Time for a U Sports Final 9 to rise and shine; or, is One and Done all that fun?
Canadian university basketball should be all about development, and could stand to get fan-friendlier. The U Sports championships need a novel approach that lets its middle class stay at the dance.
Criteria are more like sigh-teria after what was nominally a matchup at a national tournament plays out so predictably yet again… with an intriguing team from the east with player-of-the-year Jayda Veinot and her UNB Reds playing left out, while Canada West’s fourth- or fifth-best got overwhelmed.
The hope from here is just to get to see more good Canadian university basketball, aka Unibball, and hope more Canadians come around to appreciate the high quality of play. I have also had serious Idea Face — and to channel that patron saint of Xennial male mediocrity, Nick Miller, I don’t have a lot of faces — about the Final 8 format getting stale. The Canadian game is growing, but it’s also starved for attention and exposure, and it needs to be different. The infrastructure just ain’t there to have a reasonable shot at getting one-and-done drama. Finality, schminality, eh?
I have been sitting on this format fix idea for weeks. Let one more team into the event, with three groups of three instead of a single-elimination bracket. The group-stage winners and one wild card move on to the semifinals. It lengthens the events, requiring the winning team to play four games, but it also gives the middle class of U Sports basketball more time to bathe in that big-game intensity. It also gets rid of the busywork known as consolation games.
Whether any team could have done any more than the little the Calgary Dinos did in the first 2½ quarters against mighty Saskatchewan in the 8 vs. 1 quarterfinal is beside the point.1 It was just that it was foreordained. Someone had noticed that while the Dinos earned the wild card under the rules, their case was built on super-soft scheduling sand, and they had been off for 13 days since their playoff defeat. Suspicion of fraudulence and rusty is no way to face a Lisa Thomaidis-coached team. But should they have had to face that?
So, yeah, time to think about something a little different. A self-appointed old head for off-brand hoops also has the right, no, duty, to be a jerkass when comment sections fill for calls to expand from the Final 8 format to 12 or 16 teams. Sit down; we do not have the budget for that in a nation where airlines gouge us so.
Since Unibball is a not-on-linear-TV league, the form requires mentioning results of the actual tournament play before detailing my format fix. The men’s Final 8, with the Tall Yellow Guys playing a team from a city that has no airport, starts Friday.
Carleton-Queen’s and Laval-Saskatchewan are the tip-offs for Semifinal Saturday in the women’s championships. It looks like there are clear favorites in both… Prouvez-moi le contraire, jeunes de Laval et de Queen's. Prouvez-moi le contraire .
Carleton-Queen’s will be a rematch of the Ontario final seven days earlier (won by Carleton) and the 2023 national final (won by Carleton). As for recent history between the teams, it’s been (won by Carleton) since early last season.
Laval will challenge Saskatchewan in the second semifinal, after the first quarterfinal final by a Québec team since the Before Times. The 4 vs. 5 tilt is typically the tightest quarterfinal, and the form held with Laval, and 5-foot-3 guard Lea-Sophie Verret defeating the host Alberta Pandas 65-57.
It is not cliché to say it is a shame one team had to lose if you have a random weird receipt for it. Alberta had a halftime ceremony to honour the 25th anniversary of their 1999 national championship team, and they all had punny T-shirts calling themselves the “Grandas.” A program with tradition and wit, they should get a second chance.Carleton guard Kyana-Jade Poulin embodied a team flush with agility and length on defence, with Kali Porcnic always poised to swish a no-rim triple. Poulin had an 11-10 double-double with a game-most six assists and team-most four steals during the Ravens’ never-more-than-second-gear win against Fraser Valley. It was like she was Paige Bueckers of UConn, a two-way terror. Porcnic was Caitlin Clark’s Mini-Me by scoring 25 points with 89.3 TSP.2
And, no, Julia Chadwick did not outrebound the opposition singlehandedly in Queen’s Gaels win against 3-seed Saint Mary’s. The all-Canadian post player had 25 points and 27 rebounds. Just one fewer offensive board than Saint Mary’s entire team, and her total was just two shy of what what the maritime Huskies ripped down on the defensive end.
The case for a not-so-final Final 9
With formalities out of the way, well, on to the reasons for adding one more team to the mix. The tournaments need to get bigger to accommodate development and the fact there are more good-ish teams. The good-ish teams also need more time to get into the flow of the tournament against powerhouses.
But not to a field 10, 12, or 16. As tipped in the title, go to nine teams. Group stage over three days, followed by the semis, bronze-medal game, and final. That is the space this lonely guy landed on after setting some parameters.
Each team, from the outset, should have to play the same number of games to win the national championship. That does not happen with a bracket of 10, 12, or 14.
A frustrating reality at nationals, in almost any U Sport, is that teams need some adjustment to playing away from home. If that takes two quarters, it’s often too late. It would be fairer and better for the sport if they had two round-robin games. All that requires, dreaming in technicolor instead of Queen’s Tricolour, is blowing the dust off a format that was once used for the championships in hockey, soccer, field hockey, and women’s rugby.
Since attendance and competitive exposure are the arguments for having a host team, group games guarantee the host school two games on the championship side.
The duration of the tournament likely needs to stay brief. The ‘Final 9’ could require playing four games in five days. Teams would also be given the entire previous week off from competition after conference championships, to allow for recovery and catch-up on schoolwork.
This is blue-sky thinking, sure. It is not a great argument for the status quo to say that Saskatchewan would have run circles around another team even worse than it did with Calgary.
I suspect everyone knew it was coming, since an angry loner two time zones over could figure it out. Early on, the webcast crew, bless them, flogged some stats about where Calgary ranked nationally at forcing turnovers. But they might have known there are 36, 38, 53, or 57 reasons why that was just air, which was also all that Calgary could hit with their outside shots until it was open gym time.
The sport of it all rates better, eh? What would Calgary do if it got to regroup and play a somewhat less daunting team the next day? How would Saskatchewan handle it if they knew they had to win another game, most likely, to get?
I am the nerd who loves it for a team from a smaller school, such as Cape Breton, Winnipeg, or Fraser Valley, qualifying, and they rate some run.
The power of three
U Sports used to have six-team championships. Two round-robin groups of three, with a high, middle, and low seed. A couple of CEOs and a rebrand ago, there was a push for uniformity across all team sports, so that went by the wayside. Everyone plays an eight-team single-elimination format. It gets more teams to nationals. But the circular-logical next step would be?
The old format had its features that were also bugs. It wasn’t great for previewing purposes, since only one matchup in each group was set ahead of time. But does that matter when TV is not interested since putting Canadian university sports on Canadian sports networks would affect the shareholders?
If memory serves, on Day 1, the top and bottom seeds in each group would play. The ‘mid’ seed would have to play back-to-back on days 2 and 3 — first against the unrested defeated team from Day 1, then against the team that won on Day 1 to earn a day off. With two pools, each group winner would go directly to the championship game. In some sports, the group runner-ups played a bronze-medal game.
All right. How about bringing that back, but with three groups of three?
The seeding committee would create pods of the 1-2-3 seeds, 4-5-6 seeds, and 7-8-9 seeds.
Most university sports guarantee high seedings to conference champions. That would probably need to carry over. The tricky part, politically, is that Unibball has four conferences. The combined 13 teams in the Atlantic and Québec conferences add up to fewer than OUA (18) and Canada West (17).
How about this? Two words: Score board! That 3-seed could go to the rep of the shallow conference who went the deepest into the previous tournament. In that scenario, Dalhousie would be the men’s 3-seed since St. Francis Xavier took Carleton to overtime in the 2023 men’s final.
Likewise, Saint Mary’s would be the women’s 3-seed, since it played for a medal in ’23.
The imagined No. 9 seed will be the team that came the closest under berth consideration. Well, in the men’s draw they would be No. 8. Vous savez où vous êtes, Laval. Neuf victories et dix-sept défaites!
Men’s
top pod: Victoria (1), Queen’s (2), Dalhousie (3)
mid pod: UQAM (4), Winnipeg (5), Brock (6),
low pod: Ottawa (7) Calgary (8), Laval (9)
Women’s
top pod: Saskatchewan (1), Carleton (2), Saint Mary’s (3)
mid pod: Laval (4), Alberta (5), Queen’s (6)
low pod: Fraser Valley (7), Calgary (8), UNB (9)
A potential twist? In keeping with something that’s catching on, the top seeds draft their opponents, via a conference call. This is one draft that is not inefficient and possibly illegal!
The top overall seed could pick first in each round, and each team could choose one opponent apiece from the other pods. No doubt other baroque subclauses will come up, like whether the reps from the two-berth leagues should meet again in round-robin play.
I won’t get into the weeds of how coaching staffs would approach it. They would overthink matchups, playing style, and injury rumors. You can imagine the gamification. You could also imagine the motivation of knowing the heavy asked to play you.
Our groups might have ended up looking like this.
Men’s
Group A: Victoria (1), Brock (5), Laval (9)
Group B: Queen’s (2), Winnipeg (7), Calgary (8)
Group C: Dalhousie (3), UQAM (4), Ottawa (6)
Women’s
Group A: Saskatchewan (1), Queen’s (6) UNB (9)
Group B; Carleton (2), Alberta (5), Calgary (8)
Group C: Saint Mary’s (3), Laval (4), Fraser Valley (7)
Each group would have one game per day as part of weekday tripleheaders. Perfect opportunity for some schoolday games! The aural assault is worth introducing university basketball to children who are your future fans. This is about making the journey better, even if we arrive at the same ending, oh, 17 times in a 20-season span.
And then what do you do for the championship round? With a modified round-robin, there have to be two semifinals. The best-performing group runner-up with a 1-1 record, based on point differential, would join the first-place teams.
This might come off as spitballing and hoping something sticks. And I realize I wrote a frickin’ novel about a niche league again. And hope is not always a plan, especially if it’s just hoping that repeating patterns will somehow yield a new or more novel result.
This is more than enough for now. Please stay safe, and be kind — especially to yourself.
March 7-8, 2024
Hamilton, Ont.
The Huskies won by 31 points, and it wasn’t that close, as they had a 28-1 run in the first half.
True shooting percentage. Porcnic scored her 25 while trying only 14 shots.