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Message: [QUOTE="Niastri, post: 5554873, member: 722"] I haven't rewatched the game yet, but a few things stood out. Freeman is figuring out defense. He had two blocks in a game zero times last season, and only 5 total in 14 games. He had two last night. Freeman becoming a strong help defender will be extremely helpful to the team reaching it's ceiling. Kyle, Souare and Freeman as a big man rotation is potentially elite at protecting the basket. I'm disappointed with the pace of the team so far. Last year, St John's led D1 with 65.7 shots attempted per game. Last night, we won the rebounding battle by 9, forced 22 turnovers while only giving up 5, and still only took 66 shots. We were supposed to play faster. In the good news/bad news category, we were terrible at shooting 3s, making 4 of 21. On the plus side, we were 31 of 45 inside the arc, and scored 85 despite our moderate pace and bad outside shooting. In my quixotic quest for the team to score 100 points, I'm actually enthused. They only needed to make five more threes, which would still have been a pedestrian percentage to reach that goal. When was the last game we gave up zero steals? I can't imagine it happens to any team very often. The ball possession was world's better than the exhibition games. The 38 point victory was driven by good defense against a bad team, but holding any team to only 45 shots while you take 66 is a dominant defensive performance. We also held them to 33.3% shooting, which is pretty sweet defense. In spite of missing 30 shots, Binghamton had only 7 offensive boards. I seem to remember Mike Sweetney of Georgetown getting that many in a single possession once upon a time. The minutes distribution and rotation seemed to make more sense. It's hard to complain about lineups when you smoke a team and a starter is injured, but Red didn't try to play any weird tricks with the rotation. My only possible exception is that it is starting to feel like Red sees Zephir as part of the rotation. Any minute he's on the court is a minute taken away from the development of our highly ranked freshman class. You can't take minutes from Fennell, Anthony and Womack so you can have a senior transfer who was a below average player at Montana State get on the court. It's malpractice if it continues. We're going to need those freshman at some point, and they need to be ready. Zephir isn't going to help the team win, he is who he is. He turned in a -4.7 BPM and a 6.9 PER (average starter is a 15) in a game we won by 38. Put the kids out there, Red. Reward Zephir some other way than taking minutes from the kids. All things considered, this was a terrific end result after a couple lackluster exhibition games. I have been saying for months that we need 40 point blowouts against the cupcakes to maximize the margin of victory portion of the NET ranking that is so critical. 38 isn't 40, but I'll allow it. [/QUOTE]

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