Watched the whole game on DVR after following the game thread for the first half as I was waiting for my daughter's dance class to end....First of all, I love the epic swings of emotion on the game threads. Yeah, people are either jumping off a bridge or anointing the team the best evah....but it shows the passion (or craziness) of the fanbase.
I cautiously anticipated a win, but as most people are saying, a road loss against an ACC team won't be seen as a bad loss by the committee unless Wake loses every single game the rest of the year by 30. They don't watch every game of every team in consideration for the tournament...they see "Illinois lost in the B10-ACC challenge on the road, no biggie". I'd guess most people in the season prediction thread didn't have this as a win even if the had Illinois making the tournament....that thought only began after Wake started 2-4 more than our 6-0 start.
Ref's impacted the flow of the game and I agree that momentum is real in basketball. Do they do it on purpose...I've not no clue. I'd hope not, but I'd be naive to think every college ref couldn't be persuaded by someone to do something. My biggest issue is the Pandora's box with Replay...in all sports. You can't have some things be reviewable and some things not. If you are watching a replay, and see an infraction or violation, then you have to call it. If you think Alstork did a soccer flop when he supposedly got elbowed then T him up (or whatever the punishment is there)....you can't say "OH, I breathed to had through my whistle, I didn't mean to blow it." And if they didn't call the goaltend on the infamous 5 or 6 point possession in the first place, why did they even go to the monitor? Foul on Finke, debatable, but I've seen that foul called before even though I think it's stupid, but there was no one else it could have even been on...why are you going to the monitor..if you go to the monitor, its a goaltend.
Now I'm rambling....all in all...I expected more from Alstork, I think Smith is deferring too much, and when Finke is in we have to play zone, he's just too slow to do the hedge and recover, and he's going to get fouls called on him 25 feet from the hoop which hurt us. Oh, and our zone offense isn't great, but I think that's because they had a giant in the middle who was pretty good.