ON GUARD : Led by Marbury and Iverson, Little Big Men Have Taken Center Stage in This Year’s Show

Toss out the chalkboards and the game plans, and forget about anybody taller than 6 feet 2. Fresno State Coach Jerry Tarkanian, who has been through a bunch of these, is picking Georgia Tech to win the Southeast Regional. Why? Two words:

Stephon Marbury.

“I’m picking his team,” Tarkanian said Wednesday morning from his office, speaking about the freshman point guard who has ripped through the first two rounds of the NCAA tournament. “I think he’s good enough to win that region.

“I said before the season started that he’d be the best guard in the country. And he didn’t have that great of a season, but he’s started to play pretty well lately. Maybe you agree with me now?”

Marbury is the youngest, hottest, fastest member of the NCAA’s youngest, hottest, fastest breed of player: the dominant, do-it-all point guard.

Look at this season’s 16 survivors, and where Georgetown’s Patrick Ewing used to command the troops, it’s Allen Iverson with the ball, and the game, in his hands; where Danny Manning used to perform Kansas miracles from the post, it’s Jacque Vaughn with the responsibility to lead his team to the Final Four.

The tournament, which used to be a tall tale, has been overrun by a small army of turbo-charged point guards, who are as crucial to big-game success now as their bigger brethren ever were.

“I think this is an exceptional year for point guards, and there’s no coincidence that those teams with the good point guards are where they are,” said new Pepperdine Coach Lorenzo Romar, who just left UCLA’s staff.

Said Tarkanian, who won a national title with Nevada Las Vegas and is currently in the NIT in his first season at Fresno: “I think the game has gotten to the point where the point guard is the key figure. A great point guard makes everybody better. If you don’t have one, you have to be really loaded in a lot of other spots to make up for it.”

In the faster-paced, shot-clock world of college basketball, things are happening so quickly that sometimes the big men simply can’t catch up.

“I just think it’s a guards’ game now,” said former USC coach and current CBS commentator George Raveling. “It used to be you couldn’t win without a good big man. I think we’ve gone full cycle--you don’t see teams that pound it down inside all the time like you did even a decade ago.”

Said Stanford Coach Mike Montgomery: “The game’s changed--but you are talking about a special kind of player.”

There still are dangerous big men terrorizing tournament opponents--rangy, mobile centers such as Massachusetts’ Marcus Camby and Wake Forest’s Tim Duncan; and versatile power forwards such as Cincinnati’s Danny Fortson and John Wallace of Syracuse.

But the real action in this tournament is happening farther away from the hoop, on three-point shots and deadly crossover dribble-drives, on half-court pressure defenses and look-away fastbreak passes.

“The game is faster now,” Romar said. “You need to be able to guard people and break defenses down, and point guards do that. We don’t beat Oklahoma State [in the national semifinal game] last year if Tyus [Edney] doesn’t break down the defense in the stretch. And Missouri speaks for itself.”

If it gets into a half-court battle, as tournament games tend to, Tarkanian argues that players such as Marbury, who can make 25-foot jumpers or blow past the defense to the hoop, are the ultimate difference-makers.

“That’s when a guy like Marbury becomes so valuable, because he gets his own shot off,” Tarkanian said. “Marbury will get a good shot any time he wants, without a screen or anything, just on his own.”

Said Montgomery, who has Brevin Knight, his own quick guard: “Sometimes, the shot guys like Iverson and Marbury and, to a less extent, Brevin, can get on their own is better than calling a play or running screens.”

Point guards have carried their teams to titles before, of course--Indiana’s Isiah Thomas and some tall, thin guy named Earvin Johnson from Michigan State come to mind.

And, even though Kentucky doesn’t have a pure point guard, the Wildcats are the consensus favorites to win it all, because they have so much speed and shooting talent. “Kentucky’s the most talented team I’ve ever seen in college basketball,” Tarkanian said.

But this year, the depth of the point guard talent--and the success of the teams who have it--is eye-opening. A glance at the Sweet 16’s sweetest guards:

--Iverson, 6-foot sophomore, Georgetown: Coach John Thompson has gone against past tendencies and given Iverson total freedom, and he has returned that confidence by giving the Hoyas their best chance at returning to the Final Four for the first time in a decade.

Iverson averaged 23.8 points, 5.3 assists and 3.9 steals during the regular season, then scored 54 points in victories over Mississippi Valley State and New Mexico as the Hoyas cruised into the East semifinals.

“He’s almost unguardable,” Raveling said.

--Marbury, 6-1 freshman, Georgia Tech: Marbury, who is thinking about jumping to the NBA, probably sealed his fate (and a top-10 draft status) with an incredible, 29-point (six of seven on three-point tries), nine-assist, four-steal and no-turnover performance in the Yellow Jackets’ blowout of Boston College in the Midwest Region’s second round. He averages 19 points and 4.5 assists.

“I think Allen Iverson is at his best when he’s scoring, and Jacque Vaughn’s at his best when he’s setting other people up,” Romar said. “I like Marbury the best because he can go without shooting the ball and have an impact on the game. And on the other hand, he can take over a game offensively shooting the ball. He can dominate both ways.”

--Vaughn, 6-1 junior, Kansas: This Pasadena prep product isn’t a big scorer, even though he has improved his shooting, making 47.8% of his three-point shots and 51.4% overall from the field in the regular season. He’s more of a classic ball-distributor, on-court leader and defensive stopper.

“He makes everybody better,” Tarkanian said. “He defends, he runs the court.”

But anyone who saw his one-man demolition of UCLA in December knows that he can hold his own against any point guard in the country, as further evidenced by his shackling of Santa Clara star Steve Nash (who missed his first eight shots), after Nash lit up Maryland a round earlier, in Kansas’ second-round victory.

--Reggie Geary, 6-2 senior, Arizona: The Wildcats went to the Final Four two years ago under the direction of Damon Stoudamire. Can Geary get them there again? In one of the more anticipated matchups of the tournament, Geary faces Vaughn and the Jayhawks on Friday in Denver’s West Regional semifinal. Geary, like Vaughn, wasn’t a big scorer during the regular season, but Geary has 21 assists in two tournament games.

“His strength is his defense and the luxury of having a guard of his size, where he can get you rebounds and post up and maybe hit a few threes,” Montgomery said. “He’s not the kind of player who’s going to create so much for you.”

--DeJuan Wheat, 6-foot junior, Louisville: An up-and-down shooter in the Cardinals’ up-and-down regular season, Wheat’s fallaway jumper (and 33 points) led the Cardinals to a huge comeback victory over Tulsa in the first round, then he torched Villanova with 17 second-half points (19 overall) in Louisville’s second-round upset of third-seeded Villanova in the Midwest Region.

--Connecticut’s Doron Sheffer and Ray Allen; Massachusetts’ Carmelo Travieso and Edgar Padilla: None of these four players quite qualifies as a dominant point guard (Allen is a wing player and Sheffer, Travieso and Padilla are complementary players on quality teams), but these duos have enough combined talent to match up with anybody’s backcourt.