Shooting again. And for the 2nd game in a row a huge ft disparity. Fouling a lot.
Great runs in the 2nd half were sparked by the outside shooting of Paragon and O’Sullivan. I was glad to see them both as you start thinking about next year, and to remind ourselves we do have guys that make threes.
Monster weekend for Lewis. Dabo hasn’t been real visible of late.
Uchidiuno is too talented to go on like this. But this is the worst Ivy shooting stretch since Cambridge’s sophomore year. You never want to bottle up a talent like him on a team with limited perimeter scoring, but there were times in prior years where the staff rode with a guy for too long (Josh Howard, Dez) to their detriment. They may have to simplify AU’s role for a bit until he finds it again.
Poor shooting seems as contagious as COVID. MWJ started tonight, freeing the formerly hot-shooting JJ from some point guard responsibilities. The result? JJ went cold. The same thing happened with foul shooting in the second half and overtime. In the meantime, opponents have shot 73 of 79 from the foul line in the last 3 games.
Mike’s a terrific coach, and he has his work cut out for him.
We also saw lots of open drives to the hoop for Dartmouth tonight, particularly in the first half when Dartmouth shot 52%.
I don’t mind the tinkering. MWJ hasn’t been consistently effective but they’re trying to find something and I liked the experiment of moving JJ more off ball. To your point I don’t think it necessarily helped last night.
They had a big comeback late. Lost in OT shooting very poorly. But the fact that they’re shooting this bad but are still in games is notable. They’re losing largely because they haven’t hit shots, but if they do they’d be competitive with anyone.
Yes at this point it’s less about the record and more about getting some momentum, guys getting better, playing well as a team and getting things seeded for next year. as much as I love seeing Lewis play like this, the investments need to be in guys like who can improve the offense next year - JJ and Langham are the high upside guys who need as much floor time as possible, but it’s also getting Uchidiuno back into some sort of positive direction, mixing in O’Sullivan who will have to be a weapon for them, maybe continuing to find spots for Paragon to provide shooting off the bench, and it sure would be nice to see Dabo reemerge after what has been a much slower mid-season for him. The offense is now statistically just about the worst in D1. That needs to resolve.
Where they are is no fun but understandable. They lost three of their most potent offensive weapons between Kino, AJ and then Loughlin after he showed promise.