Nebraska
Crown Preview: Nebraska basketball begins tournament with Arizona State
Crown Preview: Nebraska basketball begins tournament with Arizona State
Nebraska (17-14, 7-13 B1G) will play postseason basketball on Monday when it takes on Arizona State (13-19, 4-16 Big 12) at 7:30 p.m. CT at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas for the inaugural College Basketball Crown Tournament.
After the ugly late-season collapse by the Huskers — five straight losses, including three games by three or fewer points — head coach Fred Hoiberg said his team wasn’t ready to shut the lights off, hang up the shoes and end the season.
After the regular-season finale loss to Iowa, which kept Nebraska out of the 15-team Big Ten Conference Tournament, Hoiberg brought the team’s leadership group into his office and asked them if the team wnated keep playing.
“To a man, they said we’re playing. We’re playing,” Hoiberg said during a press conference on Wednesday. “Not one guy said, Well, I don’t know, coach. I don’t know if we should continue on with this.”
After the meeting in the office, Hoiberg and the leadership group spoke with the team. It was Brice Williams, the first-team All-Big Ten guard, who told the team it will continue playing.
“Brice was the one that got up and said, ‘Guys, we’re doing this, and we’re going to go out there and this isn’t one foot in, one foot out. We are both feet in,’” Hoiberg said. “And we’re going to do everything we can to compete for a championship.”
Said Williams, who also spoke on Wednesday: “I just wasn’t ready to be done with college basketball, the way it ended. That’s really it. Wasn’t ready to be done. I wanted to continue to play in the uniform. Wanted to play for a championship.”
A handful of teams that missed the NCAA Tournament and were invited to play in the Crown and other postseason tournaments, like the National Invitation Tournament, declined the offer to play. Many chose to focus on building their rosters for next season through the transfer portal.
But with college basketball’s transfer portal window of March 24 through April 22 running right in the middle of postseason tournaments, it’s created a juggling act for coaching staffs playing postseason ball. And on top of that, Hoiberg is also tasked with finding a replacement for assistant coach Adam Howard, who took an assistant job on Will Wade’s first NC State staff.
How to watch, stream, listen
Day/Time: Monday at 7:30 p.m. CT
TV: FS1 with Kevin Kugler, Robbie Hummel and Kim Adams on the call.
Stream: Fox Sports app.
Listen: Monday’s game will be carried on the Huskers Radio Network with Kent Pavelka and Jake Muhleisen on the call, including KLIN (1400 AM) in Lincoln, KXSP (590 AM) in Omaha and KRVN (880 AM) in Lexington. The pregame show begins an hour before tipoff and will also be available on Huskers.com and the Huskers app.
Nebraska will be without PG Rollie Worster, and potentially others
Hoiberg provided a few injury updates on Wednesday — you can read the full news and notes here — the biggest of which was point guard Rollie Worster not being available to play in the tournament due to a foot injury he suffered in December and played through.
Worster has already spent a week in a boot. Expect a heavy dose of Williams and Ahron Ulis running the point during the tournament. Sam Hoiberg will be an option as well.
“He’s been playing with the plate in his shoe,” Hoiberg said of Worster. “He’s been really, really sore, and it just got to a point to where it’s tough to put a lot of weight on it. So the decision was made to put him in a boot. He talked about trying to fight through it, but the best thing for Rollie and his career is to shut him down and get him in the boot, get the recovery process started and hopefully taken care of.”
Braxton Meah, the 7-foot-1 center who was battling back spasms toward the end of the regular season and missed the finale against Iowa, took time off the court to “quiet his back down” according to Hoiberg. Meah has been gradually working back into on-court activities and will be considered a game-time decision.
On Tuesday during practice, Gavin Griffiths twisted his ankle. After treatment and recovery time, Hoiberg is hoping Griffiths will be available for the game Monday.
About the first-ever College Basketball Crown Tournament
The Crown is a 16-team single-elimination tournament that features teams primarily from the Big Ten, Big East and Big 12 staged over a seven-day period from March 31-April 6.
Those three conferences have 11 of the 16 spots, while the West Coast Conference (2), Mountain West (1), American (1) and Atlantic-10 (1) all have at last one team in the field.
Here’s the full list of 16 teams competing:
Arizona State (13-19, 4-16), Boise State (24-10, 14-6), Butler (14-19, 6-14), Cincinnati (18-15, 7-13), Colorado (14-20, 3-17), DePaul (14-19, 4-16), George Washington (21-12, 9-9), Georgetown (17-15 8-12), Nebraska (17-14, 7-13), Oregon State (20-12, 10-8), Tulane (19-14, 12-6), UCF (17-16, 7-13), USC (16-17, 7-13), Utah (16-16, 8-12), Washington State (19-14, 8-10), Villanova (19-14, 11-9).
Here’s the entire schedule, with tip times and TV channels. The first four days are all on FS1 while the semifinals and championship will be on FOX:
There will be NIL prize money for the Crown champion, runner-up and semifinalists
The Crown will feature a first-of-its-kind NIL prize pool that rewards the championship team with a $300,000 NIL package. The runner-up will earn a $100,000 package while $50,000 will go to the semifinalists through a new venture labeled the Vivid Seats Ambassador Program.
For more information regarding the prize money, click here.
Experimental rule to make debut in the Crown
From Nebraska Athletics:
One change from the regular season in place for both the Crown and the NIT is the use of an experimental rule which will allow a coach to appeal out-of-bounds calls for video replay review in the last two minutes of games.
The experimental rule would eliminate the official’s voluntary ability to review out-of-bounds calls on the floor in the last two minutes of the game. Instead, these calls for a video review would be tied to the timeouts a team has remaining.
If a team appeals the call and it is overturned, the team making the appeal would retain the timeout.If the review fails, the team making the appeal would lose a timeout.If no timeouts remain, coaches could still appeal, but if the appeal fails, they would be assessed an excessive timeout administrative technical, meaning their opponents would shoot two free throws and maintain possession of the ball.
More on Arizona State
The Sun Devils finished the regular season 15th in the 16-team Big 12 Conference with a record of 13-19 overall and 4-16 in conference play. They lost nine of their last 10 games, and injuries plagued head coach Bobby Hurley’s team.
Freshman forward Jayden Quaintaince missed eight games and has been dealing with a knee injury. He’s averaging 9.4 points and 7.9 rebounds. Senior guard Adam Miller, who’s averaging 9.6 points and 2.2 rebounds while shooting 44% from 3-point range, has been slowed by hip and oblique injuries. Miller’s status for the tournament is unclear.
Four of Arizona State’s players have already entered the transfer portal, most notably leading scorer B.J. Freeman (13.7 points per game), who was actually dismissed from the team midseason, and starting guard Joson Sanon (11.9), a talented true freshman.
When talking about Arizona State, Hoiberg mentioned its a team with talent that scored 100 points on Arizona late in the year and played Texas Tech tough before losing in double-overtime. A loss to Kansas State in the regular-season finale was by only two possessions.
“It’s a team, if they’re comfortable, they’re really good, and they’re very talented,” Hoiberg said. “So, again, you just got to go out there in these tournaments and hopefully get off to a great start. That is so important in these events. Confidence is a huge thing, it’s going to be a big part of this game. But they’ve got size on their front line and their guards can put the ball in the basket.”
Arizona State’s projected starting lineup
An opportunity to create momentum for next season
If Nebraska beats Arizona State, the Huskers would have 41 wins the past two seasons. That would tie for the second-highest consecutive-year total in Nebraska basketball history. From 1990-91 to 1991-92, Nebraska won 45 games. From the 2017-18 and 2018-19 seasons, the program won 41 games.
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Emma Bullerman is spending her summer riding around in fields with her dad, and she’s thrilled about it. It’s not just for fun, either — she’s interning for the Prairie Plains Resource Institute and working alongside her father to conserve Nebraska grasslands.
“Prairie Plains has literally been in my life since I was born. I guess you could say I’m a bit of a grasslands nepo baby,” Bullerman said. “My dad is the restoration director, so even as a kid I would be out helping him in the field.”
Today, Emma is taking a more active role in aiding her dad’s work to restore native prairies.
“A lot of my summer will be in the truck with him driving across Nebraska to collect the native grassland seeds that we put into our restoration sites,” she said. “Basically, I’m just learning the ropes of everything that goes into grassland restoration.”
As a teen, Bullerman thought she wanted to do anything but follow her dad’s footsteps. Eventually, a few stalled paths helped her rediscover her love for her hometown.
“In high school and coming into college, I really thought I wanted to leave Nebraska and do something totally different from my dad,” she said. “I tried a few other directions, but pretty quickly could tell that I wasn’t passionate about them. I took a semester off, and then my boss at Prairie Plains reached out about helping with social media.”
It didn’t take long for Bullerman to catch the bug for conservation work and switch her major to fisheries and wildlife, the same degree program her father graduated from in 1995. In fact, she is a fourth-generation Husker with strong ties to ag and food science. Her grandfather is Dr. Lloyd Bullerman, a former a professor of food science, microbiology and food safety at the university, and her aunt studied food science at NU as well.
Getting back to Prairie Plains in her early college years helped Bullerman realize that she, too, had a calling toward this field.
“Being out in the field with my dad one day, I had a moment where I was like, ‘Oh, this is what I’ve been looking for. This is what I want to do.’ Finding my way back has been really, really beautiful.”
Working with her dad, she’s is feeling better than ever about her direction, her hometown and her future in Nebraska.
“Doing this work and studying at UNL has given me a whole new perspective on the state,” she said. “I used to be someone who was like, ‘I want to get out of here after I graduate.’ Restoring prairies and traveling all over Nebraska has helped me see that it’s so beautiful here, I just didn’t take the time to see it before.”
The future of data centers in Nebraska took center stage at a North Omaha town hall Thursday evening.
The event was hosted by State Sens. Terrell McKinney and Ashlei Spivey, who alongside Sen. Machaela Cavanaugh sponsored a bill in the Nebraska Legislature that looked to help regulate data centers.
Parts of their bill were adopted and passed in LB1010, which requires reports on annual power usage, water usage and ownership.
“Having this passed in a package showed a lot of bipartisan work,” Spivey told a crowd of attendees at Nelson Mandela Elementary School.
The proposed regulations were shaped in part by Bold Nebraska, an advocacy group focused on eminent domain and clean energy. Jane Kleeb, chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party and founder of Bold Nebraska, said before the bill passed there were “zero laws on the books” to address a boom in data centers.
“If one is coming into the community, we wanted to make sure that there were some basic transparency things in place,” Kleeb said.
Political discussions around data centers heated up in recent months following reporting by the Flatwater Free Press that showed Google is considering a data center in Nebraska that could require more than three times the amount of power the entire city of Lincoln uses at peak demand in the summer.
The Nebraska Legislature recently passed another bill, LB1261, that allows private developers to build and own power plants to serve a large industrial customer, including data centers. That bill was proposed by the governor’s office and celebrated by Gov. Jim Pillen.
“Our state is once again taking a bold and strategic step – one that will create an environment that attracts business and multibillion dollar investment, while legally preserving Nebraska’s unique and consumer-friendly public power model,” Pillen said at the time.
At Thursday’s town hall, McKinney called LB1261 “the bogeyman bill.”
“It’s a bill that the governor pushed through the legislature to allow for data centers to create their own power,” McKinney said. “It’s a bill that I stood on the floor and said this is going to harm our communities.”
LINCOLN, Neb. (KOLN) – Hundreds of people are without power in southeast Nebraska after a severe storm passed through Thursday morning.
The Lincoln Electric System outage map showed 115 customers without power across the city at 11:36 a.m.
Norris Public Power District’s outage map also shows 45 customers affected by the storm. As of 11:36 a.m., there were nine active outages.
According to the Nebraska Public Power District outage map, 657 customers were affected by the storm. Most of the affected customers were near Plattsmouth in southeast Nebraska. As of 11:37 a.m., 27 customers remain without power.
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