Suddenly, New Orleans Is a Basketball Power

No matter where they started their college careers, they’re playing basketball at the University of New Orleans now.

“We’ve got the strangest group of kids you’ve ever seen,” Coach Benny Dees said.

He even has highly touted scorer Ledell Eackles playing tough defense.

And strange as it may seem, New Orleans was 20-3 going into the weekend, flirting with a first-ever Top 20 ranking and hoping for a first-time invitation to the NCAA tournament.

Dees’ first order of business when practice started last fall was to introduce his players to each other. After searching far and near, he assembled a group from various backgrounds and gave it a common goal.

Eackles, the team’s leading scorer with 24 points per game, was the nation’s No. 1 junior college recruit last year, averaging 28 per game for San Jacinto’s national championship team. He joined a squad that included only three regulars who started as freshmen at New Orleans.

Ronnie Grandison, Elden Irving, Michael Smith and Theron Cojoe moved to the University of New Orleans two years ago when Tulane abandoned men’s basketball following a point-shaving scandal.

Grandison played his freshman season at UC Irvine before moving to Tulane. Cojoe began his college career at Louisiana State University and was sitting out the year at Tulane when the scandal hit. At LSU, he was a teammate of Damon Vance, who transferred to New Orleans and sat out last season.

Point guard Gabe Corchiani, forward Sam Jones and defensive specialist Terrance Bellock are in their third seasons with the Privateers.

After introductions in the fall, Dees wasted no time in stressing a sticky man-to-man defense, and he hasn’t let up.

“We do preach that,” Dees said. “There’s no way we could have won the Pan American game, if we didn’t play defense.” New Orleans shot just 19% for the first half of that game, the 20th victory for the Privateers.

“Maybe we preach defense too much, and it’s affecting our offense. We don’t shoot well. And sometimes our shot selection comes out of ‘Call of the Wild,’ ” he said.

“We give Eackles the green light. Sometimes he takes bad shots, but sometimes he makes those bad shots, too,” Dees said. “Maybe it’s contagious. The other kids see him doing it, and they try it.”

Dees said that when practice began last fall, there was a period of adjustment when the squad had to adapt to having a designated scorer and Eackles had to adjust to playing defense.

“Ledell had never been asked to play defense, well, never had to play defense. I’m sure he had been asked,” he said. “Until he got down and started playing tough on the other end of the court, we had some trouble.”

Grandison, a 6-foot-9 forward and last year’s leading scorer, is averaging 17 points and 10 rebounds a game, plus leading the team in steals with 2.3 per game. He said Dees may exaggerate a bit when he talks of Eackles’ lack of defensive abilities.

“Ledell wasn’t a bad defensive player. It’s just that he wasn’t used to playing the whole time,” Grandison said. “We hold it for the full 45 seconds, and he was used to jumping out for the steal or denying the shot and getting down the court.

“He’s made a good adjustment. He hustles. He’s a major part of this team, but he knows he’s not the only part of this team. We’ve had teams give us a box-and-one and shut him down, but that doesn’t bother him. He just gets the ball in to me or over to Gabe or someone else, when he doesn’t have his shot.”

Eackles, 6-6, was a forward at San Jacinto, but Dees moved him to the off guard spot. Though he still regards himself as a shooter, Eackles also takes pride in his defense.

“I enjoy it more now than I did in the past,” he said. “Defense is hard work.

“I think we have one of the best defensive teams in the country,” he said. “You don’t see many teams play the running game and play the kind of defense we play -- cause 20-something turnovers in a game.”

New Orleans, an independent, has been ranked just out of the Top Twenty for the past few weeks, and Dees said that gives him hope this will be the year the NCAA calls come tournament time.

Eackles hopes so, too. “I’m having a great time here, but it’s not the best time I’ve had in basketball. The best time I had was at San Jack, because we won it all,” he said.

“If we get in the tournament? Now that will be fun. And I don’t mean any one-game-and-out. We’ve worked too hard to just last one game.”