There were three tbugaboos that haunted us much of the year and that we knew could ultimately lead to our demise:
1)Turnovers and not taking care of the ball.
2)Free throw shooting
3)Slow starts
We got away with them at some points and we didn't at others. It seemed like we had established that consistency. The way I looked at it prior to the tournament is that we could survive one of those issues, but not two.
1)17 turnovers, many of the live ball variety. We had some guys that were extremely loose with the ball. Thought we turned the corner there.
2)Free throw shooting. We were solid there, especially Kofi. He was big time from the line.
3)We couldn't have had a worse start. We did this against Nebraska, Northwestern, Ohio State(at home)...just off the top of my head. You could probably throw the beginning of second halves into that bag(a 20-0 Purdue second half run comes to mind). When you fall behind against Loyola, that's almost a death sentence. They are just so strong with the ball, they control tempo, they play defense and they never get rattled.
What we were doing well over the last two weeks, we reverted back to having some of those troublesome tendencies from earlier in the year. .
Again, we knew that the potential was there to come back and bite us.....and it did.
All in all, great year. GREAT year. That stuff needs to be cleaned up and a focus going forward.