The Bills over Rich by 1

[billiken_roy]

4 minutes ago, glazedandconfused said:

Oh ok, i agree with you now. Good point 

you are hillarious.  cant believe i never noticed you on the board before this wiz sucks discussion started.   

[RUBillsFan]

1 hour ago, A10Ref said:

My C2D: 100%. I cant be proven one way or the other until we play our last game in DC.

Either for us fans or the rest of the A10.

[A10Ref]

24 minutes ago, RUBillsFan said:

Either for us fans or the rest of the A10.

Yessir! Would love nothing more than complete carnage and the billikens come out as the sole representative of the A10 in the tournament.

As we've seen, the last 3-4 games of the season are telling for who will be actual contenders (in the A10 and contenders to win a few in the NCAA). Throw out everything else, the win at boise and losses at Bona and Davidson, the time is now. When the 13'-14' team won 19 in a row and then lost 3 of the last 4, everyone knew we were in trouble. Same thing can happen to any of the top 6 teams in the league (all of which have nowhere near the winning streak as our 19 in a row). I am not convinced that Bona won't have trouble at St. Joes, same with Dayton at La Salle and at Richmond. In the same vain, I am not convinced we are going to pull off tomorrow, but I sure hope so.

All in all, roll bills baby.

[Old guy]

Team Rankings came up with their prediction, they expect Richmond to win by (Vegas line) 2.5 pts with two stars of confidence. The pregame stats favor SLU both in offense and defense. From my point of view TR is favoring Rich because this is an away game for us.

[The Wiz]

A tough loss because this game was winnable in so many ways.

First, lets see what happened at the end of the game. With 3:09 left in the game  Gilyard hit a 3P shot ...with 2:45 Okoro made a layup and a FT...Bills trailed 68-66. The Bills then went 0-6 (two 3s & four 2s) while Rich also went blank...in the final 2:45 the Bills had 2 chances to win and 4 chances to tie.  Unfortunately, we were cold from the arc (15%). So let's forget the two 3s for a moment and look at the final  four 2s.  On a night when The Bills shot 57% from 2pt land how many 2s do you think we should have made...if you said 2 or more , you were correct.  4 more pts would have been victory ...even 2pts would have been OT.  Sometimes the better poker player loses to a bad player when the bad player stays in and has nothing.  At 2:45,  The Bills drew the first of 6 cards and came up with nothing.  Many chances to win ...but the game didn't go our way. If we play the final 2:45 ten more times ... we win most of the time.

Let's look at the numbers....bolded statements from the original post.

To start , let's look at the Bottom line...If we protect the ball and make some 3s, we can weave a web to victory. And this was the game...We gave up 9 steals and shot 15% from the arc .  We normal give up 7 steals ...so 2 over in a game where every point counts. Also, it's not just the 15% on the 3s but it was against a poor defending 3P team (D- )...on an average night we would have had 2 more 3s.

TOs 10... We had 15...this was a fail...Rich had 11.............pts of TOs...Rich 23... SLU 15
Rebs 6+... we had 7...on target

Gilyard, Burton and Golden...Hold the Big 3 to less than 40pts combined. They scored  44pts...close but not good enough in a close game.

46 / 37 / 75 ... Actual 47/15/80...good / fail / excellent...2 more 3s would have made this a good slash ....a couple of other notes...Rich had 4 extra 3PA and made them all...it wasn't that they shot great( 35%)...again, we shot poorly...on FTs both teams shot an excellent 80%...Rich had 4 extra FTA and made them all

Bottom line...When you have a team that loses close games, especially to good opponents,  and yet they have a solid overall record ...that is not the sign of a bad team...it is the sign of a pretty good team ...a team that is close to being great ...a team that is maybe just 1 player away from greatness...hmmm ...if we could only get that 1 player...well, maybe next year we can get him.....again

[Schasz]

Far too many IF's for the Bills this season to be a NCAA Tourney season. Oh well, there is a next season so let's see if we can substantially cut those IF's down.

[Old guy]

7 hours ago, The Wiz said:

 Sometimes the better poker player loses to a bad player when the bad player stays in and has nothing.  At 2:45,  The Bills drew the first of 6 cards and came up with nothing.  Many chances to win ...but the game didn't go our way. If we play the final 2:45 ten more times ... we win most of the time.

This reminds me of a movie I saw a couple of years ago of high stakes poker playing. This guy that knew nothing about poker playing (he was a con man trying to get to know high rollers) entered a private game and actually cleaned them out. Why was this?, simply because they (the pros) thought he (the know nothing) knew what he was doing and just folded. This  drove the real players crazy. Sports have a large content of chance built it. It appears that last night we had a bad encounter with chance.

Looking for a scapegoat to blame is not only wrong, it is futile. For a while now, we have known that the only clear way left to us to go to  the dance is by winning the A10 tournament. This chance will remain open until some other team eliminates us from the tournament.