What do you get when you have a point guard voted preseason conference player of the year, a center projected to go as high as the first round in the NBA draft, your best player from two years ago coming back from injury and several veteran role players returning?

Just a 0-0 team if you’re asking Greg Kampe, head coach of the Oakland University men’s basketball program.

High expectations

The hype is on overdrive for the Golden Grizzlies this winter. They are technically a unanimous favorite in the Summit League Preseason Media and Coaches’ Poll. OU, which went 23-11 last year, received 34 first-place votes among the 35 voters in the poll, and the lone abstainer, Kampe, was prohibited from voting for his team by poll policy.

It is as typical for a coach to try to temper lofty expectations as it is for fans to be overly exasperated by them, but the tone with which Kampe blows off his team’s “accomplishments” can only be described as amusing.

“I don’t read that shit,” said the cantankerous coach in reference to the menagerie of preseason publications that predict his Grizzlies will run away with the Summit League title and dance their way into the NCAA tournament. “I don’t know if (my players) do, but I don’t. We’re 0-0, and when we play Eastern Michigan, they’ll be 0-0. I don’t think anything matters but the games. I don’t give a crap whether they rank us first or last. We’ll be ready to play when the time comes.”

Whether Kampe appreciates or even cares about the preseason predictions, in the highly profitable Division I men’s basketball, there are going to be plenty of people with plenty of things to say about every league, even the Summit. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why the prognosticators are so infatuated with these Golden Grizzlies.

The players

In spite of his insistence that OU’s 2009-10 team hasn’t earned anything yet, you wouldn’t inspire much of a debate from the 26-year head coach if you were to call this team his most capable and proven yet.

“One through 12, yes,” said Kampe when asked if this team was the most talented he has ever had. “There’s nobody out there that can’t play.”

At the all-important position of point guard, the Grizzlies return Johnathon Jones who was voted by the media and coaches as the preseason conference player of the year. Kampe calls Jones “the smartest player” and one of the highest-character individuals he has ever coached.

Jones led the entire nation in assists with an absurd 8.1 dishes per game last season. Kampe sees Jones as the biggest difference between this team and the last one that was picked to win the Summit League in 2003-04.

“If you look at that team, we had a lot of really good players, but we didn’t have a point guard,” Kampe said. “He knows me better than I know myself sometimes in terms of what I want out on the court.”

Jones, like his coach, said he finds no comfort in his or the team’s lofty preseason notices. Like every other player on the current roster, Jones has never played in an NCAA tournament game and said the wounds from narrow misses such as last year, when OU blew a double-digit second half lead to North Dakota State, are too fresh to be taken by preseason kudos.

“I’m preparing like the expectations are not there,” Jones said. “A lot of us have been on this team for a few years and have been to a championship and tasted defeat. That’s motivation right there. With the expectations, we come knowing that we’ve lost games in the final seconds and we have that motivation. We don’t let a lot of outside stuff motivate us.”

Jones was joined on the preseason all-conference first team by teammates Keith “Kito” Benson and Derick Nelson.

Benson, a 6-11 junior center, broke out last season after playing a limited role off the bench his freshman season. He is lauded for his defensive ability after leading the league with 2.8 blocks per game, while wrestling down 7.8 rebounds. He also averaged over 14 points a game.

Benson has received acclaim unheard of for a Golden Grizzly. He participated in Amare Stoudemire’s Skills Camp this summer alongside 13 other elite centers and power forwards in the country. In the most recent mock draft of the renowned NBA draft site nbadraft.net, Benson was projected to be taken by the Orlando Magic with the 29th pick in the first round.

“We have a kid who is projected to one day be good enough to get drafted in the first round of the NBA draft and he is 6-11,” Kampe said. “There isn’t a lot of that in our league.”

The 6-5 fifth year senior Nelson, a guard-forward combo player, returns to action this year after missing all of last season with a broken foot. In the 2007-08 season, Nelson led the Grizzlies in both scoring (17.3 points per game) and rebounding (7.4) and was named to the all-conference first team.

Reports on Nelson’s health have been positive thus far.

“Last year was hard,” Nelson said. “Being injured and having to sit out the whole year was tough. I did learn a lot watching from the sidelines. You see things about the game differently, and I knew this year we would have a good team. It was hard, but I’m glad I’m here now with this team again.”

“I have never eased anybody into anything,” Kampe said. “If Derick can’t play at 100 percent, then he won’t play. He’s shown nothing in practice that says he isn’t 100 percent. He has not limped and he has not grimaced.”

Joining Jones, Benson and Nelson in the starting lineup will likely be junior St. John’s transfer Larry Wright at shooting guard and junior Will Hudson at power forward.

Wright, a native of Saginaw, started and averaged 9.1 points per game for the Red Storm in 2007-08, but left the tradition-rich Big East school to be closer to home after an illness in the family.

Kampe is hoping Wright, who shot over forty percent from three-point range his last season, can replace Erik Kangas, who was one of the sharpest deep shooters in the country last year.

Hudson, like Benson, was a breakthrough player last year after playing a limited role the season before.

“Each player on the team has a different role, and I think that just comes with experience,” Hudson said. “As far as a new role for me, I just gotta work that high post and try and take advantage when Kito is collecting double teams.”

The top three players off the bench are expected to be sophomores Blake Cushingberry (guard), Drew Maynard (forward) and Ilija Milutinovic (center).

Cushingberry and Maynard played significant roles as freshmen while Milutinovic rarely made it on the court, playing behind Benson and departed senior Dan Waterstradt.

However, Milutinovic, a native of Serbia, impressed Kampe enough with his mental toughness in the offseason to merit a seriously upgraded role on this year’s team.

“I really like what (Hudson) has done and I like what Ilija has done,” Kampe said. “He could have left after last year and gone home to whatever country he is from and said, ‘To hell with Kampe. I’m not going to do all of those things.’ But he came back and he has done what we have asked him to do and he is having success because of it. Right now, if he were to start today, he would play a lot of minutes.”

Tough road ahead

As overwhelming of a favorite as the Grizzlies may be to take home the Summit League trophy, they will still be significant underdogs in a number of contests. After opening at home against Eastern Michigan Nov. 14, the Grizzlies will head to Hudson’s hometown of Madison, Wis., to face the Wisconsin Badgers who will be the first but not the last marquee opponent on OU’s schedule.

Oakland is slated to play road games against Kansas and Michigan State, respectively the top two ranked teams in the initial editions of both the Associated Press and ESPN/USA Today polls. OU will also take on decorated programs in Memphis, Oregon and Syracuse. In all, the Grizzlies will face five teams that have made at least one trip to the Final Four in the last decade and three who have won the tournament.

In addition to toughening the team up for league play, Kampe said the decision to play David to these power programs’ Goliaths has a number of ancillary benefits.

“There’s three prongs to it: the recruiting aspect of it, the second is the publicity of it,” Kampe said. “You’re playing the best teams in the country, you’re going to play on TV … your name is going to roll across the bottom of ESPN. I think we’re good enough that we can compete with those teams. It’s not like we’re going to go get beat 130-60 or something. The third thing is finances; we make a lot of money playing the schedule like that, and it is a business — we’re going to bring in $400,000 just in guaranteed money. $400,000 runs the whole program and some other programs. Those are really the reasons behind it.”

The bottom line

While most college basketball analysts believe OU has the athletic ability to push the pace and run with any team in the conference, Kampe insisted it will be defense that will determine how well his team fares.

“The big difference between this team and any other team I have coached is the ability to defend,” Kampe said. “With every team I have coached at the Division I level, the guys that had to be on the floor for us to win could not defend very well and we lacked ability defensively. We’re in a position now where if you don’t defend, I don’t care who you are. Derick Nelson sat on the bench and watched us win 23 games last year. It’s pretty easy motivation that if he doesn’t do what he is supposed to do, he can sit on the bench and watch somebody else do it because we are so deep and so athletic.”

In spite of his own indifference to preseason predictions, Kampe knows this is a rare type of team: deep, athletic and experienced all to the extreme. Kampe said this perfect storm adds an enhanced sense of urgency to the season.

He also said that the team’s stars have already earned sufficient individual accolades and are much more focused on team success.

“This is the thing I am banking on, is that nobody on our team gives a shit (about awards) anymore,” Kampe said. “I’ll be blatantly honest with you: What they need is a ring that says they have played in the NCAA tournament and all of them don’t have it. The idea that they need to tell their kids they were great, they can already do that. They won’t be able to tell them that they played in the NCAA tournament unless we get there.”

— Dan Fenner contributed to this report.