(17-2)
Providence! Yep. Providence. We sort of can’t believe it either.
We’ve written a lot about Providence in the past, oh, decade or so. The Friars are a Bubble Watch fixture, one of our favorites, famous among regular readers of that column for doing some of the most reliably crazy stuff in their annual pursuit of the NCAA Tournament. They’re liable to lose a handful of terrible games early in the season, start 5-7 or something awful, and then go on a legendary run through the Big East to end up easily in the field. There are multiple seasons in the past five or six in which Providence had the weirdest, most linearly confounding at-large resume in the field.
So pardon us if it’s taken us a while to process this new reality, a reality in which Providence is apparently just … really good? True story.
After Wednesday night’s thrilling victory at Xavier — decided on this perfectly executed open-play push by Al Durham that got Jared Bynum a wide open game winner — Providence is 17-2, their best start since the 1970s, with wins at Wisconsin, at UConn, versus Texas Tech, versus Seton Hall and at Xavier. Durham had 22 points in Cincinnati; he’s having a nice post-grad year after transferring from Indiana, while Bynum has transformed his offensive game and stretch four Noah Horchler has come good in his second year under Ed Cooley. The Friars are excellent at generating (and making) free throws and don’t give many away, and thus have a bit of a points buffer built in against almost every opponent. But, mostly, they’re just a very solid basketball team all around.
Really, the only quirky thing about them is their underlying numbers.
KenPom.com still ranks Providence 48th in the country. The NET’s number is only slightly higher. The best explanation for this is that when Providence has lost this season, it has really lost, in blowouts at Virginia (58-40) and Marquette (88-56). When it wins, even against teams the algorithms think it should beat, those margins tend to be close. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. We don’t margin-shame here, bro. But it does help explain that analytical gap.
Anyway: That’s as weird as these Friars get. Otherwise, it’s just consistent, sustained, high-level success, of a type that we’re still not quite used to see from the Friars. Yep. Providence. Go figure.