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The Bills and VCU even


The Wiz

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9 hours ago, lquarles said:

This is what I posted on our board in the thread about our strategy during Bones's absence:

I'd start Ace, Jamir, Vince, Levi, Corey. Try to run a balanced offense, and value the ball more than any other game all season. I'd love scoring from all 5 starters, with Ace dishing out assists and drawing some fouls. Run a lot of pick and pop with Levi, helping to draw French out, then make them pay with backdoor cuts with some assists by Levi. Try to draw fouls from French, and foul him when he has the ball. Run a few set plays for Vince and Jamir to get them some open 3s. Bring Key/Josh Banks/Hason in as the "6th man".

Ballhandling can be by committee, with Ace, Jamir, Vince, and Josh Banks getting a share of bringing the ball up. Josh played PG in AAU, and if he gets some meaningful minutes, he may surprise, as long as he lets the game come to him.

Bring Ward off the bench, let him have a field day with Linnsen and whatever guards who decide to drive inside. Give MBJ more than 15 minutes off the bench, and he'll do good things.

KEEP SOMEONE, ANYONE, ON GOODWIN. HECK, PUT ME IN, COACH! Now, more than ever, we can't afford to allow him to get a bunch of rebounds, and therefore give SLU a bunch of second chance opportunities. Those will kill us.

Throw a handful of defensive looks at them. Man, 2-3/matchup zone, press, etc. Quickly switch to some zone if a couple of guards get in foul trouble. Force them to shoot a bunch of jumpers, especially anyone not named Perkins, and GET THOSE REBOUNDS!

After our tough winning streak, we understandably played mentally tired and not into it against GMU, and our rebounding was absolutely terrible. Frankly, I don't care if we win or lose tomorrow, I just want to see how we respond without Bones, and hope to have him healthy for the A10/NCAA tourney. 

 

Jeez!!! I hope Coach Rhoades doesn't read this, or the Billikens will be D.O.A.!!

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1 hour ago, slufan13 said:

Am I falling for recency bias when I say this is the biggest regular season game in the Travis Ford era? Lose this game and I don't see a reasonable path to an at-large bid. I guess theoretically you could beat Richmond and UMass and then get a favorable draw in the A10 tourney against some teams with good NET ratings and then lose in the A10 final to another good NET A10 team but even that would probably require some outside help with bubble teams.

Hell even a win tonight + the scenario above doesn't make us an absolute lock for an at-large bid. With Bones out today, you just absolutely have to win. There is no way we play as poorly as we did against Dayton and I think we break out of a long team-wide shooting slump (29/105 from 3 in the past 4 games - 27.6%). It's a little scary to me that Jimerson has shot the ball very poorly but he is shooting 29% from 3 in the past 4 games and the rest of the team is shooting even worse (26.9%). Eventually the shots are going to fall. 

I almost said it was the biggest regular season game of Ford's Billiken career.  This is Jordan Goodwin's senior year....are we really about to go .500 in conference and miss the tourney?  You can blame covid I guess but the Dayton debacle was not tired legs, we were absolutely outclassed.  Our lone road win is against Fordham.  I do not know how we can legitimately be favored tonight when our road record is 1-4 and Siegel Center is the hardest place to play in the conference.  Bones is a piece of what they do but Ace Baldwin is capable and coming off the loss to George Mason, I am expecting VCU to come out with rage, havoc and fury.  One or 2 early turnovers by Yuri, who is still not 100%, and the deer in headlights panic could set in again and we get blown out.    

SLU in my mind has earned an A+ grade on advertising this persona that we are the best team in the A-10 and we are so dangerous, dark horse, blah blah.  Even now we are still the first four out according Lunardi.  We are 3-4 in conference and 1-4 on the road with a loss to LaSalle.  What are we hanging are hats on again? Beating the 3rd best team in the historically weak SEC or the 10th best team in the ACC? 

If we lose tonight, and then win a couple and lose in the tourney and end up somewhere in 40s in the NET, you will not see me angry at the committee when they leave us out.  The committee in my opinion is giving us way more credit than we deserve due to the aformentioned persona we have somehow gained.  

The Dayton game made me so mad especially after hearing Goodwin allude that players were not following the coach's gameplan.  WTF is that.  That is a recipe for getting blown out.  

It is time for us to shut up and play. 

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22 minutes ago, SLU_Nick said:

I almost said it was the biggest regular season game of Ford's Billiken career.  This is Jordan Goodwin's senior year....are we really about to go .500 in conference and miss the tourney?  You can blame covid I guess but the Dayton debacle was not tired legs, we were absolutely outclassed.  Our lone road win is against Fordham.  I do not know how we can legitimately be favored tonight when our road record is 1-4 and Siegel Center is the hardest place to play in the conference.  Bones is a piece of what they do but Ace Baldwin is capable and coming off the loss to George Mason, I am expecting VCU to come out with rage, havoc and fury.  One or 2 early turnovers by Yuri, who is still not 100%, and the deer in headlights panic could set in again and we get blown out.    

SLU in my mind has earned an A+ grade on advertising this persona that we are the best team in the A-10 and we are so dangerous, dark horse, blah blah.  Even now we are still the first four out according Lunardi.  We are 3-4 in conference and 1-4 on the road with a loss to LaSalle.  What are we hanging are hats on again? Beating the 3rd best team in the historically weak SEC or the 10th best team in the ACC? 

If we lose tonight, and then win a couple and lose in the tourney and end up somewhere in 40s in the NET, you will not see me angry at the committee when they leave us out.  The committee in my opinion is giving us way more credit than we deserve due to the aformentioned persona we have somehow gained.  

The Dayton game made me so mad especially after hearing Goodwin allude that players were not following the coach's gameplan.  WTF is that.  That is a recipe for getting blown out.  

It is time for us to shut up and play. 

Good post, except we’re 4-3 in conference and I think 1-3 on the road. Just win.

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My guess is that Hyland will sit till the tourney unless he is needed at the last game this Sat against Dav....Needed means that if VCU loses tonight...depending on how the other games go between now and Fri ...VCU could be knocked out of the top 4.   If that is the case ...he will at least attempt to play on Sat.

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From the original post (Bold )....

I expect this game to be a tight defensive low scoring battle...70 pts might be enough to win..... Lead changed 18 times...but here was the clincher....this game was a 1 possession game for the final 14min 22sec. It doesn't get any closer than that.  And to finish it off... lose 2 key players in the final minute and a half and have the resulting 4 FTM be the difference in the game just added insult to injury.  We could also look at the slash line...

48/37/73. ...42/30/61....had we made any number on the slash line ...we win...What makes this even worse was VCU had the same number of FGM as we did  with only 1 more 3PM & FTM...again as close as you can get....we killed them on the boards 43-28...given the numbers so far  plus the big rebound advantage , it should have been an easy win...but the crusher was the TOs...talked about many times in the original post.....15 (SLU) to 7 (VCU)..the difference of 8 is worth about 16 pts not only in pts  off of TOs but in lost opportunities. 

 So the important thing  would be to  win the TO battle ...We didn't but not for the reason you think. VCU is one of the top TO generating teams (7th ITN) at over 17 /gm....For this game we were projected to have 15 TOs ....right on target ...VCU is also one of the worst teams (F+ ) in turning the ball over... about 15 times/ gm... which would have  canceled out their advantage.    So what happened? They only had 7 for the game.  We did not pressure them enough and as a result they had their best TO game which gave them a win.

Close but no cigar tonight. Losing this game has made our job tougher but if we can win a few games (at least 5) in the next couple of weeks we can still make it.

 

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