We had a tremendous amount of free throws, but we'd have had to make everyone of them, and then still might not have won the game. We were 0-11 from the arc. I think Middle made 7 threes. That's twenty one to zero right there, and free throws aren't going to negate that deficit.

You can't expect shooters to play the entire game not shooting, and then when you get way behind, all of a sudden expect them to just all of a sudden start hitting the shots. You have to keep shooters in the game for long periods of time and let them take their shots as they come open. This isn't something new. We've had this problem for years. A shooter gets hot and we take him out of the game. In this case no shooter got hot. Even Will was off at the free throw line.

It's like a quarterback who doesn't throw a pass for three quarters and then you ask him to start passing when he's not had any time to get into rhythm.
We have to find at least one shooter and create shots for him. That's assuming we have a shooter.

(11-18-2013 10:20 PM)outsideualr Wrote:  We had a tremendous amount of free throws, but we'd have had to make everyone of them, and then still might not have won the game. We were 0-11 from the arc. I think Middle made 7 threes. That's twenty one to zero right there, and free throws aren't going to negate that deficit.

You can't expect shooters to play the entire game not shooting, and then when you get way behind, all of a sudden expect them to just all of a sudden start hitting the shots. You have to keep shooters in the game for long periods of time and let them take their shots as they come open. This isn't something new. We've had this problem for years. A shooter gets hot and we take him out of the game. In this case no shooter got hot. Even Will was off at the free throw line.

It's like a quarterback who doesn't throw a pass for three quarters and then you ask him to start passing when he's not had any time to get into rhythm.
We have to find at least one shooter and create shots for him. That's assuming we have a shooter.

I think we had one shooter, but he left. I guess we still can hope Dillard can be that guy. We shot 11 more 3's than we should have. We take the ball to the whole, we would have gotten fouled every time.

We tried and came close, but there were some pretty obvious fouls that weren't called. You can't depend on getting free throw calls on the road, even with the new rules, although we got a heck of a lot. Did we make more free throws than Middle took? I think we came close. And still lost by double digits. Our strategy is a losing one. I'm sorry. But it's always been a losing strategy against good teams, and I'm not talking about the Floridas. It's been a losing strategy against the decent Sun Belt teams. And at some point the strategy will change, or we'll keep losing game after game.
Steve's strategy has always been to try and force the ball inside and get easy shots around the basket and draw fouls.
He would play this type of ball no matter what the rules. I'm disappointed that he can't seem to adjust to a different style of ball. I guess it will be this way until he's no longer the coach. And that could be a long time. Once again as Inside has said many times, you can't play Big 10 basketball without Big 10 players.