The Good, Bad, and Ugly of the OU Game

What I Liked About the Game
First of all, we finally came with some effort last night. This makes the loss somewhat palatable. Our guys had energy and played with a little passion for a change. Also, for all the crap I give Drew about his coaching, his substitution pattern last night was a quantum leap forward. He "stole" minutes for his quality players on the bench. I think the guys looked much fresher late in the 2nd half compared to the other games during this horrendous streak. I also rag on Lomers relentlessly on here but last night might have been his best game yet. Not statistically, but he fought hard for rebounds and didn't blow at least 2 scoring opportunities like he normally does.

We did a good job on Blake Griffin. Looking at the final box score he still had 18 and 10 but I don't feel like he was THE difference maker last night. A third of those 18 came on free throws so it wasn't like he was just scoring at will.

Having only 11 turnovers for the entire game was also a nice change of pace. I believe that this directly led us to be in the game until the end.

The Bad
The guy who killed us was Austin Johnson, and I'm not even talking about his shot-clock beating prayer that went in and effectively took the heart out of our team last night. He went 6 of 8 from the field (4 of 5 from distance) and had 5 assists versus 1 turnover. Johnson basically played about as perfect of a game as a guard can play.

Converse Johnson's play with that of 3 of our starters: Dugat, Acy, and Carter. Those three guys scored a combined 18 points (versus Johnson's 17) and combined for 7 assists and 4 turnovers. We need more production out of these three starters. I drive the Quincy Acy bandwagon but he needs to score more than 4 (I wasn't expecting a huge game from him given OU's frontcourt). I wouldn't say Tweety had a bad game (8 points, 4 assists, 1 TO) but he needs to be more efficient with his shots. His FG and 3PT% were 33% and 25% respectively. I don't even know what to think about Dugat anymore. He's a fantastic athlete and could probably play at a college level at just about any sport. The problem is that he's not a high level college athlete consistently. He's capable of going for 20 on a given night but too often it comes as often as leap year. I call it Dugat Roulette.

The Ugly
The ugly stuff is all going to be a reach because I think we played one of our better games as a whole last night. First off, the crowd was pathetic. The number 2 team in the country is in town and you can't get over 8K in the FC (Please don't quote me the announced attendance, there's no way it was what the athletic department said)? I had the pleasure of sitting in front of possibly the most uneducated fan in all of the land. Why are these people always the most vocal? I loved the passion, just wish it could have been used for good. I thought the refs were bad in the first half but were better in the 2nd. They didn't cost us the game.

Overview
All in all, it's like I said. We played better but not near the level we needed (and were capable of) to beat a team like we saw last night. The real problem with our team is that we cannot put real game changing runs together. When we get hot on the offensive end, we almost always end up just trading baskets with the other team. So instead of going on a 12-2 run, it ends up being a 12-8 stretch. While that's a net positive, it doesn't change the game and when we cool off, our opponent goes on their own 12-3 or so run. That's what happened last night. We'd go on a 5 possession (3 offensive, 2 defensive) run where we were productive and then made stops. This is when we whittled the OU lead down to 3 in the 2nd half. However, we always followed up by allowing an OU run and then basically traded baskets for the rest of the game.

Bottom line as always, we need our guys to put their hard hat on while on defense and keep working on that end until we make an offensive run. Otherwise, it cheapens our offensive efforts. I know I'm not breaking news with any of this but it's been the story of the season. Hopefully, now that the schedule gets considerably easier, we can put together a run for the NIT.

Later Kids,
Murph