SWC75
Bored Historian
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- Aug 26, 2011
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- We barely held on in our own place to beat a Pitt team that was without it’s three best defenders from last year, (and three of their top four scorers) and had lost it’s point guard to injury. They had lost six in a row, including one at home to Wagner. They’d lost to DePaul and been beaten at home by Rutgers 62-39. At 0-6 they are the last place team in the Big East.
- When we bolted to the 13-0 lead, I thought maybe we could break their spirit with a huge blow-out. Maybe this game would become a turning point in what had been an embarrassingly one-sided series. But they won the rest of the game 58-63 and they won it the way the always do. They were patient on offense and took care of the ball, (they had 14 turnovers- 3 in the 13-0 run, three due to the first half press- and why did we stop using it?- and three in the second half). They were physical on defense- every time we got the ball underneath, our guy would get a hard shove in the back and be practically out of bounds when he released the ball. And they killed us on the boards- 40-28 with 19 offensive rebounds to our 8. It was really a typical Syracuse-Pitt game of the a last decade but with the great run at the beginning and SU making the plays down the stretch to hold onto the lead. But Pitt came out of this game with a lot more confidence than they had coming in and I have a feeling that this game was not a turning point in the series, but rather a blip on the radar.
- I hate byes and loathe double byes. A #1 seed in a tournament should be to munch on a couple of overmatched teams before meeting the other contenders. Two years ago we had to open against Georgetown a team #9 nationally in RPI who had already won a game in the tournament. Pittsburgh had a bad start but I think they will be playing more like a Pittsburgh team the rest of the way. Their conference record could put them in our bracket and they could be the team we open up with in New York. What if we don’t have that 13-0 start? What if they aren’t 12 for 23 from the line?
- I’ve said it before and will say it again: Pitt gets an advantage because of their rough style of play and the way the referees call games. Refs call things that seem unusual to them. If one team is grabbing and shoving on every play, the refs will call only what goes beyond that. If the other team. Is playing what I would call “traditional basketball”- stay in front of people, play the passing lanes and block shots, the refs will call any contact against them. You can have a game like this where the fouls are relatively even and the teams get the same number of free throws and yet one team is getting away with things the other team isn’t.
- JB always says he’ll accept getting beat on the boards by 2-3 if he can get 5-6 steals and some blocked shots. But against Pitt, that’s not the math. In this game, we had 8 steals. They had 6. We did block 11 shots to 2 but a blocked shot doesn’t always get us the ball, (probably less than half the time) and when you get beat 28-40 on the boards, you have a problem. I don’t use blocks in computing “manufactured possessions“. I add one team’s rebounds to the other teams turnovers. Going into this game, we’d won that battle 18 times in 19 games. (Marshall got us 52-58, -6). We’d been averaging +9 in that regard. Against Pitt we were 42-50, -8. Part of the problem is that Pitt knows their game is dependent on dominating the boards and the go after rebounds hard. Part of it is that we usually aren’t a physically strong as they are. But this year’s SU team has an extra problem. We have no power forward. Rakeem Christmas starts but usually plays less than 10 minutes. The rest of the time we are going with two small boards. Fair has a knack for getting to the ball and Southerland can rebound when he puts his mind to it. Kris Joseph never mixes it up inside. But we are just not equipped to contend with this team on the boards.
- Fab Melo’s improvement has been quite a story but his offensive game is way behind his defensive game. I really hope he doesn’t jump to the NBA. You see flashes of what he could do but at this point DuJuan Coleman is a much better offensive player. Fab only dunks on alley-oops. The rest of the time he tries to baby the ball in, sometimes only flicking the ball at the basket. His jump hooks get halfway there. He still pulls the ball down after getting a pass. He has a lot of upside but a lot of work to do as well.
- We are famously 10 deep but Baye Moussa Keita, James Southerland, Rakeem Christmas and Michael Carter-Williams played only 29 minutes between them and scored only 2 points with 4 rebounds and 0 assists, (-2 net points). Our bench was out-scored 25-30 by the last place team in the conference. Those guys have got to show the coach something when they get a chance to play in this type of game or they will be spectators. He clearly doesn’t have the confidence in them has in the others.
- When we bolted to the 13-0 lead, I thought maybe we could break their spirit with a huge blow-out. Maybe this game would become a turning point in what had been an embarrassingly one-sided series. But they won the rest of the game 58-63 and they won it the way the always do. They were patient on offense and took care of the ball, (they had 14 turnovers- 3 in the 13-0 run, three due to the first half press- and why did we stop using it?- and three in the second half). They were physical on defense- every time we got the ball underneath, our guy would get a hard shove in the back and be practically out of bounds when he released the ball. And they killed us on the boards- 40-28 with 19 offensive rebounds to our 8. It was really a typical Syracuse-Pitt game of the a last decade but with the great run at the beginning and SU making the plays down the stretch to hold onto the lead. But Pitt came out of this game with a lot more confidence than they had coming in and I have a feeling that this game was not a turning point in the series, but rather a blip on the radar.
- I hate byes and loathe double byes. A #1 seed in a tournament should be to munch on a couple of overmatched teams before meeting the other contenders. Two years ago we had to open against Georgetown a team #9 nationally in RPI who had already won a game in the tournament. Pittsburgh had a bad start but I think they will be playing more like a Pittsburgh team the rest of the way. Their conference record could put them in our bracket and they could be the team we open up with in New York. What if we don’t have that 13-0 start? What if they aren’t 12 for 23 from the line?
- I’ve said it before and will say it again: Pitt gets an advantage because of their rough style of play and the way the referees call games. Refs call things that seem unusual to them. If one team is grabbing and shoving on every play, the refs will call only what goes beyond that. If the other team. Is playing what I would call “traditional basketball”- stay in front of people, play the passing lanes and block shots, the refs will call any contact against them. You can have a game like this where the fouls are relatively even and the teams get the same number of free throws and yet one team is getting away with things the other team isn’t.
- JB always says he’ll accept getting beat on the boards by 2-3 if he can get 5-6 steals and some blocked shots. But against Pitt, that’s not the math. In this game, we had 8 steals. They had 6. We did block 11 shots to 2 but a blocked shot doesn’t always get us the ball, (probably less than half the time) and when you get beat 28-40 on the boards, you have a problem. I don’t use blocks in computing “manufactured possessions“. I add one team’s rebounds to the other teams turnovers. Going into this game, we’d won that battle 18 times in 19 games. (Marshall got us 52-58, -6). We’d been averaging +9 in that regard. Against Pitt we were 42-50, -8. Part of the problem is that Pitt knows their game is dependent on dominating the boards and the go after rebounds hard. Part of it is that we usually aren’t a physically strong as they are. But this year’s SU team has an extra problem. We have no power forward. Rakeem Christmas starts but usually plays less than 10 minutes. The rest of the time we are going with two small boards. Fair has a knack for getting to the ball and Southerland can rebound when he puts his mind to it. Kris Joseph never mixes it up inside. But we are just not equipped to contend with this team on the boards.
- Fab Melo’s improvement has been quite a story but his offensive game is way behind his defensive game. I really hope he doesn’t jump to the NBA. You see flashes of what he could do but at this point DuJuan Coleman is a much better offensive player. Fab only dunks on alley-oops. The rest of the time he tries to baby the ball in, sometimes only flicking the ball at the basket. His jump hooks get halfway there. He still pulls the ball down after getting a pass. He has a lot of upside but a lot of work to do as well.
- We are famously 10 deep but Baye Moussa Keita, James Southerland, Rakeem Christmas and Michael Carter-Williams played only 29 minutes between them and scored only 2 points with 4 rebounds and 0 assists, (-2 net points). Our bench was out-scored 25-30 by the last place team in the conference. Those guys have got to show the coach something when they get a chance to play in this type of game or they will be spectators. He clearly doesn’t have the confidence in them has in the others.
