Sunday, December 10, 2017

More Random Weekly Observations

- It was a good day again yesterday for the SEC as Arkansas boatraced Minnesota at home and Florida won on a neutral court over Cincinnati. Florida had a bad loss at home to Loyola earlier in the week, so it was a good bounce back 

- Duke’s loss at BC yesterday was reminiscent of their losses from the last few years. Defensive malpractice throughout the game. I still believe this team gets it figured out but I’m sure it caused Brian to twitch quite a bit.

- With a bunch of top teams losing the past few weeks to teams outside the KenPom top 75, I encourage you to go look at his rankings. Villanova has separated themselves a bit. Another analytics site, Bart Torvik’s T-Rank is a little less kind but still has them, 2 (http://www.barttorvik.com/). We’ll hear a lot of talk about no “great” team. Villanova might disagree. I’ll have more T-Rank usage as the year goes along. It’s a must bookmark for college hoops junkies, even if he is a Badger.

- Speaking of the Badgers, that was their worst performance against Marquette in a generation. The loss of D’Mitrik Trice exposed a dangerously thin team that lacks any reliable scoring outside Ethan Happ who will face a deluge of double teams for as long as Trice is out. They also lost Kobe King to a knee injury. It’s hard to know if that loss matters other than from a depth standpoint as he was a limited role player thus far. The Badgers are a mediocre defensive team relying heavily on pace to ugly up games. Marquette has none of it as they had wide open shots all game and took it to Wisconsin all day in the paint as well. Marquette shot 15 of 33 on 2’s and 14 of 22 on 3’s. That’s a cool 65.5% real shooting at the Kohl Hole. Marquette’s bad defense was a non-factor as Wisconsin’s lack of playmakers outside Happ were exposed. Yesterday was more an indictment on the current situation in Madison than on Marquette’s team.


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