GAME #27: Gophers (17-9, 6-7) v. Illinois (14-12, 3-10) [BTN, 2/19, 8:00PM]

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Austin Hollins was fine tonight. He wasn't good, but he wasn't absolutely terrible.

Andre, Malik, and DeAndre on the other hand. Woof...
 


dont forget to add elliot and mo to that list, softest big man in the country, I also think they both butter their hands before games
 

GuyFawkes said:
mediocre defense? watch the game again buddy, there was a reason why he got so many minutes today
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I watched the game - no thanks - once is more than enough. I stand by my statement; we got lit up from 3 by perimeter players. McNeil was one of those defenders allowing it. He played hard I will give you that but was invisible on offense. He played so many minutes because of little Dre's foul trouble and because Malik Smith was a liability tonight. Sure, if you are looking for a bright spot have at it. In my opinion there were no bright spots tonight. Really quite an embarrassing display of basketball tonight at the barn no matter how you slice it.
 

I think Austin gets unfairly ragged on because a lot of his contributions are the kind that don't always show up in the box score. Having said that, he has made a few dumb mistakes in the last couple weeks that are the kind that should not happen (not even once) over the course of an entire season.
 


Beat Penn State and lose the other three, then go to the BTT tournament.

Win a 8-9 or 7-10 matchup, then pull an upset over Michigan or Michigan St and we're good again.
 

Face The Facts said:
Beat Penn State and lose the other three, then go to the BTT tournament.

Win a 8-9 or 7-10 matchup, then pull an upset over Michigan or Michigan St and we're good again.
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I'd rather just beat Ohio State and Iowa and salvage another February choke job.
 

Seems to me we were once again stymied with a team aggressively jumping the pick and roll forcing Mathieu to backpedal. It was pushing our offense out and not allowing our guards to attack. This caused our offense to stagnate and we settled for bad shots.

Honestly I am surprised more teams haven't employed this on lil' Dre...
 

Face The Facts said:
Beat Penn State and lose the other three, then go to the BTT tournament.

Win a 8-9 or 7-10 matchup, then pull an upset over Michigan or Michigan St and we're good again.
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No, sorry. A 7-11 team's not getting in with anything less than a B1G championship game appearance. Face those facts.
 



Austin's been disappointing on the offensive end, but he was close to last on reason's they lost tonight. Bad take.
 

Austin has done some good thing this year, especially on defense. His problem is makes some inexcusable plays with the ball in his hands. Lazy passes that get intercepted, passes right to the defender, dribble off your own foot..on and on. But a senior with that toss in violation?...no excuse for that. Just watched the replay and it looked like he never was totally out of bounds and he had both feet in bounds when he passed. A senior shouldn't have his brain that far out of sync. Makes me wonder what is going on in his head or life.
 

I guess I just expected Austin to carry us a couple times when the team really needed him. That is all. He works hard, is a good defender and does the little things yes (as he has his whole career). I just expected him to take that next step offensively this year.
 

ruppertflywheel said:
All they did was jack 3 ' s all night. If Pitino had a game plan, I didn't see it. I saw inexperience on Richards face tonight. Dutcher, Clem, Muze, and even Tubby would've won this game tonight. They were not ready . Tough road now. I see the NIT with a possible win against Penn State getting them too 7-11, which I put down before the season started. If it wasn't for little Dre they would have 3 wins.
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I agree with you on pitino today, the worst part was leading up to the game he was saying how they couldn't sleep on this team and that the fans needed to show up, fans showed up, but they didn't do their part. There were no in game adjustments at all that I could see. Hopefully he learns from this for the future.
 



Conan said:
I guess I just expected Austin to carry us a couple times when the team really needed him. That is all. He works hard, is a good defender and does the little things yes (as he has his whole career). I just expected him to take that next step offensively this year.
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We all expected him to shoot the 3 ball much better than he has this year. That's the biggest disappointment for me. And it wouldn't be quite so bad if he didn't continue to jack up these ridiculous three point attempts that everyone knows aren't going in.
 

Conan said:
Seems to me we were once again stymied with a team aggressively jumping the pick and roll forcing Mathieu to backpedal. It was pushing our offense out and not allowing our guards to attack. This caused our offense to stagnate and we settled for bad shots.

Honestly I am surprised more teams haven't employed this on lil' Dre...
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If everyone does what Northwestern and Illinois did to lil' Dre, we would struggle mightily.
 

station19 said:
Austin has done some good thing this year, especially on defense. His problem is makes some inexcusable plays with the ball in his hands. Lazy passes that get intercepted, passes right to the defender, dribble off your own foot..on and on. But a senior with that toss in violation?...no excuse for that. Just watched the replay and it looked like he never was totally out of bounds and he had both feet in bounds when he passed. A senior shouldn't have his brain that far out of sync. Makes me wonder what is going on in his head or life.
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He was rushing it, was towards the end of the game, he knew they needed to pick the pace if they wanted to come back, I understand what he was trying to do, wasn't worth it all try to save an extra second by not going all the way out of bounce, but its understandable why he rushed it
 

GuyFawkes said:
He was rushing it, was towards the end of the game, he knew they needed to pick the pace if they wanted to come back, I understand what he was trying to do, wasn't worth it all try to save an extra second by not going all the way out of bounce, but its understandable why he rushed it
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It lead to an uncontested turnover on an inbounds pass. It's the dumbest violation you can make in basketball. It should never ever happen. Inexcusable and not understandable.
 

why are you hanging your head so much on that play, the game was over at that point, elliot did the exact same thing earlier in the game, his was worse in my opinion, not that ether were any good, just austin's play didn't cost us the game, there are so much else to be upset about today
 

GuyFawkes said:
What I don't understand is, why did they keep shooting 3's? They had so much success inside early on then they decided become jumpshot only team. Find it hard to believe that pitino didn't flat out say, stop shooting stupid forced shots, attack the basket and go inside. Did the team just not listen? like wtf happened
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He said in the post game that he told them to stop shooting them- but he also said that they took some open ones that you have to shoot and still missed. But this was a complete washout. Pitino got out-coached and the players got out-played. Badly.

I thought Malik Smith really hurt us badly. We got up 10 by taking it to them inside and with good ball movement and then Smith went in and started launching 25 foot shots. Once Illinois got back in the game we never found a rhythm again. We have a lot of guys in a shooting funk and they have been for a while. Elliot, Malik, Andre, Austin (who played the best of them) all have gone on a run of games where they have not been hitting threes it seems.

It feels like NIT time to me but college basketball is unpredictable. Maybe we go and beat OSU on Saturday.
 

Yeah we took a lot of 3's - so what - make some of them! This team needs consistant shooters otherwise we try to force it in and turn it over!
 

GuyFawkes said:
why are you hanging your head so much on that play, the game was over at that point, elliot did the exact same thing earlier in the game, his was worse in my opinion, not that ether were any good, just austin's play didn't cost us the game, there are so much else to be upset about today
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Because everyone was talking about austin in the austin thread. Now everything is MOVED, so who knows where the hell it is.
 

From my favorite PG of all time:

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p>Gophers lost tough one...Matheiu foul trouble killed 1st half rhythm..3ball was unkind! Ogwu and Nunn stepped up big time..!!!</p>— arriel mcdonald (@ArrielMcdonald) <a href="https://twitter.com/ArrielMcdonald/statuses/436382383462690817">February 20, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

Go Gophers!!
 

I just got done watching the game and that familiar feeling of absolute disgust watching Gopher basketball is back. What went on in that 40 minutes of basketball was a clown show of the highest order. I don't care to get in to individual players because everyone was horrible, but the turnover show to begin the second half has to take the cake as the most ridiculous stretch of basketball of the entire season. Minnesota completely outclassed Illinois for about 7 1/2 minutes and then literally said "here, you take it". The only coaching issue I had tonight was the lineup with Mav,Daquein, Elliott that was out there for awhile in the first half...can't have 3 complete non shooters on the floor at the same time.

Obviously, any talk of the NCAA tournament goes away until the Gophers beat tOSU, Iowa, or Michigan.

What I am most disappointed about this season, is this team is not getting better as the season goes along. It's obvious that they're regressing and tonight was their worst performance of the season in a very important game against a team on a massive losing skid. This was exactly the type of crap we saw from Tubby Smith's teams year in and year out.

The second biggest disappointment for me is the Gophers have failed to make Williams Arena a tough place to win. The fans are there, the attendance is strong, but you can't lose to Northwestern AND Illinois at home. A 7-2 home record in the B1G is about the bare minimum for a "good" team most years. I thought things were back on track to protect home court after Indiana, but obviously that's not the case.

What really sucks is the players/program will still have the mental hurdle next year of always collapsing in February to get over. I've got a feeling we've lost a lot of fans who were brought back in with the performance tonight.
 

True can't lose to NW and Illinois at home. This was by far the most frustrating basketball game I have watched in years. We were sort of a surprise at the beginning of the year and I think many teams were surprised with Mathieu. Teams have have scouted us well and have definitely defended us much better. I was hoping to see Andre Hollins put this team on his back a little but that hasn't happened. Better figure it out fast or we will not be heading to the dance.
 

I just looked at Austin 's shooting numbers over his four year career. He has had only one acceptable year in terms of field goal percentage. This kid just cannot get it done and should have been replaced a long time ago. Everyone talks about his defense but I do not see it.He has long arms and gambles a lot but he is far from a lockdown defender.His ballhandling and passing skills are mediocre at best. I guess he doesn't get any flack because he is a nice guy and his dad played in nba.
 

jumpstop said:
I just looked at Austin 's shooting numbers over his four year career. He has had only one acceptable year in terms of field goal percentage. This kid just cannot get it done and should have been replaced a long time ago. Everyone talks about his defense but I do not see it.He has long arms and gambles a lot but he is far from a lockdown defender.His ballhandling and passing skills are mediocre at best. I guess he doesn't get any flack because he is a nice guy and his dad played in nba.
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Then you need to watch closer. There's a reason Rice, one of the conference's best scorers, went 1-7 last night and only scored 6 points. Austin is a good defender, but you're right that his offensive game just isn't very good.
 

jumpstop said:
I just looked at Austin 's shooting numbers over his four year career. He has had only one acceptable year in terms of field goal percentage. This kid just cannot get it done and should have been replaced a long time ago. Everyone talks about his defense but I do not see it.He has long arms and gambles a lot but he is far from a lockdown defender.His ballhandling and passing skills are mediocre at best. I guess he doesn't get any flack because he is a nice guy and his dad played in nba.
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All i read there is, everyone is overreacting to Austin's shooting woes, because he's never been a good shooter.

And I also read that you don't know what good defense looks like. When is the last time we made a comment that so and so abused Austin Hollins, or when was the last time someone said that Austin Hollins didn't give max effort today. Guy is the glue, he's the captain of that team. We all wish he had killer instinct and the desire to go to the hole fearlessly, fact remains that he doesnt.

This line of thinking is equal to everyone saying things like "why does Oto and Joey play in the big 10?!?!?!" they are what they are. The reason we are struggling this year is because we don't have a consistent scoring threat ANYWHERE on the court, and we lack people that can create their own shot and finish at the rim.

Its a flawed team, and has had some flawed results both good and bad... Get off the goddamn ledge and enjoy the ride. It's a PROCESS!!!!
 

jaymil said:
Then you need to watch closer. There's a reason Rice, one of the conference's best scorers, went 1-7 last night and only scored 6 points. Austin is a good defender, but you're right that his offensive game just isn't very good.
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The reason was that he was battling an injury after he took an awkward fall in the first half.
 

jumpstop said:
I just looked at Austin 's shooting numbers over his four year career. He has had only one acceptable year in terms of field goal percentage. This kid just cannot get it done and should have been replaced a long time ago. Everyone talks about his defense but I do not see it.He has long arms and gambles a lot but he is far from a lockdown defender.His ballhandling and passing skills are mediocre at best. I guess he doesn't get any flack because he is a nice guy and his dad played in nba.
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Austin gets all kinds of flak. He is ripped pretty consistently on this board.
 

XMan said:
True can't lose to NW and Illinois at home. This was by far the most frustrating basketball game I have watched in years. We were sort of a surprise at the beginning of the year and I think many teams were surprised with Mathieu. Teams have have scouted us well and have definitely defended us much better. I was hoping to see Andre Hollins put this team on his back a little but that hasn't happened. Better figure it out fast or we will not be heading to the dance.
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The bold is huge and not considered or discussed enough. Especially with Mathieu. As Math goes so goes this team. Teams have learned take away the high ball screen and double or trap him constantly. Just don't let him get into the lane.

When Mathieu's game is off the offense goes in the tank and the confidence suffers. You'd like to think our two experience starters could pull us through but it doesn't happen. I expected more out of both Hollins this year, even though I never thought either were NBA types.

Edit: The baseline toss-in fail by Austin was mind-boggling. It already happened once in the game. Shouldn't that make you be sure not to let that happen again? How can you coach players out of bone-headed mistakes?
 

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