Woodling: Simien, Miles key for KU
Basketball isn’t really life, is it? I mean, that bumper sticker you see every now and then can be shrugged off as merely hyper thinking.
Then you watch a basketball game like the one Tuesday night in Allen Fieldhouse and you wonder if maybe the gods of basketball really do play a pivotal role in spinning the third rock from the sun on its axis.
Those who would say it’s impossible to play a meaningful basketball game in November — that it’s all about March Madness — did not see the Kansas University-Michigan State game.
You would have thought the Jayhawks and Spartans were playing for the NCAA title. Bodies were flying all over the floor, the coaches were animated on the sideline and the crowd sounded like a fleet of 747s taking off simultaneously.
Wayne Simien was, as teammate Aaron Miles said, “a beast” with 28 points and eight rebounds while logging an improbable 38 minutes on the floor. Basketball players who stand 6-foot-9 and weigh in the 250-pound range just don’t play all but two minutes.
Simien did, though, to our amazement.
Clearly, Kansas wouldn’t have won this battle of early season Top 10 teams without Simien, and yet it was Miles who was absolutely indispensable.
During his first two years — both Final Four seasons, as you know — Miles was a complementary player who performed admirably as the point guard while backcourt performers like Jeff Boschee and Kirk Hinrich basked in the brightest spotlights.
Now — at least if Tuesday night is any indication — Miles is the featured guard. He scored 17 points with seven steals and six assists while logging a career-high 38 minutes. Miles’ minutes weren’t the same as Simien’s, though. The junior point guard reminded me of a whirling dervish. He never had time to rest as Simien did from time to time under the basket.
Kansas' Wayne Simien, who scored a game-high 28 points, shoots over Michigan State's Jason Andreas in the first half.
“Aaron’s our Energizer bunny,” teammate Michael Lee said. “If anybody can play more than 35 minutes a game he can.”
And yet, with about three minutes remaining, Miles’ batteries just about quit. Coach Bill Self noticed Miles’ tank was running on fumes and he quickly called time.
“He was exhausted,” Self said. “He had six turnovers partly because the coach didn’t rest him enough.”
Yes, the six giveaways were the only negative on Miles’ line in the box score.
“Yeah, I was really tired,” Miles confirmed afterward. “But those six turnovers … that’s terrible, man. But if I have 10 turnovers, and we get a win, that’s all that matters.”
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See the photos: KU-Michigan StateA little more than a minute ran off the clock before Self put Miles back in to replace Lee who, of all people, had been running the point. Lee had never played the point in college before, and seldom when Miles and Lee were teammates at Jefferson High in Portland, Ore.
Asked how many times he had subbed for Miles on the point in high school, Lee smiled. “Rarely,” he said. “Usually, when I came in it was chaos.”
Yet when Self brought the exhausted Miles to the bench to rest him for the stretch run, it was Lee who went in to replace him.
“When coach told me to run the point,” Lee said of Self’s directions, “I thought it was just for one possession. But then I realized I had to get it going.”
If the second game of the 2003-04 season is an indicator, then Simien and Miles are the Nick Collison and Kirk Hinrich of this year’s team.
With Collison and Hinrich off to the NBA, Simien now is the focal player inside and Miles is the man in the backcourt. Oh, there will be days, as there were last year, when Keith Langford will usurp one of those roles, but by and large Kansas has a couple of new sheriffs on the floor.
I know it’s early, but if Tuesday night is an indicator, it will be Simien and Miles who determine just how deep into March the Jayhawks will be playing.