Never in doubt against this Cal Team

[Niastri]

Cal is 21-11 after beating UNLV yesterday.

At home, Cal has lost to (with margin of defeat in parentheses) UNLV (1), Creighton (10), Harvard (5), UCLA (14), Washington (15), and Stanford (13), all at home. Stanford beat them on the road as well, also by double digits. Stanford lost 14 times and could only muster a .500 record in the Pac12. A home game for Cal doesn't make it a sure thing.

It took Cal a late seven game winning streak mostly against the weaker teams in the Pac 12 to even get to a 12th seed in the dance.

Cal's best wins (by ranking at the time) are against Arizona (#7) and Oregon (#10 and #23). They have only played 5 ranked teams all year. Syracuse played 7 ranked teams in our most recent 10 game stretch.

Cal relies heavily on two perimeter players, Crabbe and Cobbs, for their scoring. Their third best scorer, Kravish, is a 6'9 center who weighs only 225 and is foul prone. They have two bigger guys
(at 6'10" 235 and 6'10" 265), but they get many fewer minutes. Their forwards are all perimeter type players. Our worst problems come from dump and chase type rebounding teams who block shots. Cal is not that team.

Both of Cal's best rebounders play the same position. Crabbe is their third best rebounder, and plays every minute unless he is in foul trouble.

Crabbe is a bit foul prone at times, and will have to guard CJ Fair, who is taller and heavier.

The three best 3 point shooters for Cal (Crabbe, Cobbs and Wallace) combine for 10.75 three point attempts per game but only make 3.4 per game (31.4%). As we know, our zone encourages bad shooters to shoot more often, and Cal doesn't have anybody good enough to be afraid of. Wallace should probably be told to shoot less, as he averages 22% and takes almost 3 a game.

Syracuse is coming off a cakewalk victory where our minutes leaders were Triche and MCW at 29. Each of them average at least 33 mpg. Cal is coming of a stress filled nail biter where only 7 people played and their top four players all played 34 plus. Crabbe only played 34 because he was in foul trouble.

UNLV, not a world beater team, missed 16 shots in a row at one point, and Cal beat them by 3 points.

These are the reasons that Syracuse will win by 15 tomorrow, in spite of the horrible "protection" granted the "protected seed" Syracuse and UNLV teams.

We can't shoot this badly again and still win. Syracuse was by far the better team and won by only 6. Next game we will be a slightly better team and we need not to give away 8-9 points on our shooting and defense. We should have crushed this Cal team and we only just controlled them.

Their hearts should have been on the floor like Maine and Montana in the past. We will need to play and shoot much better than this to beat Indiana.

We beat them with Keita and the fact that they had to guard Fair. I mentioned that Crabbe might guard Fair, and instead they went big man then double team once Fair destroyed them in the first half. Montgomery actually screwed up badly by making his big guys guard Fair and thus fell right into our matchup problem. In my preview, I thought he would go with one big man and he waited until Fair hurt them before making the adjustment.

Montgomery had a good adjustment, and Fair only had a few points in the second half. I figured Fair would hurt them all game long, but the correction was good. Montgomery kept this from a blow out with his coaching.

Keita is McNeil.

Nothing this game went exactly as I predicted, but nothing was ever in doubt.

Wallace took 8 threes, lol. We got him to shoot a lot, and he managed to hurt the guys who are actual good players on his team. Cal as a team took lots of bad shots and was 4-21. They had nothing to hurt us.

Fair was going to crush this team, and so he did.

Crabbe and Cobbs are the only guys who can score over there, and JB does nothing better than destroy opponents who have few scoring choices. If you want to beat Syracuse the last 15 years, you better have a guy go out of his mind. Cal doesn't have the guy to go out of his mind, unless you count Wallace, who we baited into lots of dumb shots.

Home game for Cal or not, we were never in doubt. This was the best tournament game I have ever watched in terms of concern. Not once did I think we would lose, starting yesterday. Weird.

 

[orangenirvana]

Fair was going to crush this team, and so he did.

For the first quarter of the game, yes. He was horrendous in the 2nd half. Even airballed a three. I've never seen him do that before.

 

[Niastri]

So you agree that Fair took over the first ten minutes? Do you agree as well that they sacrificed the rest of their defense to keep him from fouling out their whole team?

Fair had 13 points and 5 rebounds at the 3:40 point of the game, and then Montgomery figured out what I knew yesterday. Monty had a good strategy of trying to bully us with his big guys and JB knew Fair would make him quit. If Monty keeps going with his original strategy, Fair scored thirty and nobody over 6-5 is still playing at the end of this game.

Oh yeah, Coleman scores 20 on the Cal walkons. But this time he doesn't get excited, he looks like Triche in the first round: Kind of embarrassed to play them. Triche looked like that the last time he schooled me one on one.

 

[Madbiker]

CJ was forcing bad shots in the 2nd half because he was forced into getting the ball too far from the basket. Good adjustment by Cal. We should have been able to take advantage of their double teams on CJ but we didn't. If a team erases CJ we really struggle to score. Southerland got very few shots and BT was 1-8 and therefore stopped looking for his shot the last 10 minutes of the game.

 

[Niastri]

CJ was forcing bad shots in the 2nd half because he was forced into getting the ball too far from the basket. Good adjustment by Cal. We should have been able to take advantage of their double teams on CJ but we didn't. If a team erases CJ we really struggle to score. Southerland got very few shots and BT was 1-8 and therefore stopped looking for his shot the last 10 minutes of the game.

Madbiker, we had this team so completely with our defense that our offense relaxed a bit. I never looked at UNLV, but could they possibly have been a better match for us than this crappy Cal team?