Your team isn’t playing, our team isn’t playing, so let’s talk Xavier.
Brad: What a game. Did a Husky have illicit congress with Dante Maddox’ mother? What a game he had. He was just a lunatic agent of chaos. He doesn’t care where he’s facing, where the basket is, where a defender is.
Goodness, my heart rate was through the roof. What a win, boys. Had to have it.
Joel: All the way down the stretch, UConn couldn’t get a jumper to fall. I know it’s easy to point out the number of things X did wrong and how we could feel lucky about an escape there, but I think we need to give a ton of credit to the insane work rate shown by the home team. That was a track meet punctuated by intermittent brawls and I think both teams were out of gas down the stretch. X ended up getting just enough stops on an elite offense because of what a wringer that game was.
Bry: They say games like that take years off your life, but I was stress eating Vitamin C drops during the second half so I’m actually immortal now. I’ve never been to the city of Rome, but I struggle to see how it could be as impressive as Big Rome Hunter was tonight. Just relentlessly fed it to Karaban in the second half and got him into foul trouble he couldn’t survive.
Joel: My favorite part was the mutually assured destruction approach Hunter took to it. He turned each of their interactions into a collision and dared the refs to make a call. We ended up with 12 and 5 from him with an almost incomprehensible 4 fouls in just 13 minutes of play. I know it sounds silly to say a guy who barely participated in a quarter of the game set the tone, but I thought his maniacal energy was a big part of what we did.
Also, Dailyn Swain can claim Jaylin Stewart on his taxes. Sheesh.
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Brad: Have you guys ever seen a game that relentlessly frenetic? I was exhausted by the end of it. There was never a stretch where they just dribbled and passed and did some nice, calm basketball things. Diarra tried once and Maddox picked him clean and went careering off into a one on three that he obviously converted.
And yeah, Jerome was immense. A warrior’s game.
Joel: KenPom is saying there were 67 possessions in that game, but that seems like a miscount because it felt like 80. Even in the half court, both teams had incredibly high intensity game plans: Miller wanted to turn the post into a battleground, and Hurley wanted to run Ball and Karaban off of as many screens as possible. Like you said, never a moment’s peace at either end.
Braydan: The version of Dailyn Swain that has been on the floor since the DePaul game is the version this team needs to make a run. It’s like someone reminded him that he’s an incredible athlete with a 48-foot wingspan. He just changes the whole dynamic on offense when he attacks the rim. His defense can also just smother people.
I wouldn’t hate to see us kill a game off, but we have shown the ability to get stops when we need them to see a game out.
On a completely different note: Vandy beat #9 Kentucky at home and stormed the court. This is 8 days after they stormed the court after beating Tennessee. How many court stormings do you get before admitting your team might be pretty good?
Brad: They’re 44th in KenPom and 38th in Net, they shouldn’t be storming at all. But sports are fun and sometimes you get carried away.
I wanted to storm the court last night to thank the refs for letting that game play. They got Karaban on some soft ones, but he’s a wank anyway. That crew was so much better.
Joel: Karaban might have caught a softie or two, but I thought that let Diarra go on a couple that could have been called on another night. On balance, I thought it was about fair. We took 30% of our shots from deep while they took 47%, so it makes sense that we drew a few more calls.
I think we can absorb two more regular season losses. I’m starting to worry that Creighton will be one of them. We made Diarra and Johnson look unstoppable in ball screen action and pretty much anything they did off of each other in the half court. I’m worried what we’ll look like against Ashworth and Kalkbrenner.
Bryan: What stood out to me in the closing stages last night was that everyone made at least one play, even guys who were having bad games. McKnight had 3 TO and left a couple points at the line but set up that Frosty and-1 and blew up UConn’s play when they were down 2 with the ball. Foster got whistled for a foul (which I don’t think was a good call) that gave UConn the opportunity to cut the lead to 2 without any time expiring but knocked down both free throws to seal the deal. Conwell had 2 points on 1-8 from the floor when he grabbed the ball and took it at Karaban to draw his 5th and cash in a couple at the stripe.
Maddox, Hunter, and Swain were excellent throughout, Freemantle is still in a shooting slump since he returned, but guys who had been ineffective or made big mistakes came up big when it mattered most and I think that speaks well of this team’s mental fortitude after failing in those spots earlier in the year.