Game 6: Gophers Host Air Force (12-2-18)

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Ignatius L Hoops

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Brilliant Scheduling

After the first “sit up and take notice” victory of the Whalen era, the Gophers (6-0) face two “rest the starters” outings-Air Force (4-3) on Sunday and Incarnate Word (0-7) on Wednesday. Whether we can actually play Bell, Brunson, Pitts and Bello less than 25 minutes each remains an open question.

Naturally, Air Force doesn’t plan to give Minnesota a break and enters Sunday’s game coming off a 69-57 win over Northern Colorado. The Falcons had lost 8 straight to UNC. Air Forces leading scorer was freshman point guard Briana Autrey (20 points) who is emerging as the Falcon’s best player. Autry is averaging 13.9 points/game. Air Forces leading scorer is sophomore guard Kaelin Immel with 13.8/game.

The Falcons have two players from the Twin Cities: sophomore guard Noell Tomes (East Ridge) who averages 2.7 points/game in 11.7 minutes/game; and freshman guard Audrey Gadsen (Blaine) who averaged 5.6 minutes in five appearances.

Last season Air Force finished 6-25 (5-13 Mountain West) which was good for a three way tie for 8th in the 11 team league. (The five wins topped their previous Mountain West Conference high of four). Not surprisingly, this year’s squad was projected 10th in the MWC preseason poll. The future, however, is expected to be brighter. The Falcons are a young team with 10 freshmen, 7 sophomores, 2 junior and a senior.

This young team has one of the most experienced college head coaches in college ball, Chris Gobrecht, a Southern Cal alum, is in her fourth season at Air Force. Gobrecht’s previous stops were Yale (10 seasons), Southern Cal (7 seasons), Florida State (1 season), Washington (11 seasons), Cal State Fullerton (6 seasons). She had some success at Washington winning 3 Pac 12 titles.

It has been a emotional season for Chris Gobrecht and the team. Gobrecht lost her husband Bob in mid-November following his eleven year battle with cancer. The Northern Colorado game marked Gobrecht’s return to the bench following a leave of absence.


Wins: Western Colorado 72-54, Fairleigh Dickinson 85-37, @ West Point 71-60 and Northern Colorado 69-57.

Losses: George Mason 71-78, @ Denver 66-92 @ Northeastern 41-54.

Numbers: The Falcons average 67.9 points/game while allowing 61.7. They also average 19.7 turnovers/game while forcing 20.9.


Starters:

5’10” G So Emily Conroe
6’2” F Jr Kassady Huffman
6’0” F Fr Riley Snyder
5’9” G Sr Venessannal Itugbu
5’6” G So Alexis Springfield


Others:

5’9” G So Kaelin Immel
5’5” G Fr Briana Autrey
6’0” G Fr Haley Jones
5’8” G So Noelle Tomes
5’7” G Fr Audrey Gadsen
 

Tied at 11 after 1. Gophers shooting just 5-19. Bello with 10 rebounds already.
 


Bell’s future is overseas and not the WNBA.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 

Holding air force to 16 first half points on 18.2% shooting. Keep that up gophers.
 


Defense has been good. Everything else not so much. And the free throw shooting has been beyond atrocious.
 

Gotta work on the offense. Any word on Hubbard returning?
 

This game can be summed up in two words: Absolutely hideous.
 

This should NOT be a 6 point game. Shooting just 32%.
 



Exceptionally poor performance on almost every front today. Thankfully, the defense has been able to pick up the slack. And its a good thing they're playing Air Force today because any Big 10 team would have killed them. Very disappointing coming off a big win the other day.
 

Nothing enjoyable about this game aside from cruising to a win. Get back to practice, plenty to work on. Nice to humble the team after a big win. Good to face adversity.
 

UpAndUnder43 said:
Nothing enjoyable about this game aside from cruising to a win. Get back to practice, plenty to work on. Nice to humble the team after a big win. Good to face adversity.
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Agreed. The only good thing you can say about this one is that it's over. To say there's plenty of room to improve would be putting it kindly.
 

Winning ugly. Gophers just not a good shooting team this year. I sometimes get frustrated with Bell's shot selection, but she is the only one who can create shots, and without her, this team might have two or three losses. I don't understand the free-throw shooting woes for this team. With the exception of Pitts, it seems like the whole team is lousy at free throws. On the more positive side, Bell with 9 rebounds to go with her 27 points. Bello with another game in which she dominated on the boards. Could have had 25 to 30 rebounds if she hadn't been forced to sit with early foul trouble. Pitts starting to pick it up offensively with 16 points and some nice assists. The second unit hasn't showed anything offensively this year. That's going to be a problem if any of the starters gets hurt or if this team has to go to its bench because of foul trouble. Kaposi 0-4 from the foul line. Staples still not shooting well. Another cupcake here on Wednesday before what might be a competitive matchup at BC.
 



The best thing about today's game was that Gadiva was on the side lines in warm ups WITHOUT her boot. She was walking somewhat gingerly; but there's progress.

We appear to be awful three point shoorters; although I'm beginning to think it's more of a result of no rhythm for them in the offense. There's no extra pass to make to an open shooter.

We mainly relied on having the two fastest players on the court. However, there were a couple of periods when we concentrated on going inside. The lineups got really mixed with the two fouls and out program and Whalen sitting some starters. Staples got extended minutes. All in all a game where Whalen tried to spread around some playing time and ended up with Bell having to dominate and the Gophers seriously needing Destiny's 16 points.
 

And in a post game event, Whalen said Hubbard is making progress. But, wouldn't really elaborate beyond that. Was a good sign to see Gadiva no longer in the boot.
 

https://gophersports.com/documents/2018/12/2//20181202_Quotes.pdf

Post Game Quotes:

Opening Statement:

“...Our will from our veterans came through to push us over the top but I give Air Force a lot of credit.
They played a really, really good game. We win again when we’re shooting in the 30s, we need to get
our rhythm, we need to shoot a lot more. We need to get into our rhythm with that, but things that are
correctable. We’ll take it after a win, we’ll always take things we can correct after a win.

On if she’s happy with the shots the team was taking:

“Yeah, honestly, I’ll have to watch again but I felt like I did like the shots that we are getting. I felt like
we’re either a little short or as we’re shooting, we’re maybe thinking about a little too much, it’s a
rhythm thing. We just need to shoot, we need to get a lot more shots up in practice, I’ll make sure that
we do that. But honestly, I like the shots that we’re getting, we just need to stand in there and knock
them down.”

On if she would like the team to shoot more 3‐pointers:

“Yeah, I think each game will dictate that a little bit, but looking at it right here, we made one tonight. I
mean, I’d like to take more and make more. It’s something that we’ll work on. Same thing with the
rhythm, that we’ll just have to keep working on in practice.”


On if there was any letdown after Thursday night’s win over No. 12 Syracuse:

“We talked about it. We knew that this would be a really good test for that. We knew that Air Force was
going to be a team that was going to be physical with us all night. We kind of knew, right away, our
approach and what not. I give our team a lot of credit and being able to have a game plan just a couple
days ago and having to switch things up a bit today. The way we played and the way we competed, I
think showed. This, honestly, could have gone the other way if we didn’t have as strong will as we do
have from all of our players. You don’t want to make excuses, but I think that, I give a lot of credit to Air
Force to be honest, and I give a lot of credit to them and a lot of credit to our team. In the second and
fourth quarters, we were able to wear them down, more or less, and go on some big runs.”


On finishing strong two games in a row:

“Yeah, the last two games, we have responded which has been great. No game is ever going to go
perfect, you’re going to have ups and downs and you’re going to face adversity every night, every
practice. There’s always going to be some time where the game isn’t, winning or losing is going to
happen in that time. Thankfully, we got these two here that are able to make those plays to turn the
tide in our favor. So, that’s been good. It’s been very encouraging of everything that went right tonight,
didn’t go right. Same thing on Thursday, what went right, what didn’t go right. When push comes to
shove, we have players that are willing to step up and make those plays.


Senior guard Kenisha Bell

On how the Gophers were able to push ahead:

“I think our steals, our stops and steals kind of got us going. We were able to get the rebound and push
and transition, it was tough for them to guard it because we were pushing them pretty fast. Just taking it
to them.

”
Junior forward Taiye Bello

On finishing strong in the fourth quarter:

“Yeah, we don’t give up. We play competitive teams, and I thought that it just motivated us to do more.
Because we have been in the situation where we had a lot of up and downs. But, it just shows how we
grew in that aspect of staying poised and not giving up on the game early.”

On her first quarter performance with 10 rebounds:

“During our preparation, we talked about how well they rebound. So, that was something that I was
trying to focus on. Also, like I said, in our preparation, our coaches were letting us know that they’re
really aggressive and they’re not going to back down easy. As you can see, they stayed with us at times
in the game. “
 

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The post game event where Kelly Roysland answered questions from season ticket holders and then Whalen was interviewed was nice. Kelly made it clear that the team would be working very hard on free throws and threes in practice today. As one would expect they were very upbeat on the recruiting results. Kelly also indicated that next year's pre-B1G schedule would be much more challenging than this season.
 

EaganGopher22 said:
Kelly made it clear that the team would be working very hard on free throws and threes in practice today.
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Today.... nice that they finally thought that they should get around to that.:rolleyes:
 

The poor free throw shooting is particularly perplexing. These are college players and I presume they are taking free throws daily. It surely won't hurt the players to take more FTs in practice, but seems like it's a bit contagious. As I recall, Bell was a decent FT shooter last year and she has been brutal this year. I think she'll turn it around, but hopefully soon, as she'll get a bulk of this team's free throws, especially late in games when she is handling the ball a lot. In the meantime, late in games, where the opposing team is prepared to foul, I'm hoping that Whalen designs in-bounds plays to get the ball to Pitts. She's been good at the line.
 

Bell's Free Throw Percentages:

.776 Sophomore 142-183
.733 Junior 187-255
.614 Senior 43-70
 

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