Post M v Wisc lamenting thread

best one is hurt, no further use bitching about that.  Morford are totally serviceable at both ends, but it's now clear that neither can defend a real (or even sort of real) post up player.  So, we need to adjust to help them out.  We need to do a better job denying the ball down low, and HAVE to double when a big gets the ball in below a certain point.  Or, at least move like we are going to double to get him to throw the ball back out.  Got a whole week here, no reason we can't make that desparately-needed adjustment. 

Tough to swallow that Wisconsin has now won 5 of the last 6 games in Ann Arbor.  High time a few of our starters get a fire light under them. 

If Caris can increase his court vision and learn to make the correct pass off ball screen, he will ba a complete weapon.  A far better option than Nik. 

Seems like every other game at this point the other team has had a guy on fire/having a career game against us. Yogi, Marble, now Kaminski. This isn't a coincidence - this team just isn't very good defensively.

Combine that with poor shooting, carelessness on offense, and not showing up the first half...well there you go. Hopefully we can get things turned around come tournament time, but who knows.

Whenever we play Wisconsin, I'm reminded of a (cool) story (brah).

A few years ago I was flying out of Washington-Dulles late in college basketball season (right around the start of the tournament). I was on a shuttle bus to the terminal and the bus driver was listening to a sports talk radio show. I was sort of half-listening and the hosts were talking about the upcoming tournament and who the teams to look out for were. Then, one of them brought up Wisconsin. The other host then went into a rant about Bo Ryan, ending with the gem: "If you cloned Bo Ryan 50 times and put the clones in charge of 50 teams across the country, the NCAA would drop men's basketball as a sport within two years!"

I got a lot of weird looks from the other passengers, but I had a good long laugh over that one.

Beilen and Hoke worked this flawlessly.  Impress with win at Ohio to shake their visiting recruits, while laying down for Wisky at home as a reminder to our visitors that football is KING at UM.  Brillant and flawlessly executed.

/s

earlier this year we were playing great basketball and UW was struggling.

Today UW has been playing great basketball and we've been struggling.

it happens

One thing I am seeing from this team that is a little troubling is the lack of ball movement at times. Yea it great that guys can go off offensively, but its seems that they sometimes come at the expense of the other guys on the court (wins included). I love that Nik and Caris can get a bucket when you need it, but we have enough guys who can score, that if the ball moved more at times, more guys would be involved in the offense more consistently.

Had a nervous feeling about this one. I don't get nervous anymore for basketball games, either.

Win the next game and today means nothing.

We stand around too much on offense, and we are slow to help on defense.  Other than that , we played great today.  

Honestly though, I lost count of the number of times they got offensive boards on crazy karams and flat out terrible misses.  I stopped at 7, and that was the first half.

Start Irvin...GR3 has been a HUGE dissapointment this year...He RARELY shows up to play has ZERO intensity and is costing this team at least Irvin can score in bunches

At what point can we start saying that the GR3 bashing and the Stauskas bad play-ignoring has something to do with total ignorance?

GR3 didn't put the "lotto" label on himself.  Just because he's quiet or humble doesn't mean he's not giving effort.  He's still our only reliable rebounder and he's being asked to rebound at the 4 position.  His game has never been an off-the-dribble game, so I don't know what GR3 people were watching last year.

It seems to me, because Stauskas snarls his lip or gives a couple yells that people ignore when he actually does take plays off and make terrible decisions.  It's ok, because he plays with INTENSITY.

I lamented this loss for about two hours - and then MSU wiped the slate clean by losing themselves.  

Now I don't really care, other than that we need to find ways to shore up our post defense.  We're still in first.