On Guard

When USC’s Brandon Granville and Kentucky’s Saul Smith line up in the East Regional semifinal Thursday, each will know something the other understands.

Fair or unfair, one of them will get a lot of the blame for his team’s loss.

Some of that is the nature of their position. They are the point guards, the floor leaders. It is up to each to keep his team’s offense flowing, his teammates under control.

Some of it will be because of who they are.

Granville is a junior and a three-year starter at USC. But only in the last month or so has he been the unquestioned team leader, not just the guy who dribbles the ball near the half-court line, then throws the alley-oop pass to Jeff Trepagnier.

Smith, a senior, also is a three-year starter. He moved from shooting guard to point guard midway through his junior season. And he is as much an extension of Coach Tubby Smith as anyone could be, seeing as how he’s the second of Tubby’s three sons.

The point guards serve their teams in different ways.

Granville not only sets up the Trojan offense, he contributes to it. He is the team’s fourth-leading scorer, with a 13-point average, and leads the Trojans in steals with 57. He led the Pacific 10 in assists with 181, and has 192 for the season.

Smith, on the other hand, has never been a big scorer. His 6.4-point average is right around his career mark. But he has 130 assists this season and ranked sixth in the Southeastern Conference.

What Granville and Smith mostly have in common is the nagging perception that they’re not good enough.

With Granville, it starts with his height, 5 feet 9. He can count on one hand the number of times he has had someone smaller to guard. He is the single-season and all-time assist leader at USC, yet every fall he has had to fight for his job.

“For a long time, I’ve only been appreciated by teammates,” Granville said. “In my freshman year, when we weren’t winning that much, other people pointed fingers at me. No one expected me to have as good a sophomore year as I had, and that took some pressure off.”

Many of Granville’s critics took their cues from Coach Henry Bibby, who was a star point guard at UCLA, and a nine-year pro in the NBA. He demands more from Granville than he does any other Trojan.

Publicly, Bibby always supports Granville.

“I don’t think Brandon’s game got scrutinized,” he said. “He’s a big plus to what we’re doing.”

But Bibby’s body language during games often said otherwise. If Granville threw a bad pass or took an ill-timed shot, Bibby would turn his head in disgust and look to the bench for a replacement.

Still, Bibby recently turned over more control to Granville in the last month, after the Trojans had lost to Stanford by two points. Since, USC is riding a five-game winning streak.

Bibby has had Granville make sure players don’t miss bed checks on the road, and that they get to meetings and other team functions on time. And if a player is not doing what he’s supposed to on the court, Granville can go after him.

“I was in the background as a leader,” Granville said. “During the season, Coach Bibby would say we had no leaders, wanting others to step up. But the last five, six games, I’ve been it.

“I’ve always played that role for the team. That’s how I feel. But now it feels good when the coach gives you the license to holler at players.”

Smith has had to endure a higher threshold of indignity than Granville.

It’s difficult enough to play at one of college basketball’s historic programs. Kentucky has won seven national championships, second only to UCLA’s 11, and Wildcat supporters view the Final Four as a birthright. But when you’re the coach’s son, playing the most critical position, the pressure is magnified.

Like Granville, Smith--who followed his dad to Kentucky from the University of Georgia while older brother Orlando “G.G.” Smith remained--has had to prove himself every season. If he thought his senior season would be different, all he had to do was read his father’s remarks in the media guide bio:

“He needs to step up and be a leader. It’s his team this year, in the aspect that he will draw the tough assignments. He needs to shoot the ball better and I know he is capable of doing that.”

Smith has not had the big offensive year. But at 6-2, he has been a strong defender, especially as the trigger man on the Wildcats’ full-court press.

Still Smith has been the main target of hard-to-please Kentucky fans. In January, he was booed while scoring a career-high 18 points against Vanderbilt. The home folks had not quite forgiven his one-for-seven outing in a loss to Mississippi two games earlier, and a one-for-five effort in a loss to Alabama.

Small wonder that last week, when Smith was asked at the Uniondale (N.Y.) subregional how he was doing, he smiled and told reporters, “Oh, man, I do feel old, man.”

But Granville and Smith have their teams here, and each will do anything he can to get to the next round, and a shot at the Final Four.

They should be having the times of their lives.

Maybe one of them will.