented All-Americans playing off the ball, and a host of role players filling the lane and crashing the boards. That doesn't just sound successful. It sounds fun to watch.

For the next month or so, our friends at The Mag are previewing one high profile school per day for their Insider Summer Buzz series. For the sake of all that is synergistic, yours truly will be attempting the same, complementing each Insider preview with some adjusted efficiency fun. Today's subject: North Carolina.

The Tar Heels did not have a good offense in 2009-10. You didn't need to look at UNC's efficiency profile to recognize that much. Roy Williams' team was exposed on a nightly basis as less a team than a group of promising young players with nary a clue how to run an uptempo secondary break. It was ugly to watch. When a North Carolina team can't play offense, they're in deep trouble. 20-17-type trouble, in fact.

There was, however, one aspect of offense that kept the Tar Heels from looking even more pedestrian last season, an aspect that should give North Carolina fans hope for the upcoming season. The Tar Heels could, if nothing else, rebound their misses.

North Carolina grabbed 38.9 percent of its missed shots in 2009-10, the 16th-highest rate in the country. The problem was that North Carolina's forwards lacked the ability to make much of those misses; the team shot poorly, turned the ball over, and didn't go to the line very often, all of which means those rebounds were wasted on ugly second attempts or kick-outs to UNC's young guards. Offensive rebounding is great, but it doesn't mean much if you don't use it to score more points. The Tar Heels didn't.

Still, there is reason to think UNC can repeat this proficiency in 2009-10, and that, context aside, is a good thing. Harrison Barnes is the best recruit in his class, an all-court forward who could probably play shooting guard if he wanted to. But his athleticism and ability in the paint, which this writer saw in person at Kevin Durant's Nike Skills Camp this summer, should give the Tar Heels a better option down low once they grab an offensive board. No one on last year's team had Barnes' silky scoring touch, not even the unpolished but undeniably talented Ed Davis; if Barnes can work his athletic body into prime real estate under the hoop, he could single-handedly reverse last year's ugly interior play.

Veteran forward Deon Thompson is gone, but there are other promising interior signs. Sophomore John Henson is long enough to wreak havoc on any rebounding play, but in 2009-10 he was too wispy to stand his ground under the hoop. Henson has spent most of his offseason eating like Michael Phelps and pushing iron with UNC's trainer, and he's already added about 25 pounds to his lanky frame.

Junior forward Tyler Zeller is a frequent victim of the injury bug, but has been promising big things since his arrival at UNC in 2008-09's title campaign. Before suffering a season-ending injury, Zeller was averaging 4.5 rebounds in 17 minutes per game. More minutes means more opportunities, and Zeller's per-40 figures portend good things.

If there was one trait you could use to predict which teams did well in last year's tournament, it was offensive rebounding. Three of 2008-09's Final Four ranked in the top 10 in offensive rebounding percentage, and six of the eight Elite Eight squads were ranked in the top 25. West Virginia's entire offense relied on the ability to grab misses; the Mountaineers were never a good shooting team, but they were athletic enough and efficient enough to make up for it when the shots didn't fall.

North Carolina could do something similar, at least in terms of scheme. But before that happens the Tar Heels need to improve all over the floor. Point guard Larry Drew II will have to be much better at running Williams' secondary offense. (He'll be joined in the backcourt by point guard Kendall Marshall and shooting guard Reggie Bullock, both of whom should improve the Heels' guard play significantly.) The Heels will have to prevent turnovers. They'll have to play some semblance of defense.

A 20-17 season means improvement is needed everywhere. As last year's Heels showed, merely rebounding your prodigious misses well isn't enough to make up for bad basketball before and after those misses. At some point, you have to make a few baskets. Eventually, you have to pull it all together.

But the good news is that a pretty bad UNC team was pretty good at one of college hoops' most consistently important team skills in 2009-10. If they can maintain that pace, get improved seasons from Henson and Zeller, and incorporate Williams' prodigious recruiting class into the mix, this team should look much more like the North Carolina we're used to.

The offensive rebounding was already there. Now the Tar Heels just have to get better at everything else. Simple enough, right?