Player of the Year
5. Doug McDermott (Creighton). He gets dinged for playing on a team that lost five games in the Missouri Valley Conference. Otherwise, his numbers would've blown the rest of the field out of the water: 23.1 points and 7.5 rebounds per game while shooting 56% from the field, almost 50% from 3-point range, and 86% at the line.
4. Kelly Olynyk (Gonzaga). Came out of nowhere to become the best player on the #1 team in the polls. The nation's most efficient forward averaged 17.5 points per game shooting a ridiculous 65% from the field. And thanks to Gonzaga's depth (and frequent blowout wins), he accumulated those stats while averaging only 25 minutes per game.
3. Victor Oladipo (Indiana). Like Olynyk, Oladipo's shocking improvement caught everyone by surprise. While he doesn't stand out in one statistical category, it's his across-the-board impact that makes him so valuable: 13.7 points, 6.2 rebounds, 2.2 steals, 2.1 assists, 61% from the field, 46% from 3-point range, and lockdown defense.
2. Otto Porter (Georgetown). Basically did exactly what Victor Oladipo did. The difference: teams facing Georgetown didn't have to worry about Cody Zeller down low or Jordan Hulls on the perimeter. Porter is pretty much the only offensive threat the Hoyas have, and he was a monster anyway. How did a Georgetown team that wasn't expected to do anything somehow end up with a shot at a #1 seed? Otto Porter.
1. Trey Burke (Michigan). He's a guard who shoots 49% from the field in the toughest conference. He dishes out nearly seven assists and commits just two turnovers per game. The freshman-dependent offense that he runs is hyper-efficient. When it comes to the most important position on the basketball court, Trey Burke laps the field.
Jeff Withey (Kansas). Withey set the Big 12 career blocks record and anchored a Kansas defense that allowed the lowest field-goal percentage of any team in the country. Amazingly, he averages twice as many blocks per game (4) as fouls committed (1.9). But most importantly, he provided the inspiration for a website (witheyface.com) that chronicles all of the outlandish faces he makes while on the court.
Freshman of the Year
Marcus Smart (Oklahoma State). It's safe to say that if you took Smart off of Oklahoma State's roster, the Cowboys wouldn't even be a tournament team. The same can't be said of any other freshman out there.
Coach of the Year
Jim Larranaga (Miami). The movie version of Larranaga's career would have ended with him taking 11-seed George Mason to the Final Four in 2006 and then walking off into the sunset. Yet seven years later, he won the ACC title at a school that had never cared about basketball, with players that his predecessor had recruited. He beat Duke and North Carolina at home by a combined 53 points. He also oversaw the breakout performance of sophomore point guard Shane Larkin, who averaged 13.7 points and 4.4 assists per game on 48% shooting.
Team of the Year
Gonzaga Bulldogs. No, they wouldn't win the award for Most Talented or Best Team. But when it comes to the team that was the most consistent throughout the entire season, it's Gonzaga. They played a difficult nonconference schedule, dominated the WCC, ascended to the country's #1 ranking, breezed through their league tournament, and will likely be rewarded with a number-one seed. Kelly Olynyk was a Player of the Year candidate, but the most striking thing about this squad was its selflessness. 11 different Zags averaged at least 8 minutes per game while only one of those players, point guard Kevin Pangos, averaged more than 30 minutes. NBA prospect Przemek Karnowski got hardly any playing time. Mike Hart played 17 minutes per game for the #1 team in the country yet only took 33 shots all season, accepting his role as a lockdown defensive player. The Team of the Year was Gonzaga, without any doubt.
Image of the Year
It's easily the SEC's leading scorer, Marshall Henderson of Ole Miss, taunting a cornucopia of Auburn bros. There's a lot going on here. It's like a modern-day Guernica.
Best Single-Game Performance
5. Jerian Grant (Notre Dame). If this category was named "Best Final-Minute Performance," Grant would win the award hands-down. With 44 seconds remaining against Louisville on February 9th, Notre Dame was trailing 56-48 when Grant hit a 3 to cut the lead to 5. Ten seconds later, he sank another one. Eight seconds later, he sank a third. And ten seconds after that, he tied the game on a driving layup and a free throw. Between the 44-second mark and the 16-second mark, Grant had erased an eight-point deficit by scoring twelve points in four possessions. Notre Dame would end up winning the game. After five overtimes.
4. Doug McDermott (Creighton). Really, you could pick any of his best performances out of a hat. But the cherry on top of Doug McDermott's season was the masterpiece he put together against Wichita State in the regular season finale on March 2nd. In a 91-79 win that clinched the Missouri Valley title for Creighton, McDermott scored 41 points on 15-of-18 shooting. Fifteen of eighteen. Holy efficiency, Batman.
3. Ryan Kelly (Duke). The fact that he was even playing against Miami on March 2nd was a surprise. The fact that he played more than 10 minutes was a shock. So the fact that Ryan Kelly scored 36 points with seven made three-pointers in a 79-76 Duke win was ... unthinkable.
2. Elijah Johnson (Kansas). Johnson was so bang-your-head-against-a-coffee-table awful during Kansas's three-game losing streak that Bill Self even called him out publicly. Maybe the coach knew what he was doing. Johnson responded by scoring 36 points and single-handedly leading his team to a win at Iowa State on February 25th. Eight of his points came in the final 29 seconds (Jerian Grant scoffs) to erase a late deficit, and twelve more came in overtime of the 108-96 victory.
1. Kendall Williams (New Mexico). On February 23rd, Williams went off for 46 points and 10 made three-pointers on 13 attempts to secure a 91-82 win at Colorado State, a team that didn't lose any other home game all season. That can't be topped.
Biggest Shot
5. Rotnei Clarke (Butler). This game-winning shot to beat Marquette in November's Maui Invitational had absolutely no business going in.
4. Tyler Griffey (Illinois). Usually, when there's 0.9 seconds left on the clock in a tie game, nothing of note happens. There's just not enough time to get off a decent shot. That must have been what Indiana was thinking, too.
3. Alex Barlow (Butler). Clearly, if there's a late, dramatic shot in a big game, odds are that Butler was on the winning side and Indiana was on the losing side. Butler handed the Hoosiers their first loss of the season way back on December 15th when former walk-on Alex Barlow hit the go-ahead layup with seconds remaining in overtime to stun the #1 team in the country. And somehow this wasn't even the biggest shot by a Butler player this season.
2. Ben Brust (Wisconsin). !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1. Roosevelt Jones (Butler). This shot, this play, and this game all come together to form the most iconic moment of the 2012-2013 season. On one side, there's the Butler Bulldogs, whose storybook rise under Brad Stevens couldn't have ever been scripted by anyone because that person would've been fired by his editor for wasting precious company hours on fairy tales. On the other side, there's the Gonzaga Bulldogs, the original Cinderella team, who lost this game in heartbreaking fashion but haven't lost another one since, en route to an undefeated conference season and an improbable #1 ranking. And then take a step back to realize that the Game/Moment of the Year didn't feature a blue-blood powerhouse like Kentucky, North Carolina, Duke, or Kansas, but rather two programs named Butler and Gonzaga. This is college basketball, right here. Dick Vitale (perhaps unintentionally) summarizes it best when, during the postgame scrum, he shouts, "Are you serious, America?!"
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