BIG EAST NOTES : Williams, Coleman Continue Rivalry

Jayson Williams of St. John’s and Derrick Coleman of Syracuse roughed each other up in the post Monday night for perhaps the final time in their collegiate careers.

Early in the second half, Williams drove on Coleman, scored and was fouled, but it was Coleman who landed on the floor. Williams tried to help him up, offering his hand for what seemed like an eternity, but Coleman kept sitting, refusing the gesture by looking the other way. Finally, St. John’s Malik Sealy pulled Williams away as if to say, “This is ridiculous.”

“Maybe he didn’t like the call,” Williams said after the game. “Me and Derrick are better friends than people think. We respect each other, and there aren’t too many people I respect in the league. He’s a classy kid.”

So which power forward has been the class of this one-on-one matchup during the last three years?

If you go by wins and losses, Coleman has a 5-1 edge, with Syracuse winning both meetings with St. John’s this season.

Williams said he is more up and intense when facing Coleman but isn’t so bold as to say he can stop him. “The only person who can stop Derrick Coleman is Derrick Coleman,” he said. “Hopefully, I’ll be playing the next 15 years against him.”

Maybe this debate will be resolved in the Big East or NCAA tournaments.

No coach likes to admit he’s wrong, especially to reporters, but Jim Boeheim of Syracuse has raised defensiveness to a new level. Instead of admitting he’s pleased with his re-instated lineup of Billy Owens at small forward and Stephen Thompson at the two-guard, he keeps saying it doesn’t make a bit of difference where Owens or Thompson play. He continues this stance while his players say it has made a great deal of difference to them.

“It’s all psychological,” Boeheim said. “The two and three positions are exactly the same with us. What players say and what’s reality are two different things.”

Maybe it’s just psychological that since the changes were implemented, Syracuse is undefeated, beating Pitt at home and Georgetown and St. John’s on the road.

Name these teams: 1. Each started its surprise seasons at the Great Alaska Shootout.

2. Each had the services of a key rookie forward from a foreign country.

3. Each had a key week in January when it upset Georgetown or Syracuse, or both.

4. Each was ranked very low -- seventh or eighth -- in the Big East preseason coaches’ poll.

5. Each coach had been feeling the heat to get to the NCAA Tournament.

You guessed it, Seton Hall, circa 1988-89, and the current Connecticut squad. “It’s eerie how much Connecticut reminds me of us last year,” said Seton Hall assistant coach Bruce Hamburger.

Connecticut Coach Jim Calhoun said, “Everybody says that, and I think there’s some truth to that, but P.J. was coming off a 23-win, NCAA Tournament team. He returned some pretty good basketball players. It was a veteran, veteran team. This is a team with 11 out of its 15 members being first- and second-year players.”

Hey, Calhoun, don’t fight the comparison. It could land you in Denver.

Syracuse freshman point guard Michael Edwards said he didn’t mind waiting for his scholarship offer until after Georgia Tech’s Kenny Anderson had shunned Syracuse. “He was the No. 1 player in the country,” said Edwards, who is averaging 5.4 points and 5.2 assists.

“I had to give him the common courtesy of going first. It was worth the wait.”

Boeheim said the Orangemen’s fast break has improved since Edwards took over at the point, but the coach finds his size, listed at 5-11, a disadvantage. “He’s so little he can’t see over traps. He’s like a midget out there.”

With one month left in the season, it’s not too early to predict who will go to the NCAA Tournament. The Hoyas, Orangemen, Huskies and Redmen are locks. Next-best odds go to Providence (12-5). At this point, Villanova (11-10), Seton Hall (10-7) and Pittsburgh (7-10) need major miracles.

Yet that doesn’t keep them from dreaming. Remember, no Big East team with 17 wins ever has failed to make the tournament.

Seton Hall has nine regular-season games left after Tuesday night’s loss to Georgetown. The catch: seven are against top 20 teams: two each versus Georgetown, Syracuse and St. John’s, one against UConn and one against Oklahoma. “Obviously, we had a lot more opportunities in the first half of the schedule,” P.J. Carlesimo said. “It’s going to be difficult, but it’s not impossible. Two years ago, nobody thought we could do it, either.”

You’ll never find a more positive thinker than Pitt’s Jason Matthews.

“We’ve got seven wins and at least 11 games left,” he said. “If we win nine, 10 or 11, I think we’ll be in good shape.” What kind of logic do you expect from a player who shoots better from three-point range (48.5 percent) than he does from close up (46.5)?

In the first half against St. John’s Saturday, 6-foot John Gwynn of UConn went airborne and tipped in a Nadav Henefeld miss from above the hoop. “On that particular play I felt like Michael Jordan,” he said. “That’s no lie; I couldn’t believe it.”

Small forward Michael Cooper of Seton Hall chose the wrong week to put up career numbers. Despite intense lobbying by Carlesimo, Cooper’s 51 points and 19 rebounds against Boston College and Villanova weren’t enough to earn his first Player of the Week honors. Assistant Big East commissioner Chris Plonsky, the one-woman selection committee, decided the honor should come out of the Syracuse-Georgetown game. It went to Coleman, who had 54 points and 23 rebounds in two games.

On Cooper, Carlesimo said, “He’s been our most dominant player lately. The impressive thing is he’s doing it on defense with his rebounding and on offense. At the end of games, he’s exhausted.” Cooper, who started only one game before this season, leads the league with a 65.3 field-goal percentage. His average is up from 4.8 last year to 13.3 points, and he’s averaging 20.5 in the past five games.