VT Bball: vs #5 Syracuse, tonight espn2

[Ragingcroc]

So with a minute left its time to quit playing???

Nope, apparently its time to actually play some offense, WTF.

 

[ckhokie]

With how young our team is, I can't be mad at it. Good things to come

 

[Ragingcroc]

Wait we get a consolation game with OKSTATE???????? We already have away game at OKSTATE in December.

 

[hokiefour]

Great effort tonight from this young team. This game will help as we move into ACC play.

 

[Lumbee09]

Great effort tonight from this young team. This game will help as we move into ACC play.

Welcome to the board!

 

[Chrish1023]

I really can't complain about tonight at all. Would I have liked us to win, yeah obviously. But we played hard for most of the game and Syracuse just got hot at the right time. If we beat OK State tomorrow, the start to this season would certainly have been a success.

 

[hunzworth]

Not sure how to feel about this one. On one hand we lost to (what is prob) a much better team, on the other hand, they played bad enough that we really had a chance for a W.

Oh well this was honestly pretty close to the final i had expected. i knew our defense would limit them to some degree, but i figured that overall skill would win out. FWIW i dont view this as a "bad loss" and as others have stated should be a great stepping stone for the rest of the season and ACC play.

 

[Lumbee09]

Overall, I thought the team played well tonight. Better game than I expected. If we didn't have that 5 minute or so spell where Cuse went on a 17-3 run and went up 11, we might have won this game. Cuse is a team with Final Four potential this year. This is a good learning experience for the young guys.

We are playing OK State now in the consolation. OK St should be more defeated than we are. They looked awful against Stanford today. Hopefully our team bounces back from this loss and gets the win on Friday.

 

[vtpoop]

I knew it was going to be tough to pull it out when we played about as well as we could in the first half and still only led by two at the break. Still, I thought it was a great gameplan early and still not a bad effort for such a young team. They just got overwhelmed midway through the second half. It should hopefully help us get better moving forward and hopefully help us with the RPI in March.

 

[Ragingcroc]

One thing I noticed is, in the first three games, Erick Green has really improved his 3 point shooting.

 

[wildturkey]

The wheels came off in the 2nd half. As pointed out, there was 0 halftime adjustments to attack the zone. To make matters even more frustrating, there were a couple of plays where we got the ball into the paint, had a shot inside, but passed out of it despite Davila or DFS standing underneath the basket with their hands up. A 2-3 zone is very simple to attack, but very few college teams can do it successfully. The best way is ball penetration into the middle, preferably dribbling into it. When the zone collapses, you either A)Kick out to the perimeter and keep swinging to an open shooter or B) Hit a player cutting to the hoop. It's why you don't see it in the NBA much; guys are too good off the dribble and can hit open shots. But it college so you see guys struggle, especially against a team like Syracuse who runs it so well. It's just frustrating to see the same strategy used late in the game when its clearly not working.

Defense was great in the first half, sloppy in the 2nd. I don't know what happened but there were a lot of blown rotations and just a lot of overall confusion. You could see the guys panicking as Syracuse had its run.

Also, Greenberg's timeout usage in the 2nd half pissed me off. It was poor coaching. He calls a TO as soon as Cuse takes the lead, yet 30 seconds later there's a TV timeout. DUDE, you just wasted a TO for nothing. You've got to know when the TV timeouts are. If 2 to 3 minutes go by and there's no deadball for a TV timeout, call your TO but to waste it is just stupid. Then minutes later, Greenberg calls another TO when Cuse gets up 7. Problem is, there's 10 minutes left in the game and we now have 1 TO. Just poor management. Sometimes you've got to let players play through rough spells. It's set a bad precedence to call a TO at the slightest bit of trouble because players grow use to it and can't function without it.


All in all, it went mostly how I thought it would go. We've got talent and they should realize if they play like they did in the 1st half, they can beat elite teams. A good experience that the team SHOULD learn from. We'll see if they do.

 

[hokiecheme11]

One thing I noticed is, in the first three games, Erick Green has really improved his 3 point shooting.

That really stands out to me too. His motion still isn't great, but it looks a lot less jerky and more smooth, and it's obvious how much work he put in over the summer.

 

[Chrish1023]

Eric Green has shown tremendous improvement every year. I remember groaning when he got the open shot to beat Maryland in that OT game two years ago because he couldn't shoot at all that year. Now, I wouldn't want the ball in anyone's hands but his.