Impressions from last night in Evanston

Took care of a bad team, missing key contributors, they did what they were supposed to do. This team goes with Burke, sure they have some talent around him, but when he is on, they will be tough to beat. I'm still looking towards the Ohio game to see how tough we are. While I agree the officiating wasn't very good, Morgan deserved the technical, he threw the ball down and said something to the ref, that will get you a T most times.

I think one think that really helps Stauskus (and generally helps all shooters) is receiving a pass that is chest high because you don't have to "reset" the ball. On at least two of his misses, the kick-out pass was below his waist. It's always slightly awkward to shoot a jump shot after catching a low pass because you first have to move the ball to chest-level and then go into your shooting motion.  

We are REALLY REALLY good.  We "only" won by 28 though, not 38.

- SNOWFLAKES!

- The refs were just bad - Morgan's tech seemed like BS, there were some touchy non-calls and calls... but again, we won by 38 so it's like, OK. (28).

- Who wants NW gear anyway? (Other than their kickin FB jerseys from this year)

- Not just 10 games, but also a bowl win for the first time since 1949. That meathead LB is a pretty good coach.

At some point it's got to become "Mitch McGary was probably never a 5 star and is still just a freshman" instead of him being "out of game shape".  

He's great, I love him. 

That was the worst 3 second call on McGary I've ever seen.

Northwestern athletics:

Celebrating a Gator Bowl triumph during a first half stoppage of a home basketball game in which you are down 20 points.

It was a 28 point victory, actually.

My biggest concerns for this team are:

-McGary and fouls.  In order for him to progress he needs to be able to stay in the game.  I don't necessarily want him to be so careful that he becomes tentative, but need to be smarter with his aggressive play.

-I don't want the hype of being the best shooter in the universe to get to Stauskas to the point that he forces shots. He can make any shot if he's in his natural rhythm, but is limited to simply "better than most" if he fires up a well-covered rush ball.

-Horford's health for depth purposes should freshmen "hit a wall" midway through the B1G season.

-Spike letting the game come to him when he's giving Burke a rest

When those are the concerns, and 3 of the 4 are coming from bench guys, this team is in great shape.

I posted this in another thread, but I was there with 7 Michigan fans, sitting behind the basket in what is usually a student section. We got the tickets through our neighborhood school, and apparently the school made a deal with NW: they can have the tickets at the deeply discounted price of $10 a piece if everyone wears purple and cheers for NW. Frantic emails had been sent out during the day saying "Please wear purple! They may never give us tickets again if we don't!!"

We ended up not wearing purple, not wearing the t-shirts they gave us since we didn't show up wearing purple, and not cheering for NW (obviously). We did, however, refrain from overtly cheering for Michigan, which I felt would be in bad form.  Not cheering for Michigan is much harder than you would think. 

Is now number one in offense on kenpom

Caris LeVert is really good.  

I was going to do a longer diary post on this but since there's already a started forum topic I'll just put my bullet points here:

- Welsh Ryan arena suuuuuuuuucks.  Horribly designed arena.  Way too few bathrooms & concession sites.  Very cramped bleacher seats on the visitors side, had another M fan's knee in my back all game.

-  What a crappy scoreboard, plus the awful positioning of the banners hanging from the rafters blocks the view of it from some angles.  The thing is so small there is no room for any stats for players other than their jersey #, points, and fouls.  I didn't know Morgan had a double double until I turned on the radio on the drive home.

- I thought it was interesting that when they introduced Fitzgerald at halftime, they noted he was the winningest coach in NW history with 50 wins.  When you think about it, that's kind of sad.  If he stays there long term (which I think he will, he loves it there), he will end up being their Bo Schembechler.

- They brought out a kid for a shooting for prizes contest during one of the TV timeouts and he hit every shot (he had to make 7 or 8 shots of increasing distance), meaning he put in more buckets in 60 seconds than any player on NW did in 40 minutes.  They should've found him at halftime and given him a jersey.  Later on they ran another contest (sponsored by Meijer, which the nearest is about 25 minutes from Evanston so that was weird) where the girl had to sink 5 basketballs into shopping carts from 15+ feet away.  She did manage to get all 5, doing bounce shots off of the floor instead of trying to actually shoot, so the balls would stay inside the carts. NW should have suited her up too.

- The Michigan side of the arena was completely packed as far as I could tell, with very few open spaces.  The NW side had a lot of empty seats, and also many sprinkles of Maize & Blue throughout.  Michigan fans appeared to outnumber NW fans by at least a 2 or 3 to 1 margin.

- Burke was on fire early, and he had a number of sick moves where he just juked the opposing player out of his shorts.  That kid is incredible to watch live.

- I'm surprised Coach B played Burke and Hardaway as long as he did.  The game was never in doubt, he should've emptied out the bench much earlier than he did.

- I know they were on winter break, but NWs student section was half full, and extremely uncoordinated.  Nothing like the Maize Rage.

- It didn't seem like the team was running too many set plays, but more like they were trying to create shots on their own 1 on 1.  I'm hoping they were just saving the advanced stuff for tougher opponents.

- Finally, a funny moment of the game at halftime when I was in line for the bathroom.  I overheard a little boy, maybe 5 or so, clad in purple, ask his dad "How come Michigan keeps making all their threes?  It's not fair!  They have to stop shooting those."

 May the basketball gods have mercy on the rest of the B1G's soul.