THAT game. Lots of valuable lessons to be learned and why I’m not worried about this being some kind of blueprint as long as we learn from and apply those lessons.
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I would have forgiven you if you had just refused to do this game.
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Taking a step back, do you feel like any of the gaps we saw here were the same from Butler? Or were they all new and different?
What I worry about is that we just have a series of games where we actually do address past issues but go on to make new and different mistakes. This repeats 7-8 times and you’ve gone from a 5 seed to an 11 seed pretty quick.
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(FWIW I think if we just showed an appropriate amount of effort on the glass and hit 1 more 3 we win comfortably. The effort is what really bothered me this game more than the tactical stuff.)
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It was similar… but the defense was WAY worse in the Butler game and we also didn’t give up on Malik in that game… which went hand in hand then but not so much this one.
We also played much more isolation and struggled to get as many clean looks vs. Butler - but attacked the basket better - where I thought we played better team basketball here, to our detriment at times, and just couldn’t hit anything.
The Tillis isolations taking the place of some Thomas hero ball was a big difference and not to our benefit.
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The informational nugget about a “random” traffic stoppage killing shoot around adds to the tinfoil hat vibes. The fix was in!
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I would just love to know the reasoning for why something that hadn’t really been part of our strategy all year was such a major point of offensive emphasis in this one?
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Talked about it a bit in the piece - I think they got spooked by turnovers and were trying something as a backup option to their defense on out ball screens working with our shooting being so poor.
It wasn’t the move, IMO, but after re-watch, it made a little sense how they got there.
Playing through TDR even through some turnovers early, especially on the interior, the other bigs and Thomas would have been a better use of these possessions.