We're All Friends Here

The coaches are good friends. Even moreso, the excellent point guards on each team are apparently BFFs.

Syracuse's Jonny Flynn and Arizona State's James Harden had both just experienced an NCAA tournament victory for the first time, and the good friends wanted to celebrate with each other.

So off to South Beach they went Friday night, chowing down on chicken wings and french fries with a few teammates.

"It was just fun just to interact a little bit," Flynn said.

Hopefully Jonny put something in Harden's food.

"It's just a friendship," Harden said. "On the court, it's different. I'm sure he feels the same. He wants to win just as much as I do. Off the court, it's a friendship, but obviously on the court we both want to win."

"We're just friends." If I read this story in any other context I would be making jokes about this. However, I'm not going to make any suggestions like that about Jonny Flynn, so we'll just take it at face value.

As I said, the coaches get along too. So well, Sendek is making his best effort to being like Boeheim by playing zone too.

Both coaches swear by the zone: Boeheim is a master of the 2-3, and Sendek has adopted a 3-2 in recent seasons, with great success. They have a friendship that goes back years, with Boeheim saying he's known Sendek since the "days when he was living in his car up in Providence working 14 hours a day for some crazy coach," referring to longtime pal Rick Pitino.

(Not true says Sendek. He didn't even have a car when he started at Providence in 1985.)

Hopefully he's found himself a car by now.

But the key tie, of course, is that of Flynn and Harden, who met before their junior year of high school at a camp, exchanged numbers and have stayed tight since.

"Playing basketball you meet so many different people," Flynn said. "You create long-lasting relationships for the rest of your life."

Who do you think broke the ice and asked for the other's phone number first? Okay, okay, I said I wasn't going to go there with this.

Apparently we didn't realize how good Jonny Flynn and James Harden are, because Boeheim sees this matchup being very similar to a set of high profile NBA friends.

Boeheim drew a parallel from the Beijing Olympics, where LeBron James and Miami Heat star Dwyane Wade became closer friends, which translated into even more heated matchups as opponents.

That likely will happen with Flynn and Harden on Sunday.

"I think LeBron knocked Dwyane on his butt one game this year," Boeheim said. "When they go out to play, if anything, they may play harder against each other because they want to win more."

Yes, I get it, he's not saying Flynn-Harden are as good as LeBron-Wade. That would mostly be because of James Harden though, Jonny Flynn is almost certainly as good as them.

I'm not a homer, I swear.