well santa clara hoops is certainly a bag of tricks, you never know what you’re going to get. Onwards to USF
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Even the final statistics show how tight this game was:
We were horrible from the FT line (especially on the front end of 1-and-1s), but offset it by shooting nearly 5 percentage points better on FGs.
It’s time to implement @TheWeave 's suggestion: 100 FT attempts in practice, minimum hurdle 80% makes.
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Mahi post-game interview:
I really like him.
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I’ll shout-out O’Neil too who, despite an awful start to the season, has really clawed back. His total 3P percentage is now over 35%, and he is the second most efficient player in the WCC in conference play so far (behind only Malik Thomas) with the highest offensive rating of almost any significant player in the conference. Limited sample, but Johnny has really fought back in a big way. Awesome to see.
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Any news on what happened to McEldon?
Also while we are taking a lot of 3s, if we remove Ensminger and Tongue who are averaging only .122 combined 3pt shooting, our team 3pt jumps from .350 to .375 which puts us in Top 40ish ranking in NCAA. I still think we are taking too many overall but even at .350 overall rate, we are actually shooting better on 3pt than LY .345 clip.
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Sorry. But those stats annoy me since Cam was just 0-1 at the 3 last night. Maybe he should take 15 so he can go 7-15 too.
As for McEldon. Family emergency took him home momentarily.
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Hard to get a Quad 2 win with Quad 4 free throw shooting, but we did it!
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Cam had an enormous impact on the game. I could see his frustration with that second foul. He was fired up and playing unebelievably well. He was the best defender on their bigs…remarkable. Hope he continues this kind of play. Scouts will see that.
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Top 20 talent, and Herb has them playing isolation dribble drive offense. The kids look lost out there whenever they aren’t the one playing NBA create on your own offense.
No touch (play behind in the post) D is horrendous… even garbage bigs get inside and rack up 3 footers against us. That Iranian kid at OSU is not much of a player and he waltzed his way to 25 easy points last night.
SCU is a solid 15 points better than OSU… yet it took a lot of luck to pull one out at home.
Herb should be ashamed of himself. He makes this team go backwards.
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Agree…our low post defense was atrocious last night and we really struggle with dribble penetration and weak side defense too. Tongue is a good defender, and others show spurts.
I’d like to see Herb employ a zone too. Our man to man D is nothing to write home about. Our offense is winning games. I view last night’s free throw shooting as an aberration…hopefully.
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The problem against a team like OSU is…which zone D would you utilize? The Beavers have a couple of guys who can drain 3’s, but they also have a very good low-post player who was owning Tilly. Maybe some kind of hybrid defense would work?
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Fair question Buckets:
In general, probably a 2-3 zone where we flood the middle and cut off dribble penetration. The flip side is this zone is a little more vulnerable out on the perimeter. I just think Herb needs to be less rigid and more open to different defensive concepts that are employed during a game. Disrupt their flow, give them something else to think about.
We know this team can score albeit poor free throw shooting vs OSU. The question becomes…Can we defend well enough to win the WCC tournament?
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I’m skeptical that any kind of zone scheme would’ve been effective against the Beavers, but I get your point. Sometimes just mixing things up can be effective. I’ve seen other coaches (coaching big time teams) who will switch defenses coming out of an opponent’s timeout. Also, a matchup zone D can look a lot like man-to-man, if executed correctly, confusing the opponent.
Our boys did a decent job of trapping OSU on the few occasions they employed the 3/4 court defense. It is much easier to trap from a zone D, thus forcing more turnovers. We saw the perfect example of this with Boeheim’s Syracuse squads. Those teams were fun to watch.
Even KK saw the light during one of those fake national championship teams (CIT?). He employed a zone D through much of that tournament. I think in an interview he called SCU the “Syracuse of the West” 
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Speaking of KK…I was looking for a video of the interview where he mentioned SCU being the Syracuse of the West. I couldn’t find it, but I did run across this gem:
I wasn’t sure whether to 
or 
The Wikipedia entry about the 2012-13 season actually says that SCU has the distinction of being the only team to have won both the CBI and CIT. 
We are going on nearly 30 years since our last Big Dance bid. We got spoiled during the Nash years, with 3 appearances in his 4 years.
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He’ll still mention in interviews every once in a while, like on KNBR, that team was a couple of wins away from making the tournament. If that were the case, then they would’ve made the NIT. Annoys me that no one ever pushes back at him about that.
We were something like 20-10 in regular season. And got bounced in the first game of the WCC Tourney. No chance of making the big dance when we, as the 4 seed, couldn’t even beat the 9th-seeded LMU squad that had just played the night before ( beat the 5th seed USF).
Those were some very dark years with KK at the helm. What’s he up to now? I don’t see him on tv anymore pretending to be an analyst.
Given his penchant for spinning, he really should seek a career in politics.
Those 20 win teams under Keating were all about scheduling. How many NAIA schools did the Broncos play during his tenure?
Keating can definitely sell himself in the room
He does some occasional media interviews on local news as a basketball analyst, but he hasn’t coached since. Can’t say I’m surprised. Hard to believe he’ll ever coach again.