Thursday, January 12, 2006
Did anyone see last night's game?
I missed it but it sounded from the press reports as though Pittsnogle decimated us. This is not surprising since I observed him almost single-handedly beat us in a critical contest last season. He was tough to stop then and I guess even more so now. It would have been nice to prevail but the likelihood of us winning on West Virginia's home court was slim. Hopefully we can split the season series when they visit MCI.
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I saw it. It was the Vandy game all over again -- with the same score even. We raced out to a large lead and then West Virginia's hot shooting tightened things up. Bad calls by the refs down the stretch frustrated us and caused even more errors. That said, the very end of the game was horrible. Cook's intentional foul should have been a no call. With 3 minutes left in the game you have the let the kids play. It was a ticky-tack foul--if it was a foul at all--and only the most anal ref would call that intentional. The subsequent call on DJ's steal was just flat out wrong and the ref should have realized that and not T'd DJ up when he complained. Those three calls were the difference in the game in the last three minutes. I'm not saying we would have won but that was a seven point swing right there. Give credit to West Virginia. They play hard; shoot well and take care of the basketball. They also have a rockin' home court that is hard to play at. Green, Hibbs, and Wallace played well, although Hibbert's rebounding sucked. Bowman had the worst game of his career and that's saying a lot. An off-ball foul in the waining minutes where we could have made it a one possession game was just horrible. Lots of bad shots too. Just a horrific performance. I've never seen JTIII so upset at his players as he was at DJ and Bowman yesterday. BTW: DJ didn't just get a technical; he was thrown out of the game. I'd love to know what he said. I'm guessing he accused the refs of throwing the game. I hope the guys can put this behind them and come out strong against U-Con.
I tracked the game online. Even when we were up by 11 I was pretty sure that we were going to lose. One of the nice things about watching a game online like that is that you really follow the stats. Pittsnoogle was ice cold from the field when we went way up (the whole Mountaineer squad was). I knew that wasn't going to last the whole game and it didn't.
There were also a few other things that led me to believe that we weren't going to win. Number 1 was Hibbert's two early fouls. Though we're a much better shooting team than we used to be, we need the inside presence that our big men give us--both offensively and defensively. We don't have that the same way when Roy has to worry about his fouls all game long. Number 2 was the high number of turn overs. Good teams just don't turn the ball over.
The bright sport for me was getting a little offensive output from Green. It's about time. He didn't do much offensively in the beginning, but even then we was grabbing the boards (apparently he was the only once since we got outrebounded by the smaller WVa team).
All that aside, this game made me really start to think about whether the new Big East is going to hurt us. I know that others will disagree, but I think that was a must win game for our Tourney resume. Having a deep league does nothing for you if you loose all your games to the better teams in the league. We need to knock off a ranked team and this was one of our better chances. The schedule only gets harder over the next couple of weeks.
I agree with Jester that we need a marquee win or two. That said, we have many opportunities, including West Virginia again, Cuse, UConn, Pitt, Nova, Cinci, etc. There are a lot of good teams in the Big East this year. All of those teams are/have been/will be ranked. What is frustrating about last night is West Virginia had an off night and we didn't exploit it. We played okay but not great. Hibbs was horrible on the boards and, even though he was okay offensively, that killed us.
Agree w/ Jester's thought that this was a must win game for the tourney resume & to take a step towards joining the ranked (or at least vote getting) world. What better time than to knock of a ranked team that just knocked off a higher ranked team.
However, with the new Big East strength, it will still take a strong showing at the Garden to be able to Dance this year.
I think we are really in unknown territory. The new Big East is clearly stronger than anyone though it would be. There are currently 7 teams in the top 25. Teams like South Florida, Rutgers, DePaul, Seton Hall, Providence, and Marquette have either upset or come close to upsetting the top teams in the conference. The only team that looks like it flat-out sucks is St. John's. What does all that mean? I don't know. It will be harder to get wins but maybe we won't need to win as many games as in past years. Who knows what the committee will do.
Follow-up:
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2006/writers/seth_davis/01/12/hoop.thoughts/index.html
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