With the clock running down and Mitchell’s team waiting for the last shot, Mitchell dribbled down the clock, bided his time, then drove to the basket and scored. On the list of things SLU has had trouble doing in the past few years, it’s been scoring at the end of the game when working for the last shot. A lot of times, SLU hasn’t even been able to get off a shot. Twice on Saturday night, Mitchell did it. If he can do that in games for SLU, it will be a welcome sight for fans.

Mitchell had four points as the national team beat the local team 128-121. Among other SLU recruits, Femi John had 15 points (at least by my count). Willie Reed, who played only eight games in his high school season before transferring at midseason and having to sit out the rest of the year, had four points.

Reed admitted afterward the transfer has kept him from playing a lot of games and that his conditioning is off. He was a lot skinnier than the two players who guarded him much of the night. Reed has an athletic game so they won’t want him bulking up, but he’s going to need to put on some weight or he’s get shoved around an awful lot. (He’s also going to benefit from a guard like Mitchell who get him the ball in position to score.) And despite the transfer and the semester spent at Milestone Academy, he said he will be eligible this season.

—

The SLU nonconference schedule is still in the works. Among the games still uncertain is the opener, assuming you don’t count the exhibition with Harris-Stowe as the first basketball game at Chaifetz. The Boston College game is not the opener.

There isn’t much defense played in these games, but the end of the quarter is the only time you see a team have to play half-court defense.

 (FIXES OBVIOUS AND SILLY TYPO)

 The town of Oxford, Ohio, reminded Soderberg of Madison, Wisc., where he grew up while his dad was coaching at Wisconsin, and one of the people on the staff at Miami is Jason Grunkemeyer, who was on Brad’s staff at SLU.

 ”Grunk tried to explain it to me and he said the only place he could compare it to was Madison. He said it was a mini-version of Madison. I liked it. It’s a neat campus.”

 Soderberg, the Post-Dispatch’s player of the year, chose Miami over Wisconsin-Green Bay, which had its own advantages since there are plenty of Soderbergs within a short drive of Green Bay.

“On the plane ride home, I wrote down the good things and the bad things and compared them on paper. They were extremely close. It pretty much came down at the end to a gut feeling. I followed my stomach, which I’ve done all my life.”

By coincidence, Miami was able to go after Soderberg after another St. Louis area player, Alex Moosman from Borgia, decided to transfer, opening up a scholarship.

Kramer’s dad, meanwhile, remains without a job. Brad has interviewed for several head coaching jobs and is a candidate for the still-open Florida Atlantic job, though former St. John’s coach Mike Jarvis is believed to be the frontrunner for that job.

 Northern Kentucky is in the Great Lakes Valley Conference, which includes SIUE and UMSL, so he’ll be coming back to town every year.

“I was concerned they were going to bring in a coach that wanted us to pass
the ball 10 times before we shoot. Nothing against Rick Majerus. He’s one of
the best coaches ever, but they want to score in the 50s. With the personnel
we have we want to get up and down and make the game fun.”

Tip of the hat to Matt Vautour

Meanwhile, the early list of candidates Drake is thought to be pursuing is heavy on assistant coaches. (Though these things are notoriously hard to compile.) But the number of dominoes falling in the coaching business are starting to slow, and if former SLU coach Brad Soderberg isn’t in the running for that job or the UMass job (which I don’t think he’ll be in the picture for), his options for getting a head coaching job for next season are shrinking fast.

Harrellson’s release isn’t yet official — he expects to get through the NCAA clearinghouse on Monday — but when it is, he said he’s looking at Kentucky, SLU, Missouri, Purdue and Indiana. He was going to make his SLU visit on Saturday, but had to push it back because he hadn’t been cleared yet. So he’ll go to Kentucky next weekend, then SLU the week after that. He said he wasn’t sure if he would make any trips after that.

He said he likes SLU because he wants to play close to home, but likes Kentucky because he thinks he can play at the top level. He likes Rick Majerus and he likes Kentucky coach Billy Gillispie. (fixed the typo in his name; betting that happens to him a lot.) “I guarantee you it will come down between those two,” he told me. “I’ll make the decision based on what’s best for me.”

He was impressed by Chaifetz Arena and the potential teammates he was watching on the court.

SLU could use Harrellson because with so many freshmen coming in, anyone with any experience will be valuable, and Harrellson - who averaged 15 points and eight rebounds at SWIC –  is a good talent to boot. He’ll have three years of eligibility left.

 I asked him if SLU had recruited him out of high school. He said Brad Soderberg came to one of his games, but then no more. “I wish he would have come to more,” said Harrellson, who instead went to Western Illinois. It’s apparent from the schools showing interest that he has developed into a significant talent.

I’ll have more on the all-star game later. But it looks as if SLU has a decent shot at getting a pretty talented player.

The writing was on the wall for these four the entire season that they didn’t fit in with what new coach Rick Majerus was looking for. They couldn’t get playing time this season and there was going to be even less playing time available next season. 

In horse racing,  there’s the concept of horses for courses, that some horses are best suited for certain circumstances, whether it’s dirt or grass or mud. For SLU, those four were not the right horses.

Majerus used the example of Chauncey Billups of the Detroit Pistons.

 ”The analogy I would use is when Chauncey Billups was MVP of the NBA championship series, it was team No. 5. When Wallace went to the Pistons, it was team No. 3. What I explained to the guys is that every coach has a unique style. Bobby Knight plays man to man but not zone. John Cheney plays all zone but not man. Neither presses or traps but Dean Smith does. That’s the way those guys play. This is the style I’m accustomed to coaching and that I’ve utilized. You can only do so many things well. They fit in better situations.

“Obviously, when I got the job, I said I would sit down and look at all the players and assess them. My favorite player of all time is Al Jensen. His is the family I’m closest to. Al’s brother (who played at Utah), I had this talk with him, I said, Andy, you can stay, but you won’t play. It’s not a good situation. But if you transfer, you have a good chance. He went to Weber State and had a great career. That was a win-win. I think this is the situation. … It’s not for a lack of effort.”

Minutes are the issue. Knollmeyer is a 4, and Barry Eberhardt will be getting those minutes next season, along with big guys Brent Thompson and Willie Reed and Brian Conklin, and who knows, maybe Josh Harrelson. It’s hard to see him  getting much time. Dustin Maguire redshirted this season because there weren’t the minutes behind Lisch and Liddell. That will be the case again.

“Tommie and Kevin will play exclusively 2 and 3,” Majerus said. “They average 35 minutes and I play to play Tommie and Kevin 35 minutes next year, so those two spots are locked up for a lot of minutes. That would have encompassed most of the players.

“I walked into their life, they walked into mine. I really like them, I wish them well. They’re good students. Marcus asked me if he could still work with the team. I’m letting him come to individual workouts. I don’t like Anthony, I love Anthony. Anthony and I discussed talking about going to junior college, getting some playing time and perhaps coming back. But he’s not going to play ahead of Tommie and Kevin. He doesn’t have a chance.”

I asked him if this means Paul Eckerle would be staying on athletic scholarship, rather than going back on academic as had been discussed. “I anticipate that happening,” he said.

Next year will be a young team. Assuming everyone signed makes it, there would be seven freshmen. There could be another freshman and maybe a JC transfer. As it stands now, SLU has four returning players for next season: Tommie Liddell, Kevin Lisch, Barry Eberhardt and Paul Eckerle. That would be a young team.

“It will be a young team, for sure,” Majerus said. “We’ll do the best we can. I think it will be exciting to see a young team grow together. Paul and Tommie and Kevin and Barry have some stability. We have good players.”

Curiously, I crossed paths with Anthony Mitchell at Chaifetz on Thursday and asked him about his knee. (He was on crutches.) Then I asked him if he would be back next season and he said, without hesitation, “Yes.”

I thought there was a chance Knollmeyer would be back just for experience sake and because he at times made contributions last season, but all four leaving must mean the staff feels good about getting more players.

—-

Toledo and Detroit Mercy hired new coaches on Friday, and neither were Brad Soderberg. The big job openings now are at Oklahoma State, Stanford and Providence. (Western Illinois is also still open.) Brad wouldn’t be a candidate for any of those, but he could be a candidate at a place that might lose a coach to one of those places. The Providence job has been open for a month. With Travis Ford having said no, one of the names now being mentioned is GW’s Karl Hobbs.

The general public got its first up close look at Chaifetz Arena on Thursday at the dedication ceremony. I’d already seen it — though not with the floor in place — but for those seeing it for the first time, well, everyone seemed pretty happy. If there were people who saw it and were displeased, I’d be interested to know what they didn’t like.

The one thing people kept coming back to: It will give SLU a home-court advantage. The place will likely be filled most nights. It seats 10,600, SLU usually draws about 9,000, there should be more students and, for the first time in years, there’s an incentive for people to buy season tickets. Even if it’s not full, it will be close enough to make it noisy. The raucousness will depend on the students.

The acoustics were a little iffy sitting in the north stands, but AD Chris May said this was one of the first times the sound system had been turned on, and they have to figure out where to point the speakers. (The sound was apparently good on the floor. Majerus said he liked the acoustics.) The quality of the picture on the corner video boards was outstanding. It looked more like a television than a jumbotron.

“On May 1, I stood on this spot right here when it was still a bowl of dirt,” Rick Majerus said. “It’s kind of fun to be here now and see it and I never could have conceptualized it. I love the blue, love the ribbon around it, like the acoustics right now, I was very concerned about the acoustics for practice. I’m a big practice guy and I think acoustically it’s going to be a great thing.”

 After a long, arduous basketball season, Majerus looked delighted throughout the ceremony and sat and signed autographs for a very long time. (He even seemed to be smiling during the 40 minutes of speeches at the opening ceremony.) Majerus and women’s coach Shimmy Gray-Miller said they already have seen benefits in recruiting — Gray-Miller said that a couple weeks ago for the first time since she’s been at SLU she showed a recruit their locker room and got a commitment a few days later. 

Majerus said he wants his players to have access to the building 24 hours a day.

 ”I’m trying to sell that it’s going to be open all the time,” he said. “I’m going to make sure they have 24/7 access. I’m trying to recruit 24/7 players.”

He then pulled out his cellphone and hunted around to find a text message from incoming point guard Kwamain Mitchell. “I’m  looking for these kind of guys,” Majerus said, who then read Mitchell’s message: “It’s going to take a lot of hard work but I am not a quitter so I know I can accomplish … it goes on and on.”

—–

Tommie Liddell had his foot in a boot. He had ankle surgery after last season and this year, he had a similar operation on the other ankle. (He has a bone spur problem.) He should be back in plenty of time. Anthony Mitchell was on crutches. He had knee surgery but is expected to be fine.

Luke Meyer, Danny Brown and Bryce Husak are all looking to play in Europe. (Don’t know about Polk.) Husak is making a trip to Europe with Athletes in Action in May.

And four SLU recruits — Thompson, Cotto, Cassity and John — are supposed to play in the prep all-star game on Saturday at Chaifetz. So they’ll get a game on the court before their teammates will.

And Brad Soderberg appears to be a finalist for the open jobs at Toledo and Detroit Mercy. Toledo has also interviewed former Providence coach Tim Welsh and an assistant at Notre Dame. Detroit Mercy would be interesting. They’re on SLU’s schedule for next year. Soderberg was also interviewed for the Oregon State and Loyola Marymount jobs, according to reports in both markets. Toledo could announce who it’s hiring on Friday. If neither of those pan out, there should be a new round of openings after Stanford and Providence hire their new coaches.