Monday, February 14, 2000

Rebounding effort keys romp over DePaul

---

BY MIKE DeCOURCY
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Kenny Satterfield drives into the lane against DePaul's Rashon Burno in the first half Sunday. (Jeff Swinger photo) | ZOOM |

        A quick glance at the final score tells you plenty about how thoroughly the Cincinnati Bearcats dominated DePaul, a team loaded with “the best players in the league, other than our guys,” in the words of UC coach Bob Huggins.

        There is an emphatic statement contained in this sequence: UC 87, DePaul 64. But those are not the most impressive numbers to emerge from the top-ranked Bearcats' effort Sunday afternoon at the Shoemaker Center.

        They went one step further with the usual stuff: 42 consecutive victories at home, 15 in a row in Conference USA regular-season games and a national-best 15-game winning streak. UC is 23-1 overall and 11-0 in C-USA.

        It was the Bearcats' rebounding against the Blue Demons, however, that commanded Huggins' attention and caused him to answer, “No,” when asked whether he had any complaints about their performance.

        “If you outrebound them 44-26, you've made a great effort to get to the glass,” Huggins said. “They're the best rebounding team in our league and one of the best in the country. That has been our one glaring weakness. We shoot the ball so much better now than we used to that we have a tendency to stand around and watch.”

        UC shot well enough against DePaul to retain that excuse if it wanted, hitting .515 from the floor. Point guard Kenny Satterfield scored a career-high 23

        points. Martin matched that scoring total and grabbed 13 rebounds for his 10th double-double. Forward Pete Mickeal scored 12 points and grabbed nine rebounds.

        When the Bearcats met Saturday to prepare for DePaul, which was grabbing nearly 10 more rebounds than its opponents, Huggins asked for a commitment from Mickeal, shooting guard DerMarr Johnson and big men Jermaine Tate and Ryan Fletcher to pursue every missed shot as though it would decide the game. Which is how it turned out.

        “They're one of the few teams that made sure every time a shot was up, somebody was on me,” said DePaul star forward Quentin Richardson. “Every time.”

        Richardson leads C-USA in rebounding, but was held to nine by the Bearcats and scored just seven points on 3-of-13 shooting. It was his third single-figure scoring game in the past four, but the Demons (16-8, 6-5) won the other two.

        He dealt throughout the night with Mickeal, UC's perimeter defensive specialist. With NBA scouts in the audience and the No.1 ranking ever on the line, Mickeal clearly coveted the challenge of meeting Richardson head-to-head.

UC NOTES

The Shoe UC extended its home-court winning streak to 42 games, second-longest in the nation behind Utah (50). The domination UC has beaten DePaul 17 of the last 18 games since 1992-93. The kid Freshman point guard Kenny Satterfield scored a career-high 23 points. The revenge The Bearcats are 6-0 against teams that beat them last season, winning by an average of 17.5 points.

        Richardson was 1-of-8 from the field in the first half, and only three of those shots were launched from inside the 3-point line. He did not score once on a put-back, which became his specialty when he led the nation in offensive boards as a freshman.

        “I actually thought in my mind he knew what kind of game it was going to be,” Mickeal said. “I never thought he got down. He knew coming in it was going to be hard for him.”

        The Bearcats had so many other offensive ideas at the start — and were so overly “revved up,” Huggins said — they didn't get Martin his first touch until they'd run through a half-dozen possessions. They took over the game after setting their focus on the low post.

        Martin scored six points in a 10-0 UC surge that established a 16-7 lead. Only once from that point were the Blue Demons as close as five down.

        DePaul applied intense ball pressure on the perimeter, designed to take advantage of 5-foot-7 point guard Rashon Burno's alarming quickness and make it difficult for UC to get open shots from behind the 3-point line.

        UC called for an offense termed “31 spread,” with Martin on one side of the floor, the best perimeter shooters on the other and Satterfield free to dash for the lane and take whatever option presented itself.

        It was tough for DePaul to double-team the post in those circumstances, which allowed Martin to score UC's first six points in the second half. Afterward, the DePaul big men stayed close to Martin and Satterfield was able to score 15 in the second half.

        “I don't know what it was,” Satterfield said. “I'd just get in the lane, I'd just jump up there and nobody was there.”

        Only after UC advanced to a double-figure lead near the end of the first half did DePaul coach Pat Kennedy bring out the defensive scheme that beat the Bearcats last season in Chicago, a 1-3-1 zone extended to halfcourt. UC scored on two of three trips and led 40-26 at the break.

        “We haven't been playing it much,” Kennedy said. “We've been playing 95 percent man-to-man ... You don't want to get into this game and change so many things that your kids forget what they were doing well.

        “That's a senior group. You throw a box-and-one or triangle-and-two on a young team and they tend to panic, but you're not going to get that out of this team. We're better than we were a year ago, but I think they're MUCH better.”

       

---

Bearcats Stories

Rebounding effort keys romp over DePaul Mickeal came to play and made 'Q' pay BEARCATS NOTEBOOK

Booker to visit Bengals
UC so good, even Huggins is happy
LSU's 'D' stifles Kentucky
Mason, Badin finish atop polls
Boys polls
Final girls polls
Ducks win 5-2 before 8,112
Locals one step from Sydney