Posted by Dana O'Neil
GLENDALE, Ariz. -- His players out of the room and off to do individual interviews, Jim Calhoun shared a little secret.
"I'm a little more concerned with depth than they are," the Connecticut coach said.
Other than the scoreboard, the most shocking thing out of the Sweet 16 game between Memphis and Missouri was the sight of Memphis players doubled over and pulling on their uniform shorts, the universal sign for exhaustion.
As the Tigers get ready to tangle with Connecticut in the Elite Eight on Saturday, most people are wondering how Mizzou will handle Hasheem Thabeet.
But he's one guy.
The bigger question is how can Connecticut handle the Tigers … all nine of them?
"I know I could get tired and Miguel Paul is going to come in and do the same thing and maybe even raise it up another notch, so I don't have to worry about getting tired," Zaire Taylor said. "That's where it goes back to what Coach said: Our biggest strength is our bench."
Missouri doesn't just beat teams. The Tigers wear people out. Mike Anderson wisely rotates his players, with no one averaging more than 28 minutes per game.
That's why Calhoun, whose bench runs only two people deep since starter Jerome Dyson went down with an injury, is a little less blasé than his players, who quickly shrugged off questions about their numbers.
"The delicate balance is don't get sucked into a game that's too fast for you," Calhoun said. "And conversely, attack pressure to make them pay a price."
It's almost funny to talk about UConn as the team that needs to slow it down. The Huskies aren't exactly Georgetown or some plodding team cut from Big Ten cloth.
They can run, and they do run.
But they can't run with Missouri. Few can.
"We love playing fast, but we saw what happened with Memphis," Craig Austrie said. "They really fell into the trap of playing too fast. With A.J. [Price] and myself, we have the ability to kind of control the game and see what's going on out there, play with poise."
It sounds easy, but it's not. Mizzou is a suck-you-into-our-vortex sort of tornado, a whirling dervish that can make a game and an opponent frantic.
Connecticut played 15 other teams in the Big East this year.
None of them are like Missouri.
Louisville, a fan of full-court pressure, comes closest, but not even the Cardinals' intense defense mimics what the Tigers can bring.
"Louisville has a traditional 2-2-1 matchup type of pressure," guard A.J. Price said. "This team, they switch it up throughout the game. They really won't give you the same look. Sometimes they will just trap out of nowhere. They really don't have any sense of structure out of their pressure. They just like to pressure and speed you up."
Connecticut has endured its own (I)des of March if you will -- injury, illness and investigation -- to get to the brink of the Final Four.
To make the last trip, to Detroit, the Huskies will now face an attack of biblical proportions.
Not a plague of locusts, but a swarm of Tigers.
