I hope the message is that to close out or claw back that it has to be done as a team. I've never seen so much iso. Clearly that doesn't work and I hope we don't revert back to that again this season.
I hope the message is that to close out or claw back that it has to be done as a team. I've never seen so much iso. Clearly that doesn't work and I hope we don't revert back to that again this season.
For a number of years now I’ve grown accustomed to watching these games with my son, defending the refs, downplaying their effect on the game, and remaining calm to set a level-headed example for him. Couldn’t do it tonight. What in gods name kind of lopsided unbalanced officiating was that? I haven’t posted here in years, so says enough from my perspective that I’m actually on here tonight. There’s a limit to every and anyone’s mental toughness under a situation as absurd and ridiculous as tonight.
Yeah if we win the regular season and ACCT then this loss will be irrelevant. We still have those two huge wins and this road loss will be a Q1 unless OSU somehow falls out of the top 75 which is unlikely.
Also wanted to point out that Gonzaga just struggled at home against some no-name school I have never heard of and cannot pronounce. It was like a four point game with five minutes left. We can't ignore the effects of travel and emotional fatigue. There's nothing we can do about it, the team has to play the games as they are scheduled, but it's worth keeping in mind.
Right, I just figured if that was the case, we'd start out slow and have to claw our way back. Not have a 15-point lead (or thereabouts) and somehow give it up...
Definitely not the end of the world and away games are tough, but unfortunately, we didn't rise to the occasion and execute when we needed when the team faced adversity. It's like the opposite of the 2019 team which seemed to always somehow have the clutch play (Elite 8 notwithstanding...ugh). But one game doesn't make a pattern for this season necessarily. Definitely learned something from this hopefully and have a lot of time off to think about it.
Wasn't going to win every game this season. In fact I'm happy we're 7-1 at this point. We were close to being 8-0, just ran out of gas. I really wish coach K dig deep down into his bench when you can see obvious fatigue
I believe in games like this at the end, the ball should be in Wendell Moore hands
Roach has been a little underwhelming his 2nd year. I was expecting him to take more control of the offense. He need to find a way to use his speed to penetrate
AJ needs more than 2 minutes
The general trend that I've seen from Duke over the past several years is that we start out the season playing great and sharing the ball, but as the season wears on we resort to more and more iso ball. The other trend is that we start off the season great and overperform in big November games, but then our opponents learn how to play us and we fail to make adjustments. Teams know we want to drive, we don't shoot the three well, and that Paolo loves the long midrange jumpers. The question is whether we will make adjustments or just keep doing the same thing and hope to out-talent our opponents.
Horrible second half on nearly all fronts. This needs to be a lesson on how to push through adversity and not get knocked back.
Keels is ice cold and we need to get him going. We need to learn to play without fouling as well.
One more thought that entered my mind as I tuned in horrified to see us in black unis…
Can we finally BURN THE BLACK UNIFORMS and never, ever bring them back?!
Please!
OSU should be #1 now, right?
Just like the win over the zags, I don't put a divine providence on this outcome. Gonzaga is a really good team. Duke is probably a really good team. OSU is not a bad team.
Our lack of having a third body to throw at center is a weakness if we get into foul trouble, either due to bad refs or whatever. I'm sure we'll work to avert that scenario.
I'm much less down on this loss than I am on some losses we may have had in previous seasons.
1200. DDMF.
Count me in the camp of the refs having a big impact on our play. We are a big and physical team - and without a lot of quality depth at this point. Tonight highlights our vulnerability to tight officiating.
What’s confounding to me is that I think we play more Big 10 style ball than any team I can remember - and paid the price for it against a Big 10 team in a Big 10 arena. What?
I don't think Keels was timid. He just is very inaccurate for about the last 4 or 5 games. Kentucky game I thought we had a shooting star. Lately he has flamed out. He gets to the line but makes 1 of 2. He has to work on his shot. Roach is not like the Jones brothers in that he does not seem to get assists to have his teammates score. It is one bad game and this will sting the entire team. They should be mad at how it ended.
My ole pappy always said, "You can't win if you can't score."
This was a tale of two halves. Our 1st half adjusted oRating was 1.28, the equivalent of the #1 offense in the country. Our 1st half adjusted dRating was 0.70, 18 pts (per 100 possessions) better than the #1 defense in the country. Our 2nd half adjusted oRating was 0.75, the equivalent of the #358 (worst) offense in the country. Our 2nd half adjusted dRating was 1.06, the equivalent of the #291 defense in the country.
The defensive downturn can probably be partially explained by our considerable foul trouble. I don't know how to explain our woeful second half offense.
OFFENSE
Possessions: 70.0 (not unreasonable, but our 2nd-slowest game of the season)
oRtg: 0.94 (1.02 "adjusted," for whatever the adjustment is worth in late-November; equivalent of the #158 offense in the nation)
eFG%: 41.5% (terrible; our first eFG under 50% this season)
3pt%: 28.6% (third straight poor performance from three)
2pt%: 41.2% (horrifying; by far our worst 2pt performance, mostly because instead of layups and dunks we took a bunch of contested two-point jumpers in the 2nd half)
%threes: 21.5% (considering we didn't feast on layups and dunks, this number is way too low)
FT rate: 24.6% (not good)
OR%: 21.4% (yuck)
TO%: 10.0% (finally a bright spot, another great job at avoiding turnovers; coming into this game we were 4th in the country at avoiding turnovers, after this game we'll probably move up)
a/to: 1.57:1
%assisted: 44.0% (low)
fast break pts: 11 (16.7% of points; decent, though it should be noted that 9 of our 11 fast break points came in the first half)
DEFENSE
dRtg: 1.01 (0.88 "adjusted"; believe it or not, our adjusted number is once again #1 in the country; looking at the four factors, it's really hard to see how that's possible, but it's mostly because Ohio State shot free throws so poorly (11-22))
eFG%: 55.6% (bad, for the 2nd straight game)
3pt%: 40.0% (also bad)
2pt%: 52.9% (not as bad as last game, but still bad)
%threes: 37.0% (too high)
FT rate: 40.7% (horrible; coming into this game we were the best team in the nation at keeping its opponents off the line; I assume that's not true anymore)
DR%: 79.4% (pretty good; sixth out of eight good DR performance (five straight))
TO%: 17.1% (meh overall; in the first half we forced an outstanding 25.1% TO rate while in the second half we forced a stupefying 8.8% TO rate)
a/to: 1.08:1
%assisted: 50.0%
stl%: 8.6% (worst steals performance of the season)
blk%: 3.7% (5.9% of 2pt shots) (worst blocks performance of the season)
fast break pts: 3 (4.2% of points; good; the three points came on one pseudo-broken play three-pointer in the second half)
If Ohio State had made their usual percentage of three throws, we played like the #61 defense in the country for the entire game. As I said at the top, that's a combination of being a defensive juggernaut in the first half and really bad in the second (which can probably be explained by our foul trouble). Since this is the first game all season we've had foul trouble, and in our previous six games avoiding fouling has actually been one of our top strengths, I'm not at all troubled by our defense in this game.
Our second half offense, on the other hand, perplexes me. Our unadjusted second half oRating was a mortifying 0.67. It's like we forgot how to play entirely, forcing up high degree of difficulty twos as if trying to outdo ourselves for low efficiency attempts. Hopefully the coaching staff will work on that in our upcoming off weeks and we'll be able to forget that tonight's second half ever happened.
I haven't read this whole thread as I just finished watching the game. But just reading a number of posts on the first page was disheartening. Complaining that we lost this game because of the refereeing? 8 on 5? Please. The quality of the refereeing had nothing to do with the outcome of this game. That is simply loser talk. Did we get into foul trouble? Yes. Because we fouled a lot. And a lot of them were dumb fouls and fouls that were easy and obvious calls. Sure you could quibble about a call here or there, but please.
The fact is we played lousy in the second half of that game, both by the numbers and by the obvious eye test. We had no offensive flow, we shot poorly from 2 and from 3, and we got muscled by Key at the other end. And we didn't know how to put our foot on their neck when we had them down. Ohio State frankly didn't play that great, and I don't think they're that great of a team. But had they hit a reasonable number of free throws, they would've beaten us comfortably. They weren't great, but they were the better team tonight and definitely deserved to win the game, and we didn't. It wasn't the officials.
Only thing I really didn't understand is if we were tired, and if we couldn't get any offense going, why the heck isn't AJ Griffin getting any run? He's healthy. He's been healthy. He's had stretches of productiveness, including shooting the basketball. For crying out loud, start playing AJ Griffin more! He's not a panacea, but when nothing else is working and you can get a kid that talented out there with fresh legs, why the heck not?? Almost makes me feel like he's in K's dog house for some reason, though I have no actual information upon which to base that.
Worried about our lack of a true PG in the long run. It may not have been our undoing tonight - being tired perhaps was - but having a floor general to steady the offense might have helped. When we go so ice cold and start playing iso, it stagnates everything and younger teams get jittery on both ends. Keels’ penetration in the UK game could solve for that but we haven’t really seen it since that game.
We have two weeks until our next game, but we need long memories of this one to grow from this. Like some have said, don’t quite understand why we did not make more offensive adjustments.