It ended late, but we found time to talk about what Quincy Olivari did.
Brad: We needed to not lose to DePaul, and we very much didn’t. That win will help the computer metrics a little bit, actually, because we ran up a decent score.
And most of that was due Quincy Olivari. His shot was somehow even more quick than normal last night. What a game he had.
Braydan: That game was weird to watch. On the one hand, Quincy was going off, and it was great to watch. On the other hand, the second half seemed to be an exercise in seeing how much dumb stuff we could do and still win by 20+ points. DePaul sucks.
Brad: They are genuinely awful. I was stunned at how bad at everything they are. I don’t know who they need to bring in, because I don’t know who would want that job.
I suspect Sean Miller won’t be as happy with that win, but as a fan, I was.
Braydan: I have to imagine the 930 tip and playing in front of dozens of people didn’t much help the attention to detail.
I also liked Lazar last night. He hit a three, caught a lob, locked down(?) his man in the second half and played one of his better games. Probably not gonna be on the All-Freshman team, but if he can play 10 minutes and not suck, that would be a boost.
Joel: It would be a huge boost, because you could argue right now that our best three starters and our best two reserves are guards/wings. Abou can’t stay in the game, Nemo runs hot and cold, and Ciani exhibits the combination of mobility and solidity you might associate with an iceberg made of room temperature butter. Per KenPom D1 average this year is to get 60.6% of your points from the three perimeter positions; we get 72.4% of ours from them. We desperately need someone big to step up.
Brad: Ousmane in particular has been frustrating. He’s never going to be a great scorer, but he rebounds well, and we need that. He just commits so many dumb fouls. His fifth against SJU was kind of case in point. He over committed to a shot he was never going to block and took himself out of the game.
Olivari has always scored a lot, but he’s 20 points more efficient this season than he’s ever been. He jumped up a level in competition and responded to that by just being incredible.
Joel: We’re just a more solid defensive team with Ousmane in there, which is why it’s so frustrating that he takes himself out of games so frequently. I feel like Big East teams have started trying to target him a bit, and it’s working. I will say that he has clearly learned something, because it didn’t look like he agreed with the call on his fifth against DePaul, but he sprinted off the court as soon as it was called.
Also, and I know this is kind of a sidebar, but that announcing crew was awful. Dickie Simpkins remains horrible, but the play-by-play guy kept calling Nemo a freshman and making other silly errors. I’m begging these guys to do literally any game prep. If that’s the best we can get (admittedly for one of the least interesting games on the schedule), just give us arena noise.
Bryan: The length of time they went talking about Three Musketeers the candy bar without ever even referencing the novel left me with some questions.
Djokovic is interesting to me because he went from starting games to being a healthy scratch in a little over a month. The staff clearly thinks enough of his talent that they had him in a starting role before his production indicated he should have one, but hadn’t played double digit minutes in a month outside of the two UConn games. He looked more confident last night than we have seen him, but that could just be that the opponent was 140 spots lower than anyone else we’ve played since he got back from injury.
Quincy was feeling it and it looked like the team knew that and played to it, but it would be nice to see anyone from the bench establish himself as a semi consistent scoring threat. Still, if this team can take care of business against Nova, they are right back on the bubble.