Sunday, January 30, 2005

Tough Loss at OU

You're playing tough on the road. There's 4:43 left and we're up by 5 when John Reimold hits a jumper.

We even get a stop, and come down with a chance to go up 7 or 8. Instead, Wright misses a layup, and we start a scoring drought that lasts until there's :11 on the clock. In the meantime, OU had scored nine straight points to take a 70-66 lead. Eyink hit a trey @ :11, but OU canned their FTs and we lost.

This one could have been won. At :58, we had a shot to tie at 68, but couldn't get the shot down, and they came down and scored. That's tough.

I'm not too disappointed. This is a very good team at home, and we battled them tough, so I think the performance was fine. But, pulling out a win would have sent a real message.

As usual, you can track the team by the FG shooting. In the first half, where we had a 12-point lead at one point, we shot 57%. In the second half, we only shot 36%, so that's how we lost again. For the game, we shot 47.2%.

We had 20 fouls, and OU had 13 fouls. We outrebounded them by 3 (29-26). We only had 11 turnovers, which is excellent, especially considering that OU plays pressure defense.

A couple comments. First, Fitch only played about three minutes, and is looking bad for the short-term. Its a real shame. We missed him.

John Floyd was 3-10 shooting, and Steven Wright was 2-10. Wright is in a terrible shooting slump, and that's hurting us.

We made 10-11 FTs, hopefully showing that we will re-emerge as the FT shooting team we were last year. (OU shot 24 Fts).

Perrick continues to get minutes, and I continue to think he is going to turn into a good player. Having said that, we run a look with both Robinson and Floyd on the floor at the same time, and I don't like that look for us very much. There's not much to generate. Unfortunately, when Wright is in foul trouble, we aren't deep at guard.

Akron on Thursday. They're a solid, surprising team with a new coach and always talented, but at home, we should win that one.

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