cville deac
Well-known member
- Joined
- Apr 14, 2011
- Messages
- 15,251
- Reaction score
- 911
So much this +2.
We more than hung with the #2 ranked team in the country on their court with our best player in a funk and mostly on the bench. And once they came back and had us down, we made a nice run at them in the last few minutes. You can't win every game you play, but you can play hard and be fundamentally sound. We spent the last 4 years playing some of the most atrocious shite I've ever witnessed. Now we have a real coach, who is doing a good job recruiting and who has improved what had been a group of losers the last few years over the course of this season. And who out coached Bennett.
As for the game, it was 1 of those times where a coach stayed with his system, even when we were exploiting it. Bennett's guards always fight over the top of screens and his bigs always hedge on the high screen. Why do that when the guards are Madison and CMM who can't shoot an outside shot? Add to that his rotations (mostly Tobey, who had a lousy defensive game) didn't get back to Mitiglou in time, and Mitiglou had a big game. I know CMM didn't get the final shot off (penetration was cut off by a pretty good defender), but he had a decent game penetrating a hard to penetrate defense (though may have been bailed out a couple of times by the refs). And Hudson had a nice game. And we hung with them on the boards and played pretty good defense. With Thomas on the pine (and it's nice to see that Danny sits him when he shows his ass as opposed to Buzzdick), I don't know how much more you could have asked of that team.
Also saw Dan on the way to my seat and chatted with him for a couple minutes. Nice guy, and he's upbeat about the job the new regime is doing. As we get more talent, some of these close losses will turn into wins. Like Dan appears to be, I'm going to be patiently optimistic about this group of players and this new regime.