An NBA fan’s guide to watching the NCAA Tournament

If you’re an NBA fan, the NCAA Tournament can be a bewildering experience — unfamiliar players, uneven levels of competition, quality that feels questionable. Don’t worry, it’s still basketball and our team is here to help you know what to watch for if you’re primarily an NBA fan.

It’s all about Zion

By Jonathan Macri (@JCMacriNBA)

Is there another answer besides Zion? I suppose there could be, as there are different answers to many of life’s questions, like when someone asks if you would like whipped cream on your Frappuccino and you say “no, I’m counting calories.” This is a wrong answer, but not as wrong as having a better reason for watching the NCAA Tournament than Zion Williamson. Is my perspective skewed because of my allegiance to the Knicks, and the fact that there’s an 86 percent chance this is the closest I’ll ever come to being able to root for this (alleged) human being? Yes. Yes, it is. Your answer is still wrong. Deal with it.

The hopeless romantics

By Bryan Harvey (@Bryan_S_Harvey)

As a kid, I collected all sorts of rubbish from the great outdoors, dragged it into my parents’ home, and declared it a great collection. Exhibit A: a snakeskin. Exhibit B: a stick. Exhibit C: another snakeskin. And so it is with the NCAA tournament. For the next few weeks, I will drag this rubbish into my living room and declare it peak basketball, and in particular moments, such a declaration will be correct. At others, though, the play will stall, terrible mistakes will be made, and the ball will always be rolling like a tumbleweed through a slew of diving college kids.

If you are an adult basketball fan with a job and a family, or even one non-basketball related hobby, then you did not watch every second of every college game this past season. You were out living life in all its myriad forms. But now is a chance to land on the couch and consume all the kinetic energy of amateur athletes running amok in the pageantry and landing daggers from different time zones. No worries about the opening acts. This can all be processed in a single weekend now. The world has shrunk to a festival.

In other words, before these players shed their jerseys and become something else more polished and defined, there is one last romantic window through which to watch them sprawl. Some of these players will never play before a lit camera again. Some, however, will continue playing before us for decades, but even those players might never be greeted by the same pomp and circumstance offered by March Madness. NBA playoff pools are rare. So I look forward to the sense of community that arises from guessing at how the bracket will unfold alongside friends, family, coworkers, and frenemies. I look forward to the metamorphosis of certain players and teams into something more than what we thought they were. And yet, I also fear the awkward stumbles. I am, even as a fan of other teams, worried about what might befall the University of Virginia, and I fear such events even as I root for sixteenth-seeded miracles.

Paying your respects

By Rory Masterson (@rorymasterson)

353: that is the number of schools, including the currently-reclassifying University of North Alabama and California Baptist University, which have a men’s basketball program participating in NCAA Division I. Of those, 68 make it to the postseason elimination tournament that determines that division’s national champion, the team that then gets a trophy with a built-in window and a montage set to “One Shining Moment.” Due to the quirks of an esoteric, archaic system that rewards some programs for their apparently self-evident worth, these 68 are not necessarily the greatest 68 men’s basketball programs in the land. Fortunately, every year, some of them go in believing that anyway.

Sure, we know the Zions, Reddishes and Barretts of the world — all of whom are presumed one-and-dones playing for (and earning money they will never see on behalf of) the same school, Duke, one which boasts an endowment of several billion dollars. We imagine those gentlemen strolling up to Adam Silver in a few short months and sporting the hats of our favorite NBA teams, kettledrums of promise and pressure prepared to become the next generation of heroes and busts.

This is what lies ahead, for them and for us. But what of the now? For all its monumental faults — rampant corruption among colleges, athletic programs and conferences; the inequities between gendering the women’s tournament and not doing so for the men’s; the double-bonus — there remains a value, sentimental in nature and infuriating in practice, to watching third-tier amateurs engage in what could be their final competitive basketball games. For most of us, it’s $5 in an office pool. For most of them, it’s a final bit of punctuation on a years-long statement in search of validation. The least we can do is pay them that respect.

Who’s next?

By Daniel Poarch (@DanielfromSport)

When it comes to the NCAA Tournament, I always end up thinking back to 2011 — specifically, thinking back to Kemba Walker. From the Big East Tournament to the NCAA championship, I’d never seen one person impose their will on college basketball in such spectacular fashion before. Walker scored 130 points in five games across five nights at Madison Square Garden, and I knew then that Kemba had “The Look” about him. I’m wrong quite often when it comes to NBA Draft prospects — often spectacularly so — but that year, with that player, I just knew.

That’s what always keeps me coming back to the NCAA Tournament. Not the “being right” part (though that is always quite fun, on the rare occasion it happens), but the experience of watching these young athletes plant their flags on one of the biggest stages in sports. Essentially getting in on the ground floor with the guys we’ll be watching at the highest level for the next decade. My feelings regarding college basketball will never quite approach my love of the pros, but that symbiotic relationship between the two leagues is inextricable, and always brings me back when March rolls around. I just have to see who’s next.