We’re getting close, now.
You can feel March. Every time you step out of your home and it’s not bitterly cold, that’s March reminding you it will be here soon to soothe your ailments and caress your skin with sunlight for the first time in months. March wants to wrap you in its basketball cocoon so you may emerge at the Final Four in early April as a beautiful, magnificent butterfly.
But first, we have to acknowledge that awards season is upon us. If the Grammy’s and Oscar’s need handicapping, so to do awards real and imagined that I’ve made up for our respective entertainments that you, the consumer, get to enjoy. Goods and services, changing hands to keep our free-market economy strong and the envy of the world.
[market crash wipes out the retirement plan of 90 percent of working Americans]
Yes, well. Nevertheless.
So with that, let’s get to the Month Three Awards. We’re focusing more on what’s been done at the three-quarter mark than what you can still prove (Gonzaga, UConn and Arkansas suffered for this, I’m afraid) but as always, tie goes to the vibes.
Because I show my work: Month One | Month Two
Wooden Award - Zach Edey, Purdue
Barring some sort of full-tilt personal meltdown a la Ron Burgundy or the Boilermakers going 0-for-February, this is Edey’s to lose. He’s been the most singularly consistent force of this basketball season, and the one most capable of altering the fate of his team simply by virtue of being there. Remove Edey from the equation and Purdue is probably positioning everything around Fletcher Loyer and Braden Smith, bombing away and hoping to remain a solid tournament team while those two figure it out; add Edey to any of the top dozen or so teams this year and you could make a pretty strong case they’d be among the best teams in the last 20-plus years. I briefly imagined a Zach Edey-Drew Timme Gonzaga pairing and got light-headed and had to sit down for a few minutes.