MICHAEL ATCHISON

The One

Michael Atchison

Sometimes people make the game too complicated. They want to believe that a player can be one thing and one thing only, as if basketball’s division of labor requires such specialization that one guy can never handle two jobs. That may be true in an orchestra, where a cellist doesn’t play the bassoon, or in medicine, where a podiatrist rarely performs brain surgery. But it’s not so in basketball. Some guys play a position. Some guys play ball. Jimmy McKinney plays ball. He can play the point. He can play the wing. He could play Willy Lowman in Death of a Salesman. Jimmy can play.

At Vashon High School in St. Louis, McKinney was so much better than everyone else that the distinction between point guard, shooting guard and small forward lost any meaning. In the process of winning three state titles, he did it all. Need a clutch three-pointer? Call on McKinney. Need someone to slash and finish? Jimmy’s job. Need an impossible pass? McKinney’s the man. Need to play keep away and sink free throws as time ticks down? Give the ball to Jimmy. McKinney did all of those things and more en route to becoming Mr. Show-Me Basketball and making the Parade All-America team.

Throughout that time, Jimmy’s physical skills were unmistakable, but so was his feel for the game. Whatever basketball IQ is, Jimmy had it. It doesn’t show up in the box score, but you know it when you see it. It’s the ability to control a game, to know where the other nine guys are by feel, to make the right decision 98% of the time. It’s a podium on which leadership stands, and when you’ve got it and you’re a guard, you don’t just hang out on the wing. You run the show.

Quin Snyder recognized that quality. When Snyder recruited McKinney to Mizzou, he made it clear that he saw a point guard inside the wiry slasher. At 6’3”, point skills would be McKinney’s ticket to the NBA, but they could also be Mizzou’s ticket to the Final Four, even if Jimmy used them from the two spot. If the success of Kansas and Oklahoma over the last few years has shown anything, it’s that it never hurts to put your most savvy athlete on the floor, and to let him play, regardless of his nominal position. Whether he’s a point guard or a shooting guard, that player is a lead guard. It all flows from him.

Of course, things got a little more complicated once McKinney got to Mizzou. Guys don’t just go from dominating high school competition to dominating collegians. Carmelo Anthony was the exception that proved the rule. Still, McKinney held his own. He earned a spot on the Big 12 all-freshman team, and when Ricky Clemons and his game started to unravel, Quin Snyder turned to his freshman for stability. McKinney became the coach’s extension, a full-time point guard. Aesthetically, it wasn’t always a success. McKinney turned his back on the opposition when he should have faced the basket and attacked. Sometimes he seemed to hold on for dear life amid the chaos caused by opposing defenses. But even if his play wasn’t elegant, it was effective, or at least effective enough. With McKinney at the point, Missouri beat Oklahoma, Kansas and Oklahoma State. The Tigers missed the Sweet Sixteen by a whisker.

Missouri fans fret. It is our way. A couple of generations of heartbreak will do that to people. For some, fretting is a habit controllable through medication. For others, it takes on a life of its own and impairs rational thought. Some in the latter category look back to McKinney’s freshman year and worry that they’ve seen his best, that he’s not capable of being the linchpin guard on a Final Four team. There’s a strange logic at play. People trust their eyes and their memories. They know what they’ve seen. Intuitively, they know that players get better over time, but until they see an individual player’s improvement, they don’t allow themselves to believe it will come. For Jimmy McKinney, it will. History says it will.

In basketball, numbers won’t tell you everything, but they’ll tell you a lot. Here are freshman year statistics for five guards who should be familiar to most:

Each player started more than one-third of his team’s contests, and all played more than 21 minutes per game. On paper, they’re virtually interchangeable. In reality, they’re all very, very good.

Who’s who? Player A is NBA lottery pick Keyon Dooling. Player B is 1994 Big 8 player of the year Melvin Booker. Player C is two-time All-Big 12 guard Kirk Hinrich. Player D is fellow two-timer Hollis Price. Player E is Jimmy McKinney. The first four experienced significant increases in production as sophomores. The same is coming for McKinney.

You can tell by the way he plays. Watch him now and you can see that the game is slowing down for him. At first, he was like a newbie in the Matrix, with bullets and javelins and opposing guards flying at him, past him, around him at blurring speeds. Zzzzip! There went Victor Williams. With the ball. Whoooosh! It’s Aaron Miles and Kirk Hinrich in a half-court trap so tight that you can see through their pores and into their souls. It moves so fast. Those guys dance on light while Jimmy crawls through sand, or so it feels in the freshman guard’s land of nightmares, the Big 12 conference.

The beauty of that kind of baptism is that it forces improvement. See the speed, be the speed. The eyes adjust. The brain adjusts. The feet adjust. As Jimmy’s eyes and mind and limbs get faster, everything else slows down in comparison, and once he slows it down, he can start to control it. That ability was unmistakable a few weeks ago during the Black and Gold scrimmage. Coach Snyder put junior college recruit Randy Pulley at the point for the Gold squad and gave him all four seniors, two of whom are on various pre-season All-America teams. He put McKinney on the Black team and gave him everyone else. No chopped liver on that squad, but no Paulding and Johnson, either. McKinney’s team won. Jimmy led a group of reserves and newcomers to victory over the guts of the nation’s fifth-rated team, and he did it by controlling the speed and direction of the game. He scored 15 points on just seven field goal attempts. He pulled down five rebounds. And while the official stats credit him with just three assists, it sure seemed like more to everyone in attendance. In a scrimmage that featured the most Tiger talent in recent memory, McKinney was the best player of the floor. To prove it was no fluke, McKinney did it all over again in Mizzou’s exhibition opener. With the Tigers’ other point guard options on the bench in street clothes, McKinney played 33 minutes at the one spot and orchestrated a convincing victory. Nevermind that the final margin was just nine points. McKinney led Missouri to a 29-point advantage before Snyder called off the dogs and inserted a lineup of freshmen and walk-ons that will never play critical minutes together. McKinney hit five of nine shots to score 12. He tallied seven assists against just two turnovers. And just to show how much easier the game has become, he dunked one ball behind his head and flipped another off the backboard for Rickey Paulding to finish.

Jimmy McKinney wears the number one. Maybe it was given to him blindly by an equipment manager, maybe the choice was more deliberate. You’ll find no belief in numerology here, but the number seems significant. This team belongs to Arthur Johnson and Rickey Paulding, and it should. But those guys are seniors. And while they’ll no doubt be improved to some degree over a year ago, you already have a pretty good sense of what they will do for the team. For the Tigers to go from where they’ve been to where they want to be, someone has to push them past the competition. Some of that push will be provided by newcomers like Jason Conley and Linas Kleiza. But much of it should come from the voodoo that transforms a skittish freshman guard into a great sophomore leader. For the Missouri Tigers to turn lofty preseason expectations into lasting postseason achievements, Jimmy McKinney has to be the one.

Letters, We Get Letters: Basketball’s early signing period began November 12, and Quin Snyder’s mailbox was stuffed with National Letters of Intent from blue chip recruits. For the first time in Snyder’s tenure, Mizzou appears to have wrapped up a recruiting class before Thanksgiving, and it must feel like Christmas to the Tiger staff. Four high school stars – Marshall Brown, Glen Dandridge, Kalen Grimes and Jason Horton – pledged to Mizzou, and they combine to give the Tigers some of everything: athleticism, shooting, ball handling, passing, scoring and rebounding, not to mention an impressive amount of size. Such a haul would be impressive in any year, but it borders on amazing this time around. All four young men verbally committed to Missouri over the summer while allegations of improprieties swirled around the program. Now, with an NCAA probe still pending, they have made it official by signing their letters. Their commitments to Missouri speak volumes about Snyder’s ability to connect with recruits and to earn their confidence. Given the circumstances, it’s hard to imagine a better result to recruiting season.

I asked ace recruiting analyst Eric Bossi of Prepstars for his assessment of Mizzou’s class. “I think what Snyder did is recruit the kind of balanced and talented class that he would ultimately like to get on a yearly basis,” Bossi said. He praised Grimes’ power and Brown’s athleticism, and called Horton a “patient top-level decision maker.” “I know Missouri fans won't want to hear Horton compared to a KU guy,” Bossi told me, “but he could eventually have an Aaron Miles-like effect on the Tigers.” Finally, Bossi called Dandridge’s jump shot “a thing of beauty,” and said that Dandridge is improving his game off the dribble. “This year's class off of last year's success helps make sure they will be deep for the next two or three years.”

Random Thoughts: John Woods, a slick-shooting guard who starred for Mizzou in the 1997-98 and 98-99 seasons, recently went on a scorched-earth march through Oklahoma. Playing for designated exhibition victim Athlete’s First, Woods scored 24 points in 23 minutes in an 84-76 loss to Tulsa on November 9. The next night, he stunned the crowd in Norman by scoring 30 on 11-for-13 shooting (including 6-of-6 from the arc) to lead AF to an 89-82 upset of the Sooners. While Woods rained hellfire, Oklahoma coach Kelvin Sampson turned 5’7” freshman guard Drew Lavender loose and watched the McDonald’s All-American put up 20 shots on his way to 21 points. Conventional wisdom says that the Sooners’ success hinges on more passing and less shooting by Lavender. But the freshman’s freewheeling approach was necessitated in part by a shoulder injury that sidelined Kevin Bookout, Oklahoma’s top inside player. Though official word says that Bookout should return in short order, rumors among OU fans suggest he could be out much, much longer. I’ll not speculate about Bookout’s injury, but I will offer this: If the Sooners were to be without Bookout for an extended period, the effects could ripple through the league. Oklahoma would be good even without the budding sophomore star, but the Sooners’ ability to score on the inside would suffer a huge blow. With Bookout, Oklahoma can stand toe-to-toe with Texas and trade shots. Without him, the Soooners risk dropping two games to the Longhorns. And if that were to happen, Texas would stand in prime position to capture the conference title while preseason favorites Missouri and Kansas slug it out in the north. Also, a weakened Sooner squad could give a glimmer of hope to Texas A&M and Texas Tech, two southern teams that finished in the league’s lower half last year. Neither of those teams would figure to be better than Oklahoma over the full schedule, but if A&M or Tech could steal a win or two against OU, they could raise their standing in the league and bolster their NCAA resumes.

Of course, hopefully Bookout heals quickly and reduces all this to the kind of idle, pointless speculation that built the Internet.