Yale takes on the UIC Flames today in a matinee. UIC is coming off of a frankly embarrassing home loss to KP 349 Arkansas-Pine Bluff, so you know they’ll be hungry for a win.
UIC was very impressive last year when they beat Yale. Cursory look at their roster shows they return 1 player from that game. Vegas has it yale -13.5
Broadcasters said they are also facing injuries to two of their starters, so they are forced to start three freshmen.
Frustrating start so far. Yale is struggling with UIC’s physicality, and they’re letting themselves get sped up. The refs are letting a lot go, which is annoying, but it is what it is. They need to adjust and start burning UIC for overplaying everything.
UIC giving Yale fits on the boards. Announcers saying that actually UIC normally plays at a quicker pace than this.
I knew one of UIC’s players sounded familiar. That’s Sam Silverstein who used to play at….Harvard and grew up in the town next to where I grew up. In fact, he grew up in the same town as Danny Wolf.
Wow. Last I heard he was at Cal Baptist. What a wild and meandering career path
With 3:35 to go in the first half, UIC hit a bucket to go up 29-25. That was their last bucket of the game, and they’ve played 5 minutes of the second half. Yale now up 44-32 and its defensive intensity has completely overwhelmed UIC.
Finally score 6:24 into the second half, so no buckets for 10 minutes and only 3 points overall. But this game is pretty much over at this point.
Nice to see Mullin play so well. Jones has hyped up his shooting for years, him showing that in games will take this team over the top
samson playing on 2 legs again is important.
he changed the game and cancelled some tough 2 point shooting for yale in 2h on decent looks.
be surprised if 13 rebs isnt a career high. regardless announcer was right-dominant performance even when only scoring 1 point on 1 shot.
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The good news is that after this win, Yale likely has max one more loss possible in the noncon (no offense to Albany or Howard), which should portend well for seeding if we make the tourney. The bad news is that I’m concerned about regression. The starting backcourt have struggled a bit with off-ball defense, and I don’t know that Yale’s 44% mark from 3 (good for second nationally) is likely to hold up. If the defense improves, I think this team can do some special things, but they absolutely cannot get complacent.
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i share your concern as per my response post on “dee-fense”
i am encouraged by the prospect of a return of a healthier Samson. the impact from the brandeis game last week to this one is stunning
an intimidator in the middle really allows guards to extend on the perimeter.
if we shot better on good 2s we blow the doors off uic in 2h thanks to the defense. hopefully this is a silver lining.
brathwaire is a menace on that end as well
Brathwaite is a good shooter, period.
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We’re giving up an Off. Reb % of 31.7% (202nd in the country). I went back 15+ years and couldn’t find one of our teams that has had a worse rate than that. I don’t think it kills us in Ivy play, Columbia hits the glass really hard and well but no one else does. Just a far cry of what we’ve come to expect.
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I do think some of that is opponent-influenced. We’ve played way more teams that crash the o-boards hard this year than we normally do (Charleston, Green Bay, Akron, URI, and UIC all come to mind). But yeah, that really has to stop. Especially because we have a frontcourt with legit size. I trust Coach Jones to get that sorted though. He’s always managed to get his teams to rebound well, as at least one NBA player famously learned.
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