by Chicagojayfan » Fri Mar 15, 2024 10:01 am
Disappointing game vs. Providence, but I was fairly resigned to us not winning the BE Tourney anyway (we don't have a rotation to play 3 days in a row anyway and familiarity around the league becomes an issue at this point in the season) whereas I do think we have the roster to win every other day against even very good teams
Rebounding/Turnovers:
We were under 50% in rebounding (47.8%) - we've won games like that, but usually we shot the ball well. When shooting poorly (under 100 game score) and rebounding under 50% we are 1-5 (last night fit into that category)
Turnovers weren't terrible, but at 13.5% turnover percent we didn't do a great job of holding onto the ball, but Providence only turned it over 5% (low, even by our standards, 3rd lowest of the season versus us)
Defense:
Again, not terrible, but also not good enough. 103.3 defensive score on the night and that's a winnable game, when we shoot anywhere near the norm, but last night wasn't that kind of night for us offensively. We gave up .457 eFG% which is pretty middle of the pack for us
Offense:
This aspect of the game was terrible - 6th worst game of the season for us at 96.7 score (and we lost all 6 of those games)- as a comparison, we had 9 games <= that last year and we did win 2 of them. While we won 2, we also tended to have those bad offensive games a bit more often last year. One of those wins was against UConn at home (who was even colder) and the other was against that awful GT team on the road (ugly game)
FWIW, was also the 4th worst eFG% game of the year for us and one of only 6 below 45% for this team vs 8 by last year's team - both this year and last year we pretty much lost every game when we shot like this (1-5 vs 2-6)
Not much on the individual stuff:
It's trite and kinda stupid, but we don't win when Baylor is 6/16, Ashworth 3/13, and Trey is 2/7 and Kalk 1/5 in the first half. On 2 PT shots we were AWFUL in that first half 5/15 (and all of that was with Baylor shooting well in the first half, then going incredibly cold)
I'll also reiterate my opinion that I love Bello, but if we are giving him more than 20 minutes, it will lead to defensive matchup issues. I'd like to see the coaches extend more trust to Miller (and Green off the bench). Now this may not matter in the NCAAT as especially in the first round, we may see a team with smaller lineups where Bello will fit nicely, but a lot of BE teams have length from 1-3 that hurts us
While I can spend a lot of time parsing stuff, this one comes down to a bad shooting night (any rotation stuff is forgotten if we hit our shots). We shot like garbage and we lost. Fortunately, we haven't had many games like this all year so the goal for the NCAA has to be avoiding those types of game. Last year we had our terrible shooting game against Xavier (84.0 offense game score.. yech!) and then went on a nice run. Hoping we have a similar stretch this time