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Message: [QUOTE="Coach Orange, post: 2062499, member: 2260"] College basketball is so bad in terms of how "great" the best teams are that it's a game-by-game sport at the moment. None of the top teams are really that much better than others. No 10 and No. 40 are almost the same team in terms of their overall skills and athletes. As a result, teams can lose games on the road quite easily because they really aren't much better than the competition. Today's game is a great example. Virginia is a solid team, but they lack NBA-level athletes. As a result, they couldn't dribble penetrate the gaps in the zone and make plays. That plays into our strength defensively. Coach Boeheim says in his 2-3 Zone DVD that dribble penetration is what hurts our zone more than anything. No worries about that when the other team's point guard is slow as molasses in January, though. Likewise, Virginia's bigs lack the athleticism to score. Salt was clearly not a skilled big man, nor did he have the athleticism to out-jump us. Though they had a little more success against the zone towards the end of the game, their offense was three-pointer-or-nothing most of the game. That isn't how the best teams beat our zone over the years. They also couldn't defend our two wing players, who have NBA-level potential, one-on-one. Though not an elite athlete, White's offensive skills are exactly the type that kill Virginia because of their lack of athleticism. He creates shots for himself off the dribble, and he can make contested shots by using the dribble pull-back/fade combination to create space. They are tough, contested shots, meaning Virginia actually played solid defense. He just played better offense. Of course, making the shot makes it look like good offense. If he misses those contested shots, it looks like better defense. Likewise, Battle's size and speed hurt them all day. Ultimately, though No. 9 in the rankings, Virginia isn't really much better than us, just like Florida St. wasn't. By the same logic, we aren't that much better than some of the teams that beat us. Hence, lots of teams lose games no one expects them to lose. Every college game is totally different because no teams are so much better than their opponents from contest to contest. [/QUOTE]

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