My wife wondered why I couldn't relax being up 20. I've seen this show before. The UNC game in the early 90s where we blew like a 25 point lead scarred me for life.
We were on fire in the first half, so I expected a letdown. What happened was the perfect combination of things:
(1) OSU caught fire. We were not horrific overall on D, they just got hot. We did have some lapses, but our main D issue was in the paint. Walton is slow to move, and really slow to react against any guy who isn't his guy, and soft in general. Sy is too light and soft. Marsh looked lost. This will be an ongoing issue this year.
(2) OSU played great D and we went cold. We were still getting open shots, but missing them, and then there is no question that we started to pucker up once the lead got down to about 10. We take a lot of three pointers and get good looks, but we have no snipers on the team. So again, I feel like this is going to be a problem this year, especially with nobody in the middle to go to for offense. Our interior offense is going to consist of Williams driving or LaRavia posting up and doing his best McHale impression.
(3) We do this weird thing where we get the ball into the post and then clear out one entire side of the floor and I don't know why we do it. We put four guys on one half of the floor, which greatly narrows and limits your passing lanes if Walton or whoever needs to pass out of it. It effectively puts more pressure on the post man to put up the shot, no matter how well defended.
The good? Again, it was more of what we have seen this year. Really good team ball, except at the end when we really relied on Williams, probably out of necessity. We had less idiocy passing the ball. Still plenty of confidence handling the ball in general. I really like that we have 4 guys who can score and a few guys we can bring off the bench and not see much dropoff.