...and some basketball basics never change.
- Lemme start with a quick disclaimer that from what little I knew in advance about Brown was that they had some guys who could put the ball in the hole if given the opportunity --- and boy did we give them opportunities. The elephant in the room is that was one of the worst displays of defense by a UNC team in my fairly long memory. Just P.U... el stinko.
- Let's get real: There's no way in hell that team should ever hang 50 on a UNC team in a half --- nope, not ever. OK, credit their staff with a solid game-plan that exposed our vanilla defensive approach, but (pardon the pun) we exposed ourselves. Look, one of those basics that never changes is that sometimes teams make shots --- even ugly ones --- but that's way more likely to happen when your defense offers little resistance. So, speaking of basics, much of that failure came down to the old staple of lack of effort.
- Expanding on that last point, I realize that many fans don't see this aspect, but to the trained eye, making that little extra effort to get to a defensive spot just a half-second sooner can be the difference between a stop and a bucket... or busting it across to your help assignment results in a charge or a blocked shot (didn't see many of those tonight, huh?). Did y'all notice how few team fouls we had? I'd like to say that lack of fouls was from smart defense, but that would be a lie. Fact is, we weren't even defending hard enough to pick up the normal inadvertent ones.
- Staying with the defensive breakdowns, Leaky is the only one I saw having even a decent defensive outing. Caleb (who is our best returning defender at Guard) had the worst outing I've seen from him. RJ always struggles with anybody with an inch of size advantage, and Kerwin --- oh dear Lord. The Bigs FINALLY stepped it up a bit down the stretch, but that was a long time coming --- I've never seen so many big bodies lost in no-man's land in what were supposed to be Help situations. And again, the difference was usually effort.
- Effort also makes a difference on the offensive end, particularly in getting to our lanes and spots on time in the Secondary, and crisp execution of set plays. Brown is NOT good defensively and we shoulda hung a buck-twenty on them, TBH.
- So, how'd we survive the stank and pull it out? Easy. Some basics never change, and one of those is that INSIDE-OUT ball wins. Dicking around the perimeter is for YMCA over-40s. We took back the game by pounding the rock into the Bigs, and then when they started doubling the block, passed out and made ball reversals, making the extra pass to find wide-open shots. Yes, RJ got hot, and that was facilitated by getting him rhythm-3s off the catch. And wasn't that stretch a far better result than all the forces off the bounce we were trying earlier?
Anyway, for all the general lack of effort, we pulled it out by deciding to finally exert ourselves in the last 8-10 minutes. That ain't gonna be enough against better opponents, so hopefully, that'll be lesson learned. These early games are partially about finding an "identity", so let us hope that going forward we make consistent effort (on both ends) a staple of that...
- Lemme start with a quick disclaimer that from what little I knew in advance about Brown was that they had some guys who could put the ball in the hole if given the opportunity --- and boy did we give them opportunities. The elephant in the room is that was one of the worst displays of defense by a UNC team in my fairly long memory. Just P.U... el stinko.
- Let's get real: There's no way in hell that team should ever hang 50 on a UNC team in a half --- nope, not ever. OK, credit their staff with a solid game-plan that exposed our vanilla defensive approach, but (pardon the pun) we exposed ourselves. Look, one of those basics that never changes is that sometimes teams make shots --- even ugly ones --- but that's way more likely to happen when your defense offers little resistance. So, speaking of basics, much of that failure came down to the old staple of lack of effort.
- Expanding on that last point, I realize that many fans don't see this aspect, but to the trained eye, making that little extra effort to get to a defensive spot just a half-second sooner can be the difference between a stop and a bucket... or busting it across to your help assignment results in a charge or a blocked shot (didn't see many of those tonight, huh?). Did y'all notice how few team fouls we had? I'd like to say that lack of fouls was from smart defense, but that would be a lie. Fact is, we weren't even defending hard enough to pick up the normal inadvertent ones.
- Staying with the defensive breakdowns, Leaky is the only one I saw having even a decent defensive outing. Caleb (who is our best returning defender at Guard) had the worst outing I've seen from him. RJ always struggles with anybody with an inch of size advantage, and Kerwin --- oh dear Lord. The Bigs FINALLY stepped it up a bit down the stretch, but that was a long time coming --- I've never seen so many big bodies lost in no-man's land in what were supposed to be Help situations. And again, the difference was usually effort.
- Effort also makes a difference on the offensive end, particularly in getting to our lanes and spots on time in the Secondary, and crisp execution of set plays. Brown is NOT good defensively and we shoulda hung a buck-twenty on them, TBH.
- So, how'd we survive the stank and pull it out? Easy. Some basics never change, and one of those is that INSIDE-OUT ball wins. Dicking around the perimeter is for YMCA over-40s. We took back the game by pounding the rock into the Bigs, and then when they started doubling the block, passed out and made ball reversals, making the extra pass to find wide-open shots. Yes, RJ got hot, and that was facilitated by getting him rhythm-3s off the catch. And wasn't that stretch a far better result than all the forces off the bounce we were trying earlier?
Anyway, for all the general lack of effort, we pulled it out by deciding to finally exert ourselves in the last 8-10 minutes. That ain't gonna be enough against better opponents, so hopefully, that'll be lesson learned. These early games are partially about finding an "identity", so let us hope that going forward we make consistent effort (on both ends) a staple of that...