pruman91
- Paducah, Ky
Strange game by us all around. Offensively we never got into a rhythm. Some of that is their defensive style, which is similar to our old one.
When a team maniacally denies like that, you don’t really run offense anymore. You just attack your 1 on 1 matchups and make plays. Seems like we had a couple guys ready for that and a couple not ready.
Our late game offense with the weakside overloaded horns sets were great. I missed about 10 minutes to start the second half, but I don’t recall seeing those at any other time.
I think what I’m getting at is we didn’t really appear to be running much offensively, and we haven’t meshed enough yet to understand how to play off each other when it’s in a read and react situation. That late pass from ayo to kofi that we turned over was a set we ran a lot with great success last year, particularly against msu.
Defensively, now that we’ve toned down the aggression schematically, I almost felt like it impacted our mentality. There’s an attitude piece to denying like crazy, even if you give up a layup. We didn’t appear to have that same intensity on defense, and I honestly felt like it slowed down our offense too. We have to figure out how to channel that aggression into the softer denial defense that we seem to be playing. For those of you yearning for it, this is the defense BU played after that 0-6 start at ok state, with maybe a little more zone.
I didn't watch the game , but listened to brian B...did they do to us what we did to many teams last year as far as denying D. and did we not react with what other teams did to us as far as attacking the rim as will ????
i agree we need time to recognize how to use the new pieces and with TF being cold as ice it seemed to me listening that we got into Groce bb of passing and dribbling, not attacking....could be first game jitters also, but we need to grow up fast as the next 2 road games offer us the chance to gain needed confidence to ascend upward with our progress and put the last 2 years in the rear mirror...I believe we would have lost last night if we had played like the last 2 years teams played....being an eternal optimist i hope the players realize they dodged a big bullet last night and play friday and Sunday at a higher level of urgency.....The last 5 minutes last night brought out a lot of cuss words and familiar feelings of the losing memories in me...just glad Dre and team got the win and onto the next one...
GO ILLINI !!!!