Five Beats One

Even college students sometimes need a refresher in the simplest grade school stuff. At Madison Square Garden last Friday night, in the championship game of the Preseason NIT, Arizona and Georgetown cracked open their primers for a lesson that went something like this: See Cats and Dogs run. See Cats run fast, all at the same speed. See Dogs run very fast and Top Dog run faster than any other Dog. Sec Cats beat Dogs.

In the end it was elementary how the Wildcats finished off the Hoyas 91-81, in spite of 40 points from Georgetown's hyperactive sophomore guard, Allen Iverson. The game proved anew this basketball truth: A good team beats a great individual.

Coaches are forever criticizing box scores for how they slight the player who does "all the things that don't show up" in those tidy rows of numbers. But every now and then a box reduces a game to its essence, and that's what happened on Friday night. For the losers, Iverson got his 40, and no one else had more than seven points; for the victors, six players went for double figures, and none scored more than 17. Iverson sank 12 of 27 from the floor while Arizona shot 60%. "If the key guy for them doesn't shoot as good a percentage as we do as a team, he can get all the points he wants," Arizona coach Lute Olson said afterward.

With last Friday night's numbers, the Wildcats made their case against another set of integers: the Associated Press's preseason Top 25. After a streak of 141 weeks in the AP poll, dating back to 1987, Arizona found itself dropped from the first poll of this season—apparently on the voters' assumption that the Cats would flounder without do-it-all point guard Damon Stoudamire, who's now a rookie starter for the NBA's Toronto Raptors. Beating three teams in the Top 25 (Arkansas 83-73, Michigan 86-79 and then the Hoyas) should give the Cats a good start on a new streak. And the nation's top recruiting class to date (five high school seniors have already committed to Arizona, including Mike Bibby of Shadow Mountain High in Phoenix, the top-rated point guard in the land and a son of former UCLA and NBA star Henry Bibby) ought to keep the Cats in the Top 25 until the millennium. But the disrespectful damage had been done, and as anyone who has been around the college game of late knows, there's no greater slight you can show a team than to dis it.

"We got shafted before we even played a game," said Reggie Geary, the mouthy senior guard who has taken over at the point for Stoudamire, and whose loquacity is matched only by his tenacity. "They figured we were dead. But we started breathing. We're like a newborn baby, and we're cranky."

Center Joseph Blair directed his remarks at the press. "We knew from the git-go. Was y'all who doubted us. That was a slap in the face, and we're slapping people back now."

Many of those who doubted the prospects of this Arizona team wondered whether Geary, a defensive specialist, had the tools to take Stoudamire's place. Wildcats hearing that are highly amused, for two seasons ago, when Arizona started a backcourt of Stoudamire and Khalid Reeves and reached the Final Four, Geary played the point for the reserve team in practice and, Olson says, led his crew to victory over the starters more often than not. At least one Cat implies that Geary's taking over the team from a first-team All-America is a net plus. "Players win games, but teams win championships," said reserve swingman Joe McLean, who drained three three-pointers to help push Arizona to an early 17-point lead. "Last year we had some players. This year we're a team—six or seven guys contributing every time out. I'd rather have a point guard who scores 10 points but is willing to distribute the ball. You get a player who scores 40 and has a few assists, you're going to win some games but you're not going to win a championship."

Just when you thought McLean's remarks were intended as an indictment of Iverson, he added, "Damon's a great player, and he scored a lot of points. But we didn't win the games we were supposed to." An Arizona sub dumping on an ex-teammate who could turn out to be the NBA Rookie of the Year? They're taking this team-first business awfully seriously in Tucson.

If you include summer league play, Geary has logged perhaps 300 games alongside his running mate in the backcourt, sophomore Miles Simon, who was Geary's teammate for a season at Mater Dei High in Santa Ana, Calif. For all of Geary's expressive energy, Simon, whose sister Charisse is the current Mrs. Darryl Strawberry, is smooth and poker-faced. How did he get that way? Simple, Simon said: "I've played ball with [Strawberry] a couple of times, and one time I was talking a little bit, having some fun. He said bragging too much makes people hate you."

Counterweights to the backcourt duo are frontcourtmen Blair, who goes 6'10" and 265 pounds, and Ben Davis, who is 6'8" and 255 pounds. They played off each other deftly in the semifinals against Michigan, reading the Wolverines' double teams well enough to combine for 33 points and eight assists. In the final, despite foul trouble of his own, Blair fouled out Georgetown center Othella Harrington and his backup Jahidi White, the 6'9", 270-pounder who looks as if he slipped his moorings at Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. When Blair was on the bench, Davis—who's finally flourishing in the desert after an odyssey that took him through three high schools, Division I stopovers at Kansas and Florida and a year at junior college—stepped forward and made good on five of six free throws before adding an old-fashioned three-point play with 6:26 remaining that spelled Hoya sayonara.