Arkansas point guard Darius Acuff Jr. will be selected near the very top of this summer's NBA draft. He will be a boon to any team in need of a crafty, athletic, classically trained point guard. If there's any knock on his pro prospects, it's his size: he's just short enough to profile as a defensive liability, and these days even the most skilled guards can get bullied out of games by beefy perimeter defenders. And indeed, Acuff's size was a bit of a problem in Saturday night's 94-88 win over 12-seeded High Point University, but in a way it probably never will be again. He was a little too big.
That's because Acuff, who led his team with 36 points on 50 percent shooting, was matched up with Rob Martin. High Point's point guard is listed at 5-foot-11 and 170 lbs., and was one of several HPU players who looked like they had wandered into the wrong gym. The physical disparity ended up mattering not at all—High Point gave their 4-seeded opponents all they could handle, and at times even looked like the most likely to win the game. The Panthers led at multiple times in the second half, and the game was tied at 83 with just over three minutes to play. It took a personal 7-0 run from Acuff to put the game away once and for all, but before this became Acuff's game, it was Martin's. It was his driving layup that tied the game at 83, and he finished with 30 points on 11-of-23 shooting.
How does a 5-foot-10 guy score 30 against a team that only started one player under 6-foot-5? You only have to watch Martin for a few possessions in order to stop feeling sympathy over his stature. That's because it doesn't take long to realize that Martin might actually be the most athletically gifted player on the floor. He has a first step that flash-freezes any defender unlucky enough to be in front of him, enough straight-line speed to shrink the court, and an ability to manipulate the ball and change direction without ever having to decelerate. This makes him the perfect point guard to lead High Point's sped-up, bombs-away offense—the Panthers shot 22 more threes than Arkansas—and all that speed was almost enough to engineer another upset.
This is the fun of the tournament, the way it can grab onto players and programs whose paths could not be more divergent and wrench them into an intersection. Acuff is a 19-year-old prospect from IMG Academy who is destined for the league; Martin is a 21-year-old senior who played at Indiana State and Southeast Missouri State before transferring to High Point. Everything about these two players' circumstance is meant to keep them away from each other, and it is only the tournament that can intervene on those destinies.
The beauty is in how all those differences cease to matter once the ball is tipped. For 40 minutes, Acuff stopped being the future lottery pick and Martin stopped being scrappy senior just trying to extend his college career. Instead they became two incredible point guards, going right at each other, trading buckets throughout one of the most entertaining games of the tournament.
Acuff got the win, and the right to return to his smooth path towards the NBA lottery, but Martin left the game with something, too. If nothing else, his name will be added to the memory banks of college basketball fans who inevitably find themselves reminiscing about some of the tournament's most captivating little guys. The next time someone says, "Hey, remember Marcus Paige?" or "Jacob Pullen was nice," someone else might chime in with, "What about Rob Martin?"
