The Bills over Rich by 5

[dlarry]

10 hours ago, dlarry said:

 

Bills by 5 I’ll take that.

In fact I’ll go a step further....I say Bills by 13+.

I think they blow them away.

No gloom and doom here!!!

Go Bills.

Sigh.

I really thought they had it. 
A win is a win but I want more!

Go get them Monday!!

[joe_davola]

Nobody beats the wiz.

[The Wiz]

First,  I would like to welcome the new French or should I say the old French. The last 2 games have been way better than the first 7 games after the pause...more pts...more rebs...more blocks...more French.

Let's see what happened tonight....Bold is from original post in this thread.

 Rich has a good starting 5....there is no depth ...not much behind those 5....we need to use our depth to either wear them down or get them in foul trouble ....So true...our bench played 63 min...theirs played 25 min...big difference...and when did it make that difference...in the final 3 1/2 min when we outscored them 9-3....Depth

When they make substitutions , that is when we need to open up the game margin ... We did...our bench out scored their bench 23-8....Depth

 Keep Rich to under 75pts ... check mark

Dominate the boards...we could do a double digit margin. ... We did, times 2....41-21...just excellent

 Make some shots...48/37/ 72....We did...except foul shots which didn't matter because Rich made only 1 more than we did.....slash was...52/55/ 53...It is a strange slash when your 3P number is the highest on the line.  This slash is an important stat....it shows we are rounding back into shooting shape....We were a good shooting team before Covid...these are the kind of numbers we were putting up then.

 Hold the top 3 to 35 pts combined. ... This didn't work because Francis went crazy from the arc .....67% (6-9)...actual pts scored by the 3 was 44pts...take away the extra three 3pt shots Francis made over his average and you have 35pts for the to 3 scorers.

We need to match their TO output. A wide margin here will spell doom again...Protect the ball. ...This was a big concern . . And we had 13 TOs  which isn't terrible against a good TO team...but could have been a problem as they only had 8.  But this, along with the extra points from their top scorer,  was canceled out by a huge reb advantage.  In a way, this was the opposite of the VCU game....In the VCU game we had a big reb advantage of 15 which was wiped out by an 8 TO deficit.  In this game we overcame a 5 TO deficit with 20 reb effort...more rebs , smaller TO deficit.

We don't need a great game to win...we just need to do what the Bills normally do....and wear them down .......and we win.... We did and we did....This was a great team effort....which is another way of saying depth.  A few years ago with a short Billiken bench, we would have lost this game....but not tonight.  Hopefully we can keep this going for another month.