One shining bracket: Picking Alaska’s best Division I men’s college basketball player

Whether your favorite sport is basketball, hockey, football or something else, we all share a favorite game: GOAT roping.

Choosing the greatest of all time in any sport can be a lively pursuit that provokes as many debates as it evokes memories. It can fill up Twitter — MJ or Lebron? Brady or Montana? Serena or Steffi?

And it can fill time during a quarantine, which is why Alaska basketball fans are currently debating about the best Division I men’s basketball player to come from Alaska.

Trajan or Muff? Mario or Boozer? Wally Leask of Metlakatla, who played in the 1940s, or Kamaka Hepa of Utqiagvik, who is playing right now?

Those six are among 64 Alaskans, all of them with Division I basketball experience, in a bracket-style competition devised by Van Williams for the Alaska Sports Hall of Fame.

Williams, 48, is an East High graduate who covered sports for the Daily News for 15 years and now writes a blog for the Hall of Fame. When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down sports, he decided to use the free time to research the college statistics of every Alaska man who has played D-I basketball and then seed them in a field of 64.

“There was nothing else to cover so history took center stage,” he said.

And in sports, history is integral. Can’t have records without it, can’t have dynasties without it, can’t have GOATs without it.

Williams found about 70 Alaskans who play or played Division I men’s basketball and went online to find stats for all of them. Because he was dealing with Division I schools, the statistics were readily available online, but compiling and analyzing them took time.

“I probably worked on this bracket every day for the last month,” he said by email. “I studied harder for this than I did the SATs. My biggest fear was overlooking the obvious.

“I probably rearranged the bracket 100 times. I bet I spent more time analyzing player seeds than researching player stats. Trying to rank different guys from different eras was brutal.”

The bracket isn’t a popularity contest. It’s Williams’ bracket, and until he gets to a Final Four, all decisions are his. Once it’s down to four players, he said he’ll consult with a handful of others before crowning the greatest of all time.

In order to level the playing field as much as possible, Williams decided to make his bracket strictly about Division I players — sorry, Peter Bullock, Brad Oleson and all you other Alaskans who had stellar Division II careers.

He also decided to base his decisions exclusively on achievements made while playing Division I basketball. What guys did in high school doesn’t matter, and what they did professionally doesn’t matter. If they spent time in Division I and Division II, what they did in Division II doesn’t matter.

That last piece of criteria sparked the biggest Twitter debate when Williams released his first-round results Wednesday.

There was just one upset — in the Bell-Holter region, No. 10 seed Vante Hendrix (whose name was Devante Doutrive when he played for West High) surprised No. 7 Dane Kuiper in a showdown between two former New Mexico Lobos.

But it was a game in the Boozer region that got people going on Twitter, the one where Jalil Abdul-Bassit, the No. 8 seed who played two seasons at Oregon, beat Jason Kaiser, the No. 9 seed who played two seasons at Weber State before transferring to UAA, where he became one of the greatest shooters and scorers in school history.

When he makes his picks, Williams said, he doesn’t imagine the two players going one-on-one. Instead it’s a one-on-one evaluation based on statistics, career highlights and impacts, and in this particular matchup he went with the numbers Abdul-Bassit posted at Oregon over the ones Kaiser posted at Weber State.

Not fair, challenged the UAA men’s basketball Twitter account. Kaiser set the Great Alaska Shootout scoring record as a junior at UAA while playing against three Division I teams, it argued. He won the 3-point shooting contest against a field of DI shooters at the 1995 NABC All-Star Game. He consistently scored big anytime UAA took on a Division I team.

Also arguing for a first-round win for Kaiser was Patrick Callahan, a longtime coach in Nome: “Kaiser out, so am I,” he tweeted.

“I’ve heard from a ton of players, coaches and fans,” Williams said. “Some people think I’m an idiot, but it’s not about me. It’s about celebrating these players and reminding everybody that Alaska has produced top-notch talent for decades.”

Picking top seeds in each of the four regions was easy, he said, and anyone with even a basic knowledge of Alaska basketball would know that Trajan Langdon, Carlos Boozer and Mario Chalmers — legit Division I stars who went on to play in the NBA — would be automatic top seeds.

The fourth was also a no-brainer, Williams said, although it wasn’t Muff Butler, an East High and city-league legend who is Abdul-Bassit’s dad and is viewed by many who saw him play at his peak as the best; he earned the No. 3 seed in the Langdon bracket.

“In my mind, Damen Bell-Holter was a clear-cut No. 1 seed,’’ Williams said of the Hydaburg player who competed in high school at Ketchikan and college at Oral Roberts. “He ranks No. 1 all-time in rebounds among Alaskans (in Division I), No. 4 in points, No. 3 in blocked shots and No. 7 in games. His 20 rebounds in a game are the most by an Alaskan. He is No. 3 with a career-high 35 points. Dude was a beast.”

Williams, who has been writing the Hall of Fame blog for 10 years, doesn’t have a specific timeline for announcing the results of each round but said he will roll them out every three of four days on Twitter and the Hall of Fame website.

He’s not sure what his next project might be until sports resume and he can resume his regular reporting of sports results. He said he has considered a list of all-time UAA and UAF basketball greats but thinks it might be better to take on a different sport.

“These projects take up a ton of time and leave little room for error,” he said. “The pressure to get it all the way right is heavy duty.”

First-round results

Bell-Holter region

#1 Damen Bell-Holter (Oral Roberts) d. #16 Mike Dunlap (Loyola Marymount)

#2 Kyle Bailey (Santa Clara) d. #15 Doug Hardy (Idaho)

#3 Doron Perkins (Santa Clara) d. #14 John Brown (Seattle)

#4 Tony Reed (Montana) d. #13 Bryan Anderson (Texas State)

#5 Will Egolf (Bradley) d. #12 Devonaire Doutrive (Arizona)

#6 Marcus Watts (McNeese State/Florida Gulf Coast) d. #11 Mao Tosi (Idaho)

#10 Vante Hendrix (New Mexico) d. #7 Dane Kuiper (New Mexico)

#8 Mark Schweigert (Southern Utah) d. #9 Jeff Lentfer (Weber State)

Langdon region

#1 Trajan Langdon (Duke) d. #16 Cole Magner (Bowling Green)

#2 Jason Erickson (Montana State) d. #15 Donny Judd (Maryland)

#3 Muff Butler (New Orleans) d. #14 Brandon Huffman (North Carolina)

#4 Roderick Wilmont (Indiana) d. #13 Jay Lewis (Wichita State)

#5 John Levitt (Saint Mary’s) d. #12 Michael Godfrey (Grambling)

#6 Wally Leask (Washington) d. #11 Ryden Hines (Iona)

#7 Kevin Winford (Eastern Washington) d. #10 Jeremiah Bailey (Pacific)

#8 Chris Toomer (Liberty) d. #9 Anthony Cousin (Illinois State)

Chalmers region

#1 Mario Chalmers (Kansas) d. #16 Tommy Hobbs (New Orleans)

#2 Nick Billings (Binghamton) d. #15 Kwintin Williams (Connecticut)

#3 Devon Bookert (Florida State) d. #14 Bentiu Panoam (North Dakota)

#4 Jumoke Horton (Saint Mary’s) d. #13 Kamaka Hepa (Texas)

#5 Damon Sherman-Newsome (Colgate) d. #12 Kinzey Reeves (Saint Peters)

#6 Jacob Calloway (Southern Utah) d. #11 Connor Devine (South Dakota State)

#7 Derrick Wilson (Marquette) d. #10 Ray Schafer (Oregon)

#8 Chris Bryant (Drake) d. #9 Jack Hobbs (Hartford)

Boozer region

#1 Carlos Boozer (Duke) d. #16 Gary Wilken (Oregon State)

#2 Chris Devine (Santa Barbara) d. #15 CJ Hooker (North Carolina)

#3 Andre Laws (San Diego) d. #14 Brian Petro (Texas State)

#4 Colter Lasher (Houston Baptist) d. #13 Stefan Falke (Lehigh)

#5 Larry McBride (Montana) d. #12 Bomet Walden (Murray State)

#6 Cameron Rigby (Bradley & San Diego) d. #11 Greg Harton (Southern Utah)

#7 Ramon Harris (Kentucky) d. #10 Damon Nicholas (Arkansas State)

#8 Jalil Abdul-Bassit (Oregon) d. #9 Jason Kaiser (Weber State)

Note: The Bell-Holter and Langdon regions are on one side of the bracket, and the Chalmers and Boozer regions are on the other side.

[Because of a high volume of comments requiring moderation, we are temporarily disabling comments on many of our articles so editors can focus on the coronavirus crisis and other coverage. We invite you to write a letter to the editor or reach out directly if you’d like to communicate with us about a particular article. Thanks.]