After a night of relatively sober sleep, I think I stand by my histrionics from yesterday.
I'm hearing a lot about respecting the other team, crediting Manning for pre-game prep (in response to criticizing him for his in-game coaching), THE REFS!!!?!?!?1, best rebounding team in the league, bad bounces on shots, freshmen mistakes, young team, expel Codi, etc. etc. Lots of excuses.
Racer put it really well that setting up motivation for a good week of practices is a weird way to win games. Not calling a timeout once during the 18-2 run is probably the reason why we ultimately lost that game. I understand teaching guys a lesson and whatnot and letting a young team play through mistakes (insert your platitude here), but that stretch completely sapped our offense of any momentum it may have had and Codi just didn't look with-it enough to put us on his back, as he did so often last year. During that stretch, we gradually stopped playing with any sort of intensity. By the time that we allowed six offensive rebounds on three consecutive defensive possessions (which was just bad effort/positioning/boxing out), it wasn't just that we were playing a great team, it's also that we just appeared to stop trying.
Manning's hook-style of substitutions, in particular, made little to no sense in this game. Leave Dinos and Crab in while pulling out Collins (for what, exactly)? Not recognizing that X was exploiting the hell out of the fact that McClinton can't do anything when the offense isn't flowing and Dinos is softer than any Deac in recent memory on defense? Not calling a timeout and running a set play for Devin out of the in-bounds pass when he touched the ball like four times in the second half? Reward a really solid stretch of play from Doral Moore by keeping him on the bench all second half? Waiting until the postgame to point out what was pretty clear while we were all watching: we were forcing awful perimeter shots (heyo, Crab!) when we really were doing a good job of getting looks inside of the arc in the first half?
I get it. We're a young team prone to mistakes with veterans who are not exactly immune to bone headed plays themselves. Our rotation is deep, but has a lot of flaws and inconsistencies. We couldn't hit the broad side of a barn after the first half. X is really damn good in a lot of ways. All of that certainly factored into that loss.
Yet, we competed with them and really could have won that game if we had minimized any one of the weaknesses above. As DC pointed out earlier, it's become pretty clear that we have NCAA Tournament ceiling if Manning can get and keep these guys motivated. I'm over giving participation trophies to our guys for moral victories, won halves, and close games against good teams (especially when we went into the break up 15). That was good for a team full of freshmen or a [name redacted] roster, but not now.
I'm really hoping that we look like a different team in the coming weeks because this game revealed the recent trend of playing down to opponents as an inability to capitalize on momentum and adjust once our opponent has figured us out.
ETA: And I agree with plama that Crawford deserved that technical foul. While the offensive foul call fit into the trend of horrific refereeing - I'd argue that it worked for and against both teams throughout the night - the technical was absolutely deserved.
