Really bad game last night, but not too surprising. Winning on the road in the BE is no easy task. Take a look at the first few BE games, most home teams were dominant. I was a little surprised that Crean did not seem to have the team properly prepared. I thought with the extra prep time we would come out with a solid game plan and a nice performance. At the end of the day, it's one bad game and not the end of the season. This team still has enough talent be a solid BE team.
The real question I have is what happened to our up tempo transition game and our defensive intensity? I think the run and gun aspect of our team is our main strength. We have excellent open court players who can finish at the hoop. When we run and gun, we look solid. Half court offense is not our strength for many reasons, mainly lack of inside play and poor shooting. We need easy hoops in transition. The trasition game seems to impact our intensity on defense too. In my opinion, this team needs to run and have full court pressure for a large portion of the game to be successful. I think it will be very successful. If not, at least it will be fun to watch. Anyone with me?
Nothing stops running more effectively than outrebounding you opponent by 20+ rebounds. You can't do a lot of running if you don't have the ball. You also can't press much if you don't make any shots. It'd also difficult to play uptempo against a zone. Lots of things contributed to the poor performance.
There are opportunities to run in every game. We need to set the tempo as opposed to letting opponents control the tempo. Granted, we can't control the whole game, but we can affect tempo at various stages. If you haven't noticed, we are a team of runs. We play sluggish, and then bam, we go on a run, then back to sluggish. If we can minimize our sluggish periods, we can be successful. I think this team needs to come out with a full court press at the start of the game. Also, full court man to man on the guards on any missed shots.
agreed-
no intensity last night.
watched wes now and again, and tho' he was on a different player, he appeared rather indifferently defensively as a PC guy blew past his man and wes...
the team did a lot of walking around last eve.
When the other team shoots 50% its also hard to run when taking the ball out of the basket...
I agree with 'fan. Hot shooting will lead to a slower paced game. Providence controlled the tempo by controlling the boards... Jerel is the SOUL of the this team. He brings on both ends of the floor for 40 minutes. his absence really slowed our offensive tempo Jerel gets a lot of deflections and that leads to fast breaks and broken plays. It seemed like all the deflections were caused by Providence last night.
It's always easier for a slow pace team to control tempo rather than an uptempo team-----and tempo is very important!