I Tried Really Hard to Find the Letters ‘NIT’ in the Asheville Jim Maui Invitational and It Didn’t Work

The Asheville Jim Maui Invitational has officially begun, which means two things:

1. We’re about to get the third wave of “Shaka Smart has hair??” reactions.
2. The public is about to get the impression seven teams are much better than they are.

It’s a weird thing, Maui. You assume the tournament got the best and brightest. Often, they don’t, but by the time March rolls around, we’ve forgotten that. In a suspect twist, Texas is probably the best team in this year’s field, and only they and North Carolina are really unlikely to make the NIT (but don’t sleep on another bad year for the Tar Heels, by which we mean great year, because they could theoretically get into the NIT picture). Behind them comes Indiana, which is always capable of glorious collapse, followed by the Stanford/Alabama/Providence trio, which sits right around the projected NIT top line, as God intended. Davidson has an NIT chance, but it comes from the bottom. UNLV is not, at this moment, on our radar, or anywhere really near it, but we expect to get a lot of comments in our NIT Bracketology from Mountain West fans incensed that their worse-than-100^th-rated-in-every-rating-system middle tier isn’t getting any NIT love.

In short, get used to most of these teams. Because in the NIT world, we’ll be seeing a lot of ’em.

Other games of NIT note:

• Richmond is pretending to not want to play in the NIT. Their latest act was deconstructing Kentucky in Lexington yesterday. Don’t buy it. The Spiders know who they are.
• Our beloved San Francisco Dons continued to show everyone their entire unpredictability, granting Fatts Russell eleven of Rhode Island’s forty free throw attempts in a thirteen-point loss. Really incredible stuff.
• If we’re going to get an is-St.-John’s-back? media cycle in NIT circles, we probably need them to beat Boston College today. No, it isn’t thoroughly necessary, but the Red Storm, as is their wont, may well be the worst team in the Big East. And it’s just hard to build a résumé when you’re the worst team in the Big East and there’s an abbreviated nonconference schedule.