I’m bored on Black Friday, so some ramblings on this game.

1) Ambivalent on the choice to foul or not.  Either way works for me.  However if we are going to foul, why not pressure the inbounds right away and foul in the backcourt rather than waste 5-7 seconds letting them cross mid court before fouling.

2) No urgency by JB in bringing the ball up with 25 seconds left.  Wasted precious time.  Which highlights…

3) It’s going to be a long year without an A-10 quality PG.  Through five games I think Brayon and his learning curve last year looks a lot better than what we are going to see this year.  Court vision is just a click too slow and even when a drive and good dish is made, 50-50 chance it will clank off someone’s brick hands. I think Clark has spark—but I don’t see him breaking down ball pressure with his dribble—something we already know that JB and BA do not excel at.

4) No post play at all.  I think we went Hunter once who kicked out and we rotated the ball for a corner three by Max.  The other time was to Rickey about four feet above the elbow where he made a
Post move, but was four feet further away from the basket than we needed to be.   It sure why we don’t look to the post a little more and get additional touches on each sequence.

5) Our energy level made me wonder  if there was some flu other type of bug running around the team.  We looked a step slow all night.  I’m disinclined to say we stepped it up in the final minutes and more inclined to say SD was going through a GW-like collapse.  Although our shooting stats were not horrific, I saw tired legs and not a lot of good squaring up on our threes.  You could tell many were going to be missed before the shot left the hands.

6) Like PI in football, I wish  I knew what is and what is not a foul. This is especially true when a defender has position in the lost post and a ball handler just barrels their shoulder into the defender to displace them.  Seems you have to be run over entirely to get a call.