Caleb Love V. Emanuel Sharp Should Be Great Theater — Inside the Houston-Arizona Deep Ball and Rebounding Drama

TUCSON, Arizona — Caleb Love is almost a throwback to the 1980s and early 1990s, a high-profile star who’s been around college basketball so long he’s played both the hero and villain roles with equal dramatic flair. Love hits deep clutch shots, often misses a ton of other shots and unleashes a torrent of trash talk that is apparently annoying enough that Arizona State claimed it drove on of its players to try and head butt Love right near the end of a game already long decided. Game, set, Love?

Kelvin Sampson’s University of Houston team brings its own rugged guard into this Top 15 early Saturday showdown (1 pm, ESPN) with Love and Arizona. That’d be Emanuel Sharp, who like Love is one of college basketball’s true deep ball artists. Sharp regularly practices shots from 35 feet in his shooting practices with UH associate head coach Quannas White.

Part of the subtext of this fascinating matchup at the McKale Center between 20-4, 12-1 Big 12 Houston and 17-7, 11-2 Arizona is the deep ball theater that Love and Sharp could engage in. Adding to the intrigue is the fact that the 6-foot-4 Love and the 6-foot-3 Sharp, one of Houston’s better one-on-one defenders, figure to be guarding each other for long stretches of this game.

“You know, I don’t mind it,” Sharp says when I ask him about the verbal back and forth Love likes to get into. “If it’s silent and we don’t say a word, that’s cool. If he wants to talk even better. But we try not to play into that. We try not to get into it with back and forth type of players. Because focusing on winning. Not focusing on talking or one-on-one matchups. It’s  a team game.

“It’s not any person versus another person. We try not to get caught up in that.”

Sharp cracks that UH power forward JoJo Tugler talks as much as anyone on the court anyway. “No, no, joking,”  Sharp amends with a big grin. “There’s really not a lot of back and forth in this league. Everybody just comes out and competes.”

“You know, I don’t mind it. If it’s silent and we don’t say a word, that’s cool. If he wants to talk even better. But we try not to play into that.” — UH guard Emanuel Sharp on trash talking with Caleb Love

A Game Of Giant Rebounders

JoJo Tugler, the 6-foot-8 power forward with the 7-foot-6 and 1/2 wingspan who plays center for Sampson, is the key to another crucial matchup in this Big 12 battle. One maybe even more important than Sharp v. Love. Arizona leads the league in rebounding and rebounding margin with 6-foot-8 forward Tobe Awaka and hulking 7-foot center Henri Veesaar powering the Wildcats to that advantage. Tugler is capable of shifting the rebounding balance almost on his own, but he must stay out of the foul trouble and on the court to do so.

“Every game I want to go out there and do better than I did last time, try to,” Tugler tells PaperCity. “I like it. I like competing.

“I like playing against somebody better than me.”

For Tugler, there is nothing better than going against other talented rebounders and shot blockers, guys who can push him to raise his own game. (And you can’t get much higher above the rim than Tugler, college basketball’s unique unicorn, does.)

“I just love competing,” Tugler says. “Playing my favorite sport.”

This is one of those games where players who want to compete can’t be weak kneed. Which is exactly what the players who could swing this matchup want.

“He’s a scorer,” Sharp says of Love. “He just reached a milestone (Love became the 85th player in NCAA history to reach 2,500 career points.) You’ve got to get up in him. He’s a great player, like a lot of other players on these teams. We just got to respect him.”

There will be flying offensive rebounds that would be Dennis Rodman approved. Deep shots that test the geometry of the court. And plenty of guys talking. And the latest version of Love, the guy who put Duke to bed in Mike Krzyzewski’s last Final Four with one of the most iconic college basketball shots of the decade while playing for North Carolina.

“He’s dynamic,” Kelvin Sampson says of Caleb Love. “That’s the best way to describe Caleb. I would say two words — dynamic and fearless. What makes him tough is his success as a player doesn’t alter anything he does.

“He plays the same way. And he plays the same way if he’s missing shots too. And that to me just reeks of confidence.” So does Emanuel Sharp, LJ Cryer and in his way JoJo Tugler.

It’s what a game like this is all about.