Lance Stephenson Goes Coast-to-Coast on the Knicks, Goes Right Through Raymond Felton 
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Watch Klay Thompson Get Buckets in High School 
NCAA Sweet Sixteen upsets, and Shaq doesn’t care about winning
Missouri's J.T. Tiller
A couple of themes dominated last night’s NCAA tourney Sweet 16 games: Defense and Onions. First you had UConn defensive stalwart Hasheem Thabeet putting together his first dominant game of the tourney (15 pts, 15 rebs, 4 blks) to push the Huskies past Purdue. Then Villanova slapped a stifling total team defensive effort on Duke, ball-pressure and denial for which Coach K‘s boys seemed totally unprepared. And then Missouri’s new-school “40 Minutes of Hell” paved the way for them to get past Memphis … As for the onions? Look no further than Levance Fields. He was The Man in crunch time of Pitt’s win over Xavier, hitting the go-ahead bucket on a ridiculous NBA-range three with less than a minute to go, then getting a steal and layup on the next possession to lift the Panthers to their first-ever Elite Eight. Funny how when Fields (14 pts, 6 asts) buried that three — a classic “Nooooo/YES!” shot — the announcers were like, “What courage!” and “What a leader!” But five minutes earlier, when Pitt was losing and Fields took basically the same exact shot and missed horribly, one of them muttered, “Oh goodness” when he took it and both announcers killed him when it didn’t go in … Pitt’s Jermaine Dixon owes Fields a few lunches. Were it not for Fields, everybody might still be talking about the play in the second half when Dixon got a steal and couldn’t decide if he wanted to dunk or lay it up, so he stumbled into the ugliest wide-open missed layup of all-time. Plus he fell down after the shot and might have gotten hurt. It was like when Omar Epps tore up his knee in Love & Basketball, only Dixon didn’t even get a highlight dunk out of the deal. Fields was there to follow up Dixon’s miss, and his later heroics prevented Dixon from being a goat if Pitt had lost … On one play DaJuan Blair missed a shot, and as he chased down his own rebound, you heard somebody scream “REBOUND!” It was probably Blair (10 pts, 17 rebs) screaming. He’s like the Cookie Monster when it comes to getting boards … Where the hell did ‘Nova come from as a serious national championship contender? Then again, maybe their destruction of Duke shouldn’t have been a surprise; when you think about it, why wouldn’t the Greg Paulus era end with the Blue Devils getting 20-pieced? Overall Duke went 16-for-60 from the field, with Jon Scheyer (3-18 FG) and Gerald Henderson (1-14 FG) being particularly terrible … Did you see what Nolan Smith did at the end of the game? Duke was down by 23 and Corey Fisher was innocently dribbling out the final seconds when Smith jumped him at midcourt, stole the ball and acted like he was going in for a shot before the buzzer sounded. Totally something you’d expect from Mike Beasley‘s best friend … J.T. Tiller scored 23 for Mizzou, who led by as much as 24 in the second half before Tyreke Evans (33 pts) led a late comeback. Memphis got within a couple of shots in the last minute, but were hurt by costly turnovers, questionable shot selection (settling for jumpers) and their usual bad foul shooting. Aside from Tyreke, who was perfect on all nine of his freebies, Memphis was 9-23 at the stripe …
Anyone else not feeling the way every court in the Sweet 16 looks exactly the same, with the black/blue color scheme? The other day we caught the Georgetown vs. Houston ’84 championship game on ESPN Classic, at the old Kingdome in Seattle where the court was all kinds of green and yellow. Last night, you couldn’t tell the difference between the game in Boston and the game in Arizona … Two of the Suns’ most memorable losses this season have happened in Portland. Back in December, Phoenix got soaked when Brandon Roy rained 52 points on national TV, then last night they had their six-game win streak snapped at the Rose Garden, putting 3.5 games distance between themselves and Dallas for the last playoff spot … Did you see Shaq chuckling and joking on the bench in the third quarter when the Suns were getting blown out? Somebody call the Vince Carter “You Obviously Don’t Care About Winning Because You’re Not Snarling For 48 Minutes” Task Force and get them to Phoenix ASAP … The Blazers ended the third when Sergio Rodriguez and Rudy Fernandez hooked up for — what else? — a baseline cut that Rudy finished with a fallaway J, then Rudy stole the inbounds and hit a three at the buzzer. Never seen Kevin Harlan more pumped-up for a sequence that didn’t involve a dunk. Is it possible to make a layup with no regard for human life? … With Chicago’s win over Miami and the Pistons’ loss to the Lakers, the Bulls took over the 7th spot in the East. If this holds, the Bulls would get Orlando in the first round, which isn’t a terrible matchup for them. With Tyrus Thomas (15 pts, 12 rebs, 3 blks) playing as good as he ever has lately, Chicago has multiple bigs to throw at Dwight Howard — Tyrus, Noah, Miller, Gray — and replicate what the Pistons have done to neutralize Dwight in the postseason. Then you’ve got John Salmons, Ben Gordon and the Derrick Rose/Kirk Hinrich combo, who could definitely get buckets on Hedo, Courtney Lee and Skip. Not saying Chicago would win the series, but they could make it interesting … Line of the night goes to Reggie Miller: When Mike Fratello was talking about the lineup issues that could come up for the Bulls when Luol Deng comes back, Reggie called the Czar “Debbie Downer” … We’re out like Paulus …
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