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Message: [QUOTE="SWC75, post: 2937818, member: 289"] - Much of tonight’s Upside will be about the first 24 minutes and 49 seconds of the game. We led for 15 minutes and 44 second of that period over the #2 team in the country. - We out-shot them from two point range 9/21 (42.9- not great but we were playing the best defense in the country) to 5/12 (41.7 – which means we were playing just as well on defense inside the arc). Virginia didn’t get a 2 point basket until there was 8:52 left in the half. - We’d been having some trouble rebounding but we were ahead on the boards 21-18. - They had 9 turnovers to our 5. 7 of them were Syracuse steals as we showed quick hands in the passing lane. - We were also get more than our share of the ’50-50’ balls. A local sponsor backs a declaration of which team wins the “hustle stats” in the box score, announced by Matt Park after the game. To the 24:49 mark, we had 21 rebounds, 7 steals and a block for 29 points. Virginia had 18 rebounds, 2 blocks and 3 steals for 23 points. - The one thing we weren’t doing well was defending three point shots. The Whoos made 8 of 12, most of them wide open. My interpretation was that we’d decided to focus our defense on stopping them inside the arc, assuming that they couldn’t keep up that percentage the whole game. Normally, that’s a good assumption. - It was our third game in 10 days against a team ranked in the top five. We led all three of them at halftime and we kept up the superlative effort for the whole game against Duke and North Carolina, losing by 10 and 8 in games that were closer than that until the end. Now we were going to at least do that again. Maybe we could pull the game out and make national headlines. At least, with the win at Duke, the committee would have to look at these games and conclude that, at our best we were not far from being an elite team and deserving of a good seed in the tournament. - Paschal Chukwu was in full Duke mode, scoring 8 points and pulling down 5 rebounds. He was flying around blocking shots, (not that they counted them) and diving for loose balls He’s the one guy we have who gets down on the floor to get the ball and at 7-2, he’s got a long way to go to get down there. - Tyus Battle showed us a new spin move that was quite effective and he backed down shorter defenders like Kyle Guy and Kihei Clark using it. - I kind of thought that the one thing Tony Bennett would make sure his team did was to take Buddy Boeheim out of the game but Buddy found a way to go 3 for 5, including a couple of threes for 8 first half points. - You want balance? Tyus Battle, Oshae Brissett, Paschal Chuwku, Frank Howard and Elijah Hughes all had between 6-8 points with 15:11 to go in the game. - Believe me, if you didn’t know which team was ranked #2 in the country, you wouldn’t have bene able to tell which team it was, based on those first 24:49. 19-11 (10-7) and with 3+ to go LET’S GO ORANGE! [/QUOTE]

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