Interviews

Jason Thompson isn't the kind of talent you often find at the mid-major level. Heck, there aren't that many players in the power conferences like him. He's a 6-11 specimen who can shoot mid-range jumpers just as well as he can lay it in, and can muscle his way to any rebound, anywhere. Entering this season, Thompson was the only returning player in the nation who averaged 20 points and 10 rebounds per game in 2006-07.

And he's done it again. During his senior season at Rider, he's averaged 20.2 points (on 55 percent shooting), 11.8 rebounds (second-best in the nation behind Michael Beasley), and 2.8 blocks. Along the way, he's collected 20 double-doubles, and has reached 20 and 20 in points and rebounds on two occasions. On top of all that, he's a team leader who carries himself on the floor with supreme confidence and poise. Earlier today, Thompson was named the player of the year in the Metro Atlantic Conference by a panel of league coaches, in advance of this weekend's MAAC tourney in Albany.

Not quite surprisingly, Thompson's physique, statistics and composure have attracted lots of pro interest. At the recent BracketBuster game at Cal State Northridge, there were no fewer than 14 NBA scouts in attendance. He's currently projected as a low first-round draft pick, and could end up joining Calvin Murphy and Rik Smits as players who've gone from the MAAC to the mainstream.

We caught up with Thompson last Friday after his second-to-last home game, in which he scored a career-high 33 points and grabbed 12 rebounds in an 88-76 win over St. Peter's. Listen in as we talk about his Rider career, stats, scouts, the temptation of larger schools, that snappy new Rider logo and uniforms, and his surprising lack of a good nickname.

Most basketball fans know the 7-2, 240-lb. "A-Train" as one of the greatest centers ever to play the game, a 12-time All-Star who played five seasons in the American Basketball Association before pounding the paint for 11 seasons for the Bulls and Spurs. Artis Gilmore scored a total of 15,579 points and grabbed 9,161 rebounds during his NBA career, and was the ABA's all-time block leader with 1,431 during his days with the Kentucky Colonels. His pro total of 24,941 points ranks first all-time among left-handers. The Basketball Hall of Fame stands as an illegitimate institution until such time as he is properly enshrined there.

But you may not know about some of his other distinctions. Gilmore, who set the NCAA career record with 22.7 rpg while at the University of Jacksonville, is the only player in history to have his number retired at two current Atlantic Sun schools (he started at Gardner-Webb when it was a junior college). In 1970, he and guard Rex Morgan -- nicknamed "Batman and Robin" by the national press -- led the 23-1 Dolphins on an improbable Final Four run. During the campaign, Jacksonville scored 100 or more points and toppled Iowa and Kentucky on the way to the national championship game, where they finally fell short against Lew Alcindor and the UCLA dynasty.

After the North Florida native spent years away from home in Texas, Gilmore was invited back to campus by an school eager to undo decades of relative neglect to its athletic department, one that was once the giant-killing pride of northern Florida. As of this January, Gilmore's giant presence is back in Jacksonville, where he's serving a role in the administration and calling games for JU's radio broadcasts. We caught up with him last Thursday after an A-Sun tilt with Mercer, and discussed his new role in the university, the program's future, and Jacksonville University then and now. We talked about his playing days -- the rough travel in that old "mid-major" pro league called the ABA, and of course, teenage idol deluxe Bob Costas.

We've certainly certainly said this before, but we strongly believe that "Jasper" Joe Arnone, Voice of the Central Connecticut State Blue Devils, is the finest arena announcer in Hoops Nation. He is to college basketball what Yankee Stadium's Bob Sheppard is to baseball, but with Vin Scully's friendly delivery instead.

And Arnone, 74, has had plenty of good basketball to call in recent years -- CCSU won the Northeast Conference hoops title in 2000, 2002 and 2007, and has produced a long line of league POY's and first-teamers under the direction of former Central player and UConn assistant Howie Dickenman. We were able to catch up with the legendary voice two weekends ago in New Britain, just after a game in which the young Blue Devils had overwhelmed current first place team Wagner by 26 points. We spoke about his announcing style, the many roles he's taken on at the college and in the community, the history of CCSU basketball, and the way the game as a whole has changed since he's been gently informing audiences about it over a speaker system.

Take a listen to a man who came from a coal-mining town, became a war hero, and went on spend a lifetime of loyalty to a tiny Nutmeg State school, achieving legendary status as simply The Best.

In 1969, Drake achieved the Final Four with a 26-5 record. Adolphus (Dolph) Pulliam was the emotional leader of that team, and his Bulldogs lost in the national semifinals to UCLA and Lew Alcindor by a single point. After his senior season, he was drafted by multiple professional basketball and football teams, and three decades later, he's the Director of Community Relations and Development at the Des Moines school. In 2003, then-coach Dr. Tom Davis invited Pulliam back into the program, asking him to provide commentary on Bulldog radio broadcasts and be generally available to the players. Now that Davis has retired and handed the reins over to son Keno, Pulliam has remained an important link to the program's past, an important advocate and friend to the team in every way.

In journalism school, they fill your mind with a lot of ideas about interviewing, stuff about asking leading questions and guiding the flow of the conversation and all that. But every so often, you have to just roll the tape, keep your mouth shut and let a legend unspool his remarkable life story for the public record. Mr. Pulliam was ever so gracious to give us an hour of his time before Drake traveled to Southern Illinois this week; he spoke about the parallels between the magical Drake basketball teams of 1969 and 2008, the $800 blue leather suit that brought the team luck on its recent 21-game winning streak, and the importance of friendship on a championship basketball team. We also reveal an exclusive, shocking surprise -- he and I are, in fact, both men of the cloth.

Listen, too, as he talks about why he turned down his childhood dream (a career with the Boston Celtics or Dallas Cowboys) in order to fulfill his destiny as a destroyer of racial barriers.

The grand old Mid-American Conference has been tragically misunderstood this decade. A league that's produced some of the most competitive, exciting and thrilling hoops at the mid-major level has had a lot of trouble with respect on the national scene, not having received a second bid to the NCAA Tournament since 1999 or a first-round win since 2003. All this despite producing an Elite Eight team (Kent State 2002) and several productive pros.

And there's nobody better to discuss the current state of the league and its immediate future than Elton Alexander, longtime Cleveland Plain-Dealer reporter and purveyor of the fantastic MAC Insider blog on the P-D website. You won't find anybody with a more thorough and unbiased perspective of the league and its history, and Mr. Alexander has been known to talk MAC hoops for hours on end (we can attest to that). Let's go ahead and pick his brain for a bit.

Until the night of Nov. 7, 2007, most college basketball fans didn't know Gardner-Webb from a weed whacker. But with a 84-68 thumping of Kentucky at Rupp Arena, the little school in Boiling Springs, N.C. was thrust into the national spotlight. It was the first major story of the 2007-08 season, the greatest moment in the seven-year Division I history of the Runnin' Bulldogs program; a team that had finished 9-21 a year before and picked eighth this season. In the days that followed, head coach Rick Scruggs was on every sports-related interview show you could name.

It's been over two months since that landmark upset, and Gardner-Webb is once again just another mid-major program that's struggling hard to move above .500. Last Friday, we caught up with the Bulldogs, then 7-9 overall and 1-1 in the Atlantic Sun, at the home of new A-Sun member (and recent Division I newcomer) South Carolina-Upstate. On the strength of an overwhelming second half run, the Spartans came away with their first ever D-I conference win at the expense of the infamous Kentucky-beaters. Afterwards, Coach Scruggs was kind enough to share his thoughts about the unbearable lightness of unexpected SEC upsets, Australian recruiting, the right way to move up to D-I, and the lasting legacy of what happened at Rupp that magical November night.

After a week-long break (nobody wants to talk during the holidays), TMMI is back. And to kick off the new year, we have one of the most powerful men in all of Hoops Nation, Missouri Valley Conference commissioner Doug Elgin. He's led the toughest mid-major conference in the land since 1988, spent four years on the NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Committee, and some even believe he cracked the RPI's code on the way to the league's four bids in 2006. All we know is that he's one of the most knowledgeable, forthright and friendly people in the game, and we don't deserve to have him on our rinky-dink web show. We caught up with him on Sunday after a Drake-Evansville game; tune in as we discuss the Valley's "down year," scheduling policies, the possibility of a CAA-MVC Challenge, and the things that make the Missouri Valley so great.

In March 2005, Tennessee Tech head coach Mike Sutton was suddenly stricken by Guillain-Barré Syndrome, a disease that can only be described as "mysterious." It laid siege to his central nervous system, leaving him paralyzed and clinging to life in a hospital for 10 months. Immobile and attached to a ventilator, his weight plummeted and his only method of communication was blinking his eyes. A month after his return home that November, he was at the end of the TTU bench in a large wheelchair. A year later, he was strong enough to use a walker to get around. He continues to undergo extensive physical therapy in order to retrain his musculature, slowly regaining the type of normal everyday body movement that you and I take for granted.

Sutton is, quite simply, the most alive person I know, and is the first person I think of whenever something comes up that seemingly can't be done. He was also one of the first head coaches to publicly admit he read this site several years ago, and he remains a good friend of TMM despite that time I called him Eddie by mistake (maybe we really do need an editor). We caught up on Thursday evening and discussed the Golden Eagles' up-and-down start to the season, the cost of broken backboards, his continuing recovery from an ailment that nearly claimed his life, and what it's like to coach from the visitor's bench at Kentucky after spending years there as an assistant.

You usually meet the best people by accident, and often in the strangest places. I made the acquaintance of John Kuchar in a PayPal complaint box -- he had subscribed to Basketball State last month but some stray binaries kept his account from being activated. Once that was ironed out, he told me about the game he invented called Classic College Basketball. It's a tabletop game, played with pens and paper, that uses highly-detailed player stats and an array of in-game factor cards to create a highly accurate (if not invisible) simulacrum of college basketball. Basically, it's for serious fans who have outgrown the PlayStation and are ready for real coaching glory. My own attempts to step into Todd Lickliter's old shoes and replay the Butler-Florida Sweet 16 matchup to the Bulldogs' advantage, though, have so far been fruitless.

I asked John to share some more about the game and its origins, and he kindly obliged. Along the way, he told me about his first tabletop basketball game, his love for the Dayton Flyers, and about trying to lug an APBA basketball game through the jungles of Vietnam. He even gave a rundown of a Bucknell-Army game he'd played recently. We discussed the balance between detail and playability, and whether there's even a place for tabletop basketball in an XBox age. Come join us after the jump.

Kyle Hines is the 6-5 senior leader of the UNC-Greensboro Spartans, but he's a lot more. In addition to a 17.3 ppg average and a streak of 56 consecutive games of scoring in double figures, Hines is a gentleman-scholar, a blogger and one of the most well-spoken ballplayers you could ever hope to meet. Over the summer, he led off my SoCon preview at ESPN, but he led off the season by being named Mid-Majority Baller of the Week for his 25 point, 9 rebound performance in a grand upset at Georgia Tech.

After a tough nonconference loss to Kent State last Saturday, the first-ever MMBOW to be interviewed on this site was kind enough to sit down with your host to discuss a variety of topics: the season so far, what it's like for a big-city NYC kid to attend school in North Carolina, Waffle Houses, 1979 Cadillacs, and the relative weight of honors from The Mid-Majority and Dick Vitale.

Gregg Marshall is a lot of things: a master motivator, an excellent rap dancer, and the first mid-major head coach to have a double-keg installed in his living room. As of ten months ago, after coming up short in his first six attempts, he's also a member of the NCAA Tournament victor's club -- joining 438 other Division I head coaches who've won games on the Big Bracket. That historic 11-over-6 upset win for Winthrop over Notre Dame, the first non-play-in game W for the Big South Conference, helped Marshall land a job in Hoops Nation's premier mid-major league: the Missouri Valley.

On the court, though, Marshall's Shockers are 4-2 on the young year, and they're already showing the same kind of tough and energetic play that thrilled Winthrop fans and annoyed opposing Big South coaches for nine seasons. After using a blistering 7-0 run out of halftime to beat Appalachian State 62-53 last night, Coach Marshall was kind enough to hold up the team charter so we could catch up. We discussed his transition to life in the Valley, what there's to do in Wichita, and his son's Pop-A-Shot prowess.