Sure They Are

Jamie Rhodes-USA TODAY SportsWho you going to believe, Hall of Fame Coach Rick Pitino or your own lyin' eyes?

Introduction

Bloggin' Rick Pitino is back, with a quick summary of last night's game, the MVP chart and a laughably inaccurate headline.

Is this year's team better than last year? Sure they are.Pitino's metric for this is two-fold: 1) defense, 2) snapshot on December 17. I'm sure it's actually a lot more complicated than that, but it's blogging, so we're trying to keep things simple.

Under the first metric, last year's team was better at playing the 2-3 zone than this year's team, that's for certain. And the reasons are obvious: Nanu was the only sorta newcomer in the starting lineup,…