Survive and Advance: Zags Scrape By Southern

Olynyk right before he gets swatted/called for a charge (AP photo Streeter Lecka)

Wow. There are a lot of choice words for what just happened but few of them are appropriate for family audiences. I had to summarize it for a friend of mine who doesn't watch basketball and  I said something like: "if I'm being completely honest, we were just incredibly unlucky. I don't think we played all that bad."





Southern has a pretty aggressive defense, and they blitzed us out of the gate by applying tough ball pressure and forcing the ball out of the post. The referees made it clear that if you touched the ball on your follow through, a defender could do just about whatever he wanted in the post. There were several close non-calls on our offensive players under the basket, and you could see Elias Harris starting to check out after he got mauled a couple times. They doubled in crafty and intelligent ways, and their weakside shot-blocking help was incredible all game. Their players were fast and aggressive... they had nothing to lose and they played like it.

On the other side, we played a pretty solid game. Pangos and Bell shot pretty well, Stockton bailed us out repeatedly in transition and (surprisingly) on defense. More importantly, Stockton was composed.  He did not succumb to pressure defense and didn't turn the ball over.  Hart was fine, but not as disruptive as usual, probably due to their superior athleticism. Dower was huge on offense early, but as the game stayed tight Few shortened the bench and kept the starters on the court. Our offense created shots and moved the ball at will, we just rarely got the calls in the paint until we discovered that they had no idea how to guard a high pick and roll with Olynyk. This cliche get overused to say the least, but Olynyk quite literally carried the team.  He moved well and was able to nullify their athleticism with his footwork in the post (something Harris was unable to do). For whatever reason, his mobility confused their defense and gave him the space he needed.

Southern's offense, on the other hand, basically devolved into long range three point shots, the occasional entry pass to Mitchell (their solid post player who honestly killed us), and ridiculous foul calls. I'm not one to harp on the refs on the internet because it sounds petulant, but Southern was bailed out on many occasions by friendly calls. Beltran, their star guard, moved well and hit plenty of long range threes while pulling off a couple "Reggie Miller style" leg kicks to draw 3 point foul shots.

Charles Barkley summed it up pretty well by saying that our offense played well and that we made shots, but Southern just happened to make just about all of the difficult shots they took.... now the pressure is off of us a little bit. I can't tell you how many times I said "sure, I'll take that" as Southern took a long, contested two that went in. My thought process was simple: that's the kind of shot that you want your defense to force if you're a head coach. The problem was that they just kept making deep threes. At some point, there isn't too much you can do about that.

Anyway, this game was frustrating, but it's over. Survive and advance. The pressure will go down exponentially in the next round. In addition, Wichita State plays a similar game with more talented players so this was a decent practice round for us. Hopefully Few uses this as coaching moment and tells the team to get their ish together... we got our "get out of jail free" game out of the way, now we have to win on our own merit.