uneblinstu's postgame chatter: vol 15, ed 3: @ St. John's

4 minutes ago, HB said:

U gotta be kidding me.   Most of our players can’t shoot or dribble.  We can’t shoot free throws.  We gave up 21 offensive rebounds.  No handles.  Offensive “scheme” still involves lots of one on one, dribbling, and piss poor ball movement.  Trev should make Fred hide in a dark office and watch film of Creighton.  It’s called ball movement.  As in, have some.   This can’t end soon enough.  

So basically Walker might as well not come back.  One player isn't going to make that much of a difference.  

10 minutes ago, hskr4life said:

Maybe we just did the vanilla offense thing and haven’t opened up the playbook yet.

The basketball season doesn't start until the Big Ten Tournament in March anyway.

6 minutes ago, HB said:

U gotta be kidding me.   Most of our players can’t shoot or dribble.  We can’t shoot free throws.  We gave up 21 offensive rebounds.  No handles.  Offensive “scheme” still involves lots of one on one, dribbling, and piss poor ball movement.  Trev should make Fred hide in a dark office and watch film of Creighton.  It’s called ball movement.  As in, have some.   This can’t end soon enough.  

We had 18 offensive rebounds.  What's that say about St. John's rebounding?

If Sam has 6 points and 8 turnovers, we are going to lose 100 % of the time.

The 1st half, refs were not allowing St John's to be physical.  In the 2nd half, they allowed them to be super physical.  Our defense was also much worse in the 2nd half.

On a positive note, the last time we lost by 20 + points to St John's, we went on to finish 4th in the Big 10.

Tim Brando and whoever was calling the game with him should be forced to watch Hoiberg's NU teams 30+ times per year like we have to, rather than once per year. I'm guessing he'd have a different tune on how much we're "building for the future." That was a brutal broadcast ... although it probably was what that abomination of a contest deserved.

54 minutes ago, Dead Dog Alley said:

 

I never plan on watching Curbelo play again; and my life is already better.

If you change your mind he has two games against Creighton where you can root for a double-forfeit.

26 minutes ago, HuskerFever said:

 

The basketball season doesn't start until the Big Ten Tournament in March anyway.

They call that “Trueblood Time” where I come from…

Year 1 is always tough. New roster, everyone figuring things out, lots of losses. Having 4 straight year 1's is something else. 

42 minutes ago, brfrad said:

We had 18 offensive rebounds.  What's that say about St. John's rebounding?

 

If Sam has 6 points and 8 turnovers, we are going to lose 100 % of the time.

 

The 1st half, refs were not allowing St John's to be physical.  In the 2nd half, they allowed them to be super physical.  Our defense was also much worse in the 2nd half.

 

On a positive note, the last time we lost by 20 + points to St John's, we went on to finish 4th in the Big 10.

When you shoot 20 something percent from the field that’s going to inflate your offensive boards a bit. 
 

Granted, this is my first game watching but Sam sure doesn’t look like a PG to me. I think he’s a solid basketball player but generally you don’t want your PG to have to stare at his dribble half the time. Poor kid seems out of possession…and on top of that I’m not so sure his backup his suited for PG. 

2 hours ago, OmahaHusker said:

Would be awesome. I have a feeling there’s gonna be some big name teams going against us for coaches this off-season, tho. Syracuse and Georgetown are two of them. 

You think NE is anywhere near the job of those 2 teams?

I didn’t realize until the game started that Anderson coached SJU.  
 

This was an absolute nightmare matchup.  
 

It was a huge mistake to not put as much athleticism as we could on the court to combat their speed.  Lawrence and Dawson should have gotten all of the Wilcher/Tominaga minutes in the second half.  The youngsters need to take their lumps but they are much more talented athletes and huge upgrades defensively.  The best thing you can do to a pressure team is pressure them right back.  No way can Witcher and Tominaga do that.  
 

I also think Kojenets is a better player than WB and Keita at the 5, at least offensively.  

7 hours ago, Fullbacksympathy said:

I didn’t realize until the game started that Anderson coached SJU.  
 

This was an absolute nightmare matchup.  
 

It was a huge mistake to not put as much athleticism as we could on the court to combat their speed.  Lawrence and Dawson should have gotten all of the Wilcher/Tominaga minutes in the second half.  The youngsters need to take their lumps but they are much more talented athletes and huge upgrades defensively.  The best thing you can do to a pressure team is pressure them right back.  No way can Witcher and Tominaga do that.  
 

I also think Kojenets is a better player than WB and Keita at the 5, at least offensively.  

Tominaga was one of the bright spots last night and he didn’t even play very well.  

7 minutes ago, hskr4life said:

Tominaga was one of the bright spots last night and he didn’t even play very well.  

He made some shots and was generally bad on defense.  Once they pressured and played physical in the second half, he was in over his head.  I’m happy with him this season so far though.  

That really was 40 minutes of hell.

It's likely were going to get run off the court like that a lot this season but we've also had a season before where we bounced back after being run of the court by St Johns.  We shall see.

Notes from UNL

*-With the loss, Nebraska falls to 1-4 in Gavitt Games contests, including 0-2 against St. John’s
*-Keisei Tominaga finished with 15 points, the second time he came off the bench to reach double figures this season.
*-Juwan Gary tied a career high in rebounds with 11, matching his high of 11 vs. Maine in the opener . It marked the third straight game NU had a player with 10+ rebounds in a game. Gary also had three steals, matching his career high of three steals (2 other times at Alabama).
*-Nebraska allowed just 20 first-half points, the lowest first-half total allowed by a Hoiberg-coach team at Nebraska. The previous low was 21 on two occasions, most recently against Minnesota last season. NU held St. John’s to 20 first-half points, the lowest total for a Husker opponent since Southwest Minnesota State had 18 during the 2018-19 season.

10 minutes ago, hhcmatt said:

That really was 40 minutes of hell.

It's likely were going to get run off the court like that a lot this season but we've also had a season before where we bounced back after being run of the court by St Johns.  We shall see.

What's more demoralizing is that we could have our opponents sit on the bench for the first 20 minutes of the game and we still lose the game.

5 minutes ago, HuskerFever said:

 

What's more demoralizing is that we could have our opponents sit on the bench for the first 20 minutes of the game and we still lose the game.

This is an excellent point.  That team was prime for the picking if we play halfway decent yesterday we could have been up 10-15 at half.

They (St John’s) will lose every game they aren’t allowed to bully the other team.  They’ll also lose some they can bully just because they won’t play well.  I wasn’t impressed with that team.  Middle to lower end of the pack Big East team seems about right.

My observations:

A game like this against an established power conference team is real sobering, eh fellas? 
For all the “Olegs can help us this year”

and “Wilcher lost 16 pounds and transformed his body” narrative, this was some I’ve cold water on the face.

Wilhelm is really good at…..fouling. His revised role should be to play defense, rebound, and foul as needed. At this level he isn’t a drive to the hoop from outside the three point line, and I think I’ve only seen him make a couple of 3’s, and that was last season.

CJ Wilcher. Wow. Last night exposed him quite badly. He’s a classic tweener. Too small to play the three. Too slow to play the 2. (He’s actually too slow to play the three as well) He may get hot at times from the outside, but his foot speed is alarmingly not up to par.

Sam- going to need to be more assertive and look to score more. His passes were under high pressure defense, but some were horrid.

Bandumel, Gary, and Dawson are our athletes who could fit in on Big Ten rosters. Maybe Lawrence….maybe.

KT has been a nice surprise, this offseason some of you completely wrote him off and basically inferred he wasn’t a division I player. He’s doing exactly what we all could’ve hope for, coming off the bench, hitting three to four three’s and sometimes being crafty and hitting his free throws. 
 

Need to bounce back with confidence this Sunday. Then it’s gonna get brutal.

Going into that game, the one thing I did not expect was us getting absolutely dominated by their big man.  Just did not see that coming as his stats were far from dominant coming into the game.  But he looked like he was on a whole different level than our bigs.

Sam held up pretty well in the first half, but got physically, mentally and emotionally overwhelmed in the second half.  Ended the game with 8 turnovers and just 6 points.  The SJU pressure just wore him down to a pulp by the second half.

In fact, the entire team played their butt off in the first half, but they clearly dropped a notch in the second half, and once SJU got it rolling, it was impossible to stop. That is the problem with a team that can't dribble or shoot and relies solely on hustle and grit and energy.  One slip up and it is very hard to make up the lost ground. 

Keita once again looked completely lost and overmatched.  And Wilhelm, . . .    Probably don't win that game with Walker, but Walker would have made a huge difference.  Walker needs to get back soon or we will see a lot more games like that.  It seems like Fred is trying to run the offense through the high post the same as he had planned all pre-season, but he intended for Walker to be at the high post.  Well, let's just say it is not working with Keita and Wilhelm in that role.  Running the offense through those 2 is a disaster and Fred it going to have to scrap it until Walker come back.  And the very first play of the game was a Keita post up against the SJU center that was bigger and stronger than him.  That had zero chance of success, how was that the first play?  Why did anyone think that was going to work?  And Keita is now 1-5 on free throws, so even if he gets fouled its a turnover.

The players on this team need to figure out what their strengths and weaknesses are and play in a way to maximize their strengths and minimize their weaknesses.  For instance, Gary shot five 3s last night (0-5) and is now 1-9 on the season.  Him shooting a 3 is a wasted possession.  Nobody shot well from 3 yesterday except Keisei, but we still need our best shooters shooting and our grit/energy players gritting and energizing.  Even though CJ is only shooting 33% on 3s so far this year, I still want him shooting when he is in there.  And if Keisei is going to play, then he needs to shoot.

The real struggle for Fred is finding a way to get his very limited number of shooters open.  This team has so many non-shooters that the defense can sag off them when they are on the perimeter and focus on our shooters.  Right now, the only players who have shown to be decent shooters are CJ, Keisei and maybe Bando.

Griesel has only made one 3 all year (1-5).  This is part of the reason that guys like Gary are shooting so many 3s.  Griesel isn't a great shooter, but he is better than most the other options.  He has to find a way to get up some 3s.

The team is now shooting 41% on FG, 28% on 3s and 61% on FTs.  Some things never change. 

Whenever CJ starts driving towards the rim you can tell it's because he doesn't think his shot is going in that night. In some regards it's the smart play but honestly I'd rather see him missing 3s than Gary.

One thing about Keita last night was that he was able to quickly get 2 fouls on David Jones.  Putting him on the bench very much helped our defense in the first half.

11 hours ago, brfrad said:

We had 18 offensive rebounds.  What's that say about St. John's rebounding?

 

If Sam has 6 points and 8 turnovers, we are going to lose 100 % of the time.

 

The 1st half, refs were not allowing St John's to be physical.  In the 2nd half, they allowed them to be super physical.  Our defense was also much worse in the 2nd half.

 

On a positive note, the last time we lost by 20 + points to St John's, we went on to finish 4th in the Big 10.

Right.  Come back in 3 months and we'll see if I was out of line.  I'm 3 for 3 the last three years knowing we suck and this product is an abomination.  

12 hours ago, Nighthawk said:

So basically Walker might as well not come back.  One player isn't going to make that much of a difference.  

Correct.

11 hours ago, HB said:

U gotta be kidding me.   Most of our players can’t shoot or dribble.  We can’t shoot free throws.  We gave up 21 offensive rebounds.  No handles.  Offensive “scheme” still involves lots of one on one, dribbling, and piss poor ball movement.  Trev should make Fred hide in a dark office and watch film of Creighton.  It’s called ball movement.  As in, have some.   This can’t end soon enough.  

I feel like you need to read more of my posts and get a better idea of where I'm coming from and how critical I am of this team/coaching staff. 

I saw things on the defensive end as far as attitude, toughness, physicality, tougherness last night that I haven't seen for years. What they did in the first half, and not cave under what St. John's was doing, was also very impressive to me. Watching that fist fight, to come out with a nice lead going into halftime was pretty impressive to me. Kinda goes beyond the stats, score, etc... 

1 hour ago, hskr4life said:

This is an excellent point.  That team was prime for the picking if we play halfway decent yesterday we could have been up 10-15 at half.

 

They (St John’s) will lose every game they aren’t allowed to bully the other team.  They’ll also lose some they can bully just because they won’t play well.  I wasn’t impressed with that team.  Middle to lower end of the pack Big East team seems about right.

Wherever they finish in the Big East - I would NOT want to play them in late February or March when the refs forget where their whistles are. 

12 hours ago, hhcscott said:

If you change your mind he has two games against Creighton where you can root for a double-forfeit.

I don't turn on Creighton games unless I've seen a score and they're down by 20.

I got quite a chuckle this morning wading through some of the takes.  Specifically about Briedenbach.   Shoot, he didn't suck any more or less than anyone else last night.  Tie that to the fact that he is coming off major knee surgery less than a year ago, and two major knee surgeries within approximately two years.  Shoot all he does is bust his nuts trying to help his team.  

I guess some player needs to take the heat.  However, I vote that this was a total team debacle, especially in the second half.  Just saying...