College basketball fans may remember Duke slinking off the court after a 2014 NCAA tournament loss to Mercer, but the Blue Devils were absolutely dominant during the regular season on the offensive end. In fact, Mike Krzyzewski’s squad finished second in the nation in Ken Pomeroy’s pace-adjusted offensive efficiency rankings and featured the likes of Jabari Parker and Rodney Hood. The Blue Devils failed to live up to expectations because the defense faltered, not the offense. Parker ...

When Michigan opens its 2014-15 season, the starting lineup for its basketball program will have a nice blend of talent, experience and youth, and how the players mesh should determine how successful they are this coming year. Three players are almost assured of starting spots—point guard Derrick Walton Jr. and wings Caris LeVert and Zak Irvin. From there, head coach John Beilein could go a in couple of different directions to round out the starting five. ...

UNC basketball has one of the country’s most exciting returning players in point guard Marcus Paige. The rising junior floor general is coming off of a brilliant 2013-14 campaign in which he averaged 17.4 points and 4.3 assists per game, making him a prime contender for next year’s Wooden Award. Not only is Paige poised to put up huge individual numbers again, but his Tar Heels team—which brought in one of the nation’s best recruiting classes—is ...

When ranking the many college basketball conferences, there is plenty of data to use to make an educated assessment based on team strength and performance. It's what experts like CBS Sports' Jerry Palm and others do for a living, and they do it well. For the casual college hoops fan, though, there's not always an interest in metrics and advanced statistics. Wins and losses are more than enough to determine who is better than whom, as ...

If we had a time machine that allowed us to go back and grab college basketball's greatest players right before their final year in school, which ones would actually still excel during the 2014-15 season? Have you ever tried to search the Internet for lists of the "greatest college basketball players of all-time?" Type those exact words into a search engine, and one of the first things to show up is a list that Chuck Klosterman ...

This December will mark the 20-year anniversary of Fordham joining the Atlantic 10 Conference. Leaving the friendly confines of the Patriot League in every sport except for football, the university made the decision to give big-time college athletics a try. Men's basketball would be its flagship program. Two decades later, the results have been mixed. In just the past few months, the women's basketball and softball teams won conference championships and played on national television in NCAA tournament games. Those ...

After a run to the national title game in March, Kentucky basketball fans have been itching to see what the 2014-15 version will look like. Spoiler alert: The Wildcats will be tall, good and have plenty of new faces. With nine McDonald's All-Americans and Willie Cauley-Stein fighting for a spot in the starting five and for playing time in general, the biggest thing that sticks out is that each player brings something different to the table. ...

The Syracuse Orange men’s basketball team will begin its 2014-15 season with an exhibition game against a familiar foe on Nov. 2. The Carleton (Canada) Ravens will travel to the Carrier Dome in an attempt to avenge an exhibition loss to the Orange on Aug. 22 of last year. In that game, the Orange trailed 47-32 with less than 15 minutes to play, but a late run helped put the game into overtime, where Syracuse eked ...

More than half of college basketball's offseason is now in the rearview mirror, meaning it's about time to figure out which nonconference games of the 2014-15 season you absolutely cannot afford to miss. These are the games that we'll be talking about for the rest of the year, whether in the weekly rankings, the tournament seedings or the daily arguments about which team is actually the favorite to win the 2015 national championship. In deciding which game ...

While the Indiana Hoosiers may be a young basketball team, they have a ton of potential. Many of the key players from last year's squad are back and should be vastly improved.  IU's players, especially the assumed starting five, should have added facets to their games. The Hoosiers starting unit has a real chance to be special. This slideshow will explain why.Begin Slideshow