No sink-o

[Dish]

Conference tourney's are always kind of a mind eff. If you're on the bubble, you desperately need to probably win to get in. If you're comfortably in, you don't want to see your guys get hurt or have a brutal loss.

MU hasn't played in the semi's in a long time, and even though these tournaments are mostly just money grabs, it was awesome to win tonight to be able to move on to the semi's for the first time in a really long time. Let's win the damn thing!

[willie warrior]

Great game by the Warriors. How the hell did we lose to these turkeys twice, and then this whuppin? Will take it, though.

[warriorchick]

Have to admit, I was not prepared r0r how depressed I felt after the Georgetown game.  I normally get over a loss within a half hour or so, even after a bad beat, but I wasn't sleeping at night, overcome with disappointment and worry. 

What I kept thinking about was if my own funk was this deep, I can't imagine how bad it must be for the players. How the Hell do you come back from the last four games?  Even though I am probably more optimistic than 90% of Scoopers, I was convinced we only had two games left in the season.  Two horrible games.

Anyhoo, I am over that now.  We are back, baby!!!

[hairy worthen]

Boys will played very good tonight. Ed will be a big part of future success this season. Looking forward for tomorrow night.

Personally I prefer Morrow over Theo. Plays smarter. Theo is more spectacular but takes himself out with stupid fouls. One play in particular all he had to do was slide over to stop Ponds drive, instead he laid back for the highlight block and got scored on.

[frozena pizza]

Man we needed that.  SJ looked tired and we took full advantage.  Tomorrow won't be so easy.

[Goose]

Hairy
Morrow is the guy to get more minutes. He is much more rounded ball player.

[The Sultan]

This is why you don't make changes just to make changes.  They played it the way they usually do, but Markus let it come to him and they defended their asses off. 

[connie]

Great game by the Warriors. How the hell did we lose to these turkeys twice, and then this whuppin? Will take it, though.

How do we play like total crap for key stretches of 4 straight, and then put together this wall to wall effort?  I'm just going to enjoy it.

[hairy worthen]

Have to admit, I was not prepared about how depressed I felt after the Georgetown game.  I normally get over a loss within a half hour or so, even after a bad beat, but I wasn't sleeping at night, overcome with disappointment and worry. 

What I kept thinking about was if my own funk was this deep, I can't imagine how bad it must be for the players. How the Hell do you come back from the last four games?  Even though I am probably more optimistic than 90% of Scoopers, I was convinced we only had two games left in the season.  Two horrible games.

Anyhoo, I am over that now.  We are back, baby!!!

I hear you. extreme frustration was how I felt. They still need to clean things up, but a win like this goes a long way to rebuild confidence.

[Eldon]

Hopefully we just booted SJU out of the tourney. Couldn't have happened to a nicer team.

Seriously?  Bro, tourney credits.

[hairy worthen]

How do we play like total crap for key stretches of 4 straight, and then put together this wall to wall effort?  I'm just going to enjoy it.

this wasn't a wall to wall effort, some really bad play in stretches, but hopefully all that is out of their system.

[tower912]

How do we play like total crap for key stretches of 4 straight, and then put together this wall to wall effort?  I'm just going to enjoy it.

The team was still 23-8.  Lots of teams have bad stretches.  MU's just came 4 in a row at the end of the regular season.  If MU had started the conference 0-4 and bounced back to finish 12-6, Wojo would be hailed as a hero.

[drewm88]

Conference tourney's are always kind of a mind eff. If you're on the bubble, you desperately need to probably win to get in. If you're comfortably in, you don't want to see your guys get hurt or have a brutal loss.

MU hasn't played in the semi's in a long time, and even though these tournaments are mostly just money grabs, it was awesome to win tonight to be able to move on to the semi's for the first time in a really long time. Let's win the damn thing!

Disagree. I love the conference tournaments, especially BET, and I think they're meaningful.

[Marquette Gyros]

There was about a 9-10 minute stretch (from Anim's three at 4:22 left in the first half) to Wojo's 2nd half TO where we scored 7 points - ton of sloppy TOs, bad shots, not great D - but St John's only made up 8 points if the deficit.

That 23-2 run was insane.

Glad I can visit this board again...

[Eldon]

Disagree. I love the conference tournaments, especially BET, and I think they're meaningful.

+1

It's the equivalent of the Wild Card in baseball/football.

As a reminder, the year that the BE put in ELEVEN teams, MU was the 11th team, and got in only because of beating WVU in the BE Tourney.

[SoCalEagle]

In my best George Costanza voice:

We're back, baby!!!

Go Warriors.

[NickelDimer]

Markus started second half very badly, SJU goes on a run and with a Simon slam dunk gets it down to six just prior to 16 minute TV timeout.  Wojo calls timeout, says whatever to the team and they go on 23 to 2 run.  Markus played great after that. 

Morrow with 8 and 8 and was awesome inside.

Believe SJU just got bounced from NCAA.  What is that 5 losses in 6 games?  Go Georgetown, I want nothing to do with Myles Powell.

Yep. And if he had called a timeout just 30 secs into the second half I would've understood why. That timeout was crucial to waking the team back up

[MU82]

This is why you don't make changes just to make changes.  They played it the way they usually do, but Markus let it come to him and they defended their asses off.

This.

I tried to be the voice of reason in another thread earlier today, calmly stating that we had gone 23-4 playing a certain way, how even during the 4-game losing streak we played well enough to have the lead late in each game, how the previous time we played StJ we lost by 1 even though we shot like shyte. And I was shouted down by the Angry Scoopers.

Wojo HAD to make adjustments! He'd be an IDIOT if he didn't. He HAD to play this guy instead of that guy. He HAD to play zone. And so on.

If Wojo made adjustments for this game, they were pretty darn subtle. The main adjustment I noticed was that we shot well and we got after the ball. Which, of course, aren't coaching adjustments at all.

One thing that did stand out is that Markus let the game come to him. In fact, at least 2-3 of his early turnovers came when he passed instead of switching to 1-on-1 mode. He did seem more conscious of trying to get teammates involved, especially early. In the post-game interview on TV, Wojo said he has talked to Markus about giving the ball up and trusting you'll get it back, "but he's such a great scorer, and he's always in attack mode, and you don't want to take away that aggressiveness." After settling down from the early TOs, Markus was sensational. BEPOY.

It was nice seeing Joey make a positive impact -- several very nice passes. Sacar had a great first half offensively and was dialed in on D. As is the case most of the time, Theo and Morrow were a very nice 1-2 punch at the 5.

Very satisfying game. Satisfying to see the team rewarded for hard work, satisfying to see so many guys play so well when the lights shined brightly, satisfying to beat a team that had tormented us, satisfying to start the most important part of March on a great note.

It's sad that some of us more optimistic Scoopers have to get some satisfaction out of shutting up our colleagues here who seem to get some weird joy out of joylessness. I mean, one guy said he knew MU would lose. Why? Because he's been watching the team for 45 years. Ipso fatso, he's a savant, I guess.

Oh, and I'm not exactly sure what Wojo said in that time-out after StJ cut it to 6 and the crowd was going wild ... but whatever it was, it wasn't IDIOTic.

[Shooter McGavin]

Got the monkey off our back.  Now let's do some damage.  I look forward to a war tomorrow with the Hall. 

[Dr. Blackheart]

Isn't he Canadian?

Arab

[Dr. Blackheart]

0.758 Defensive Efficiency is 2nd best MU effort in BE this season (Xavier). We were really switching on the perimeter and Ed and Theo owned the paint.  Some easy run outs for the Johnies at the start of the 2nd but otherwise pretty flawless. Ponds had nowhere to go.

[cheebs09]

This counts as a Q1 win right?

[Jables1604]

Did we ever trail in this game?

[NorthernDancerColt]

Got the monkey off our back.  Now let's do some damage.  I look forward to a war tomorrow with the Hall.

Seeing the title of this thread and now your war analogy, I'm kind of freaking out about a discussion I just had with a Naval weapons system engineer from NavalStationGreatLakes tonight at a bar watching the Warriors. He was talking about how he was overseeing some testing of everything from DEW (directed energy weaponry) to cruise missiles far off the coast of San Diego. He was making a point about how sad it is that some of the strongest, most utilitarian ships and planes are deemed obsolete, like frigate class destroyers. He told me how a standard old frigate proved almost unsinkable after taking everything from phalanx to DEW, to multiple Tomahawk cruise missiles. His group had the environmental clearance during testing to sink an old frigate and create a coral reef...and they basically could not get the hull to submerge due to the tensile strength of the steel and overall fortitude of the old ship.

Teams often take opponent runs as a direct hit and absorb some serious damage (we sure did during our 4game hiccup), but when Marquette plays with the kind of resolve we did tonight, we deflect energy and withstand much like these frigate class battleships. Here's to the tensile strength of team and a little belief.

[JakeBarnes]

But, but, but... we didn't mix in a zone. How is this possible?

They actually did mix in a zone-man thing for a bit when Chartouney first came in.