Why almost 10 losses by 10 or less points? Why are the Gophers always losing in the 4th quarter, after playing so hard all game? Why are they NEVER the victorious ones at the end of hard fought battles? Did anyone catch Coach Bluder's interview when she was talking about their 1 point win earlier this season? She talked about how great she thinks the players are for the Gophers. She mentioned, they are quick, strong, can shoot free throws, on the boards, and can shoot behind the arc, but can't understand why they are ranked #11 in the Big Ten. To me, it was a shot at Lindsay's coaching. Then again, maybe it wasn't. Lindsay's a great person but, this does seems like a coaching issue. Is she being out coached??
@whalenfan gives you the short answer - which is pretty much on target as far as it goes. For the multi-faceted answer see the following ...
> Why almost 10 losses by 10 or less points?
Ignoring our non-conf games as less relevant, I put our 17 Big-Ten games (all but the upcoming Maryland game) into a little Excel spreadsheet just for fun.
Out of those 17 Big-Ten games, 5 are wins, and out of the 12 losses, fully 7 of those 12 are losses by 10 points or less. There's 2 losses by more than 20 points, which skews the distribution quite a bit so that the mean lost-by is 10 points. There's also 5 losses by 6 points or less. And there's 4 losses by 3 points or less. Since a nearly-tie score late in the 4th quarter can be run up quite a bit by desperation fouls, all of those 7 losses by 10 points or less were essentially close games that we conceivably could have won. I'll try to paste the Excel chart here (but not sure if it will work).
Let's consider a hypothetical just for grins: If we had won all seven of those close losses, our (actual) 5-12 Big-Ten record would have instead been a 12-5 record. That's what Indiana's record actually is right now, and they're in fourth place in the Big Ten. But, in accomplishing said hypothetical (but not real) feat (e.g., by flipping the won/lost result on all games that we actually lost by 10 points or less), we would have beat Indiana once, thus reducing Indiana to an 11-6 record and moving them down to 5th place, right behind us, since we would have (hypothetically) taken their (actual) 4th place in the Big Ten. Presumably, under that (nice to dream about) hypothetical, we'd also get Indiana's #22 rank in the AP poll, and a guaranteed invitation to the NCAA Tournament.
Quite honestly, way back at the beginning of the Big-Ten season, a fourth- or fifth-place B1G result was approximately where I envisioned this team at the end of the Big-Ten regular season. There's lots of reasons for the different result than we wanted/partly-expected - some of which I'll mention below.
> To me, it was a shot at Lindsay's coaching. Then again, maybe it wasn't. Lindsay's a great person but, this does seems like a coaching issue.
That's a complicated question, but for the most part I'd say no - or at least my opinion is mostly no. I can't read Coach Bluder's mind, so unsure of what she was intending, but I suspect that's not what she had on her mind either. Certainly Whay is only in her sophomore season of coaching, so all would probably admit that she has room to improve as a coach. Certainly, if we look back at this same question three years from now and compare her results then to results now, we'll see improvement - but I argue that most such improvement will come from the fact that she has (in the interim) had the chance to recruit a full team of players to her own specifications. This year's team just doesn't have the complete set of players that she (or any other coach) really needs in order to compete in the Big Ten (more on that in a bit).
Much of the less-than-hoped-for results this year do, in fact, come about exactly because of those 7 games that we think we could have won, but instead lost - thus flipping our hypothetical 12-5 record to an actual 5-12 record instead. So really, it's largely down to what happened in those seven games that made the difference in our Big-Ten season record (and standings).
Some of this just has to do with the high level of parity in Big-Ten Women's Basketball this year. I mean, could it simply be that when we played those teams-that-we-lost-to-but-could-or-should-have-beaten (as one might call them, but let's just call them the "near-wins" for short), the luck of the draw (as to how things go in the final part of the 4th quarter) was such that we just happened to lose all seven games that we could have won? Just bad luck? Well, I'd say that bad luck was involved in at least some of those games. For instance, in the recent Indiana home game, everything Indiana threw up was going in, and we had (I'd guess) at least ten shots that rolled around the rim and popped out. Probably some bad shooting luck in that game.
We also had a few games in which otherwise real-good shooters were going 1-8 from deep. In one game, I think, we had two guards shooting bricks like that. To a certain extent, that might also just be bad luck. But where bad luck turns into really bad luck is when you have a team with injuries and other roster depletions, such that you have to play all your healthy guards, and you can't just give those players shooting bricks (in a given game) extra bench rest so as to give more shots to those shooting well. And that's just the situation we find ourselves in. We had Brunson under concussion protocol for a while, and that just made our bench depth even shorter. We play mostly a 4-guard system, and we're quite literally down to 5 guards total (unless we activate forward Justice Ross at small forward). Plus there might even be psychological factors induced by the pressure on the remaining (healthy) guards to perform. In the recent
@iowa game, we were threatened with the very real possibility (with Powell and Adashchyk both in foul trouble) of being able to field only 3 guards (if both had fouled out). With Taiye also in foul trouble in that game, it wouldn't have gone all that well during the last minutes of that
@Iowa game if all of {Powell, Adashchyk, T. Bello} had fouled out (and K. Bello unavailable due to tweaked ankle). We would have been playing Brunson, Scalia, Hubbard, Sconiers and Tomancova against 10-deep Iowa.
Plus we had two guards transfer out. Mercedes Staples transfered, seeing the handwriting on the wall, and thinking she'd get little playing time - perhaps a good assumption at the time. Who knew that we would actually need her now, since our guard depth is one-on-the-bench.
Then there's the whole Destiny Pitts debacle, which we don't want to re-debate here. But for sure we would have won the Illinois near-win game (that we lost by 3 points) if the Pitts fiasco hadn't happened. Recall that the Bellos didn't play in that game, as punishment for going on record supporting Pitts. Do we get an extra 4 points and beat Illinois in that game with Taiye and Kehinde playing? Absolutely, yes. So that's one of the near-wins accounted for.
What about the subsequent Iowa near-win home game? In that game, Taiye didn't start, and played only 15 minutes (shooting 3-6) - again in partial punishment for supporting Pitts. Sconiers played 8 minutes and Tomancova played 17 minutes in that game. Although the latter two put in an admirable effort in that game, do you think playing Taiye for, say, 35 minutes could have netted us the extra two points needed to beat Iowa? I'd say that's a safe bet. So that's two out of the seven near-win games accounted for - which would have put us at a 7-10 record instead of our actual 5-12 record.
That by itself would not be enough to put us in the Big Dance. However, five (of seven) near-win games remain, of which two are in the past relative to the Pitts fiasco and the two post-Pitts games discussed above - leaving three more near-win games. Even just looking at it from the perspective of bench depth alone, it's quite clear that we would have have won some proportion of those three near-win games with Pitts on the roster. Those were the near-win losses by 10 at Wisconsin, plus the last two games, the near-win loss by 6 points to Indiana and the near-win loss by 8 points at Iowa. But recall that at Iowa we were actually within three points before things fell apart completely and we had to intentionally foul.
The question of whether we could-have or would-have won those above-mentioned three near-win games (instead of losing them by an average of 8 points) can only be conjectural, since we can't rewind history and explore the alternate path. But it's quite imaginable that having Pitts on-roster would be sufficient to have won those games. Remember, we wouldn't need a full extra (average) 8 points, but only would need enough extra points to make the opposing team be forced to commit desperation fouls against us, instead of us committing desperation fouls against them. For the recent
@iowa game, four more points would have probably done it - since we caught up to only 3 points behind at one point. So it’s really quite conceivable - perhaps probable - that we would have won those three extra close games if Destiny Pitts had played.
In any event, the alternate reality of winning the latter extra three games (which might have happened, for instance, had Pitts still been on the roster) plus the two prior-mentioned games that we most-certainly would have won had the Pitts fiasco not happened, would give us five extra wins (out of the 7 near-wins) - and that would have given us a 10-7 record. That's right where Rutgers and Ohio State and Michigan are currently tied in the Big-Ten standings. That would most likely have gotten us a ticket to the Big Dance, since the latter three teams are all Dancing according to Charlie Creme, and we have better RPIs and SoSes than some other Big-Ten teams that Charlie thinks are in.
So it's quite possible that five out of the seven near-loss games could have quite straightforwardly been wins, if only whatever-the-heck-happened-between-Pitts-and-Whalen hadn't actually happened. The dfference between being in the NCAA Tournament and being on the outside wistfully looking in, might quite simply be the lack of Destiny Pitts.
> Is she being out coached??
Again, I would conditionally say "mostly no" to that question, although others might reasonably differ in opinion.
My conditions are all true conditions:
(1) The known condition that we have a doubly short bench - short on the guard side and short on the post side.
(2) The condition that we don't really have a viable true center on the team (such that we have to deploy our power forward at the center position).
I doubt that any existing coach in the Big Ten could do much better under those same conditions. Perhaps Geno might be able to do better, but on the other hand, playing with such a depleted roster might be such a foreign concept to Geno that he might not be able to do any better either.
The (1) depth shortage might be so severe that it could put psychological pressure on the players to perform, perhaps so much so that it leads to mini-slumps. Not much a coach can do about that (although reportedly, Whay told Diva she was going to score 20 at Iowa, and she did). The guard-side bench shortage leaves us vulnerable to ploys by opposing coaches such as deliberately trying to get our guards in foul trouble - to thus shorten our bench some more or else at least make us play scared of those additional potential fouls. We can't use that ploy on any other Big Ten teams. No other team has the guard-depth shortage that Minnesota has. One might argue that the Destiny Pitts shortage is self-inflicted, but there were a lot of complexities in that situation and we'll very likely never know the full truth on that one.
Condition (2) is somewhat elated to our depth shortage on the post side. Of our five posts, one has not been able to play all season due to medical conditions (and will be redshirted); only one is a true quality national-McClain-award caliber post player, namely Taiye, and she shoulders most of the post burden herself; and the other three posts are sometimes quite competent and sometimes weak - varying from game to game. See
@whalenfan's comment that is relevant here - we just don't have enough post power to be competetive in the Big Ten this year (whereas last year, with Annalese Lamke on the team and getting meaningful minutes, we were much better in rebounding). Taiye often gets double- or even triple-teamed in order to reign in her rebounding. In spite of Taiye still being in the top few offensive rebounders in the NCAA this year, one great rebounder by herself does not make a great-rebounding team. We supplement her rebounds with guard rebounds mostly, and they do surprisingly well, but not good enough to meet the Big-Ten standard. So we have a rebounding deficit most games. That's like digging a two-foot hole, and making your shooters shoot out of that.
One of the real problems there is perhaps more on the order that our three available off-the-bench posts just haven't had much playing time in which to mature their game. One potential coaching fault I might point out would be that our bench posts should have gotten a lot more playing time in the non-conf season when we didn't really need them to win, rather than giving that time to guards, who were already good enough to win, so didn't need the playing time as much. The problem boils down to the fact that there are more tall and expert posts in the Big Ten these days, and that trend will continue. We (Big-Ten WBB) have just about reached the point that exists in the WNBA, namely that you're not even a viable team unless you are capable of fielding a team with both a quality center as well as a quality power forward. We have a quality power forward, but not a quality center. So much so, that Whalen doesn't dare to play much time at all with both a power forward and a center in there (double posts). Would other Big-Ten coaches have the same fear under the same scenario with the same available personnel? Most probably.
On the other hand, would it have been possible to have better trained our team (with the players we have) to play better in a double-post scenario? I think so. Other, more experienced Big-Ten coaches might have been able to accomplish that. But no guarantee.
If there were any season-level strategic mal-decisions by the Gophers' coaching staff, then I think it would be the following. I think that they decided early-on that "We've mainly got (power forward) Taiye at the post, and our other post resources are not likely to develop sufficiently over the season, such that we must commit to going (mostly, some exceptions maybe) with a single post and four guards for pretty much the whole season - come hell or high water." Partly with the insight of hindsight, I think that a better season-level strategic decision would have been "Even though we've mainly got (power forward) Taiye at the post, and our other post resources are much less skilled and with much less experience, it seems clear to us in advance of the season that you just can't play in the Big Ten anymore without using a double-post scheme for at least half of the time - therefore, we are going to play double posts (when required, which is sometimes most of the game but averages maybe half of the time) come hell or high water, and we will just work our butts off training our secondary posts as best as we possibly can." Well, they went with the first strategic (mal-)decision above, and although hell didn't come, high water certainly did. Enough of a flood that we lost all of the near-win games - primarily because we couldn't field (or didn't dare field, which amounts to the same thing in practice) double posts against all the skilled and tall double-posts that our opponents have (with one or two good backups on the bench to boot). Given the improvements in skill level shown recently by the three backup posts, I think that if the coaches had focused on teaching them during the non-conf season, the resulting high-water of actually using them when needed, would be less drowning than the waters we're swimming in right now.
It was just unreasonable (and unfair, really) to expect Taiye to single-handedly shoulder the load of a power forward and a center for all our games. And although they actually improved perhaps more than what we might have expected, we didn't put in enough training time to sufficiently improve our backup posts to the point that we got good offensive game flow when we did play double posts. Let's face it - we don't actually have a true post coach - the head coach and the assistant coaches are all guards. Although Taiye has done just fine with little coaching, I believe our secondary posts have suffered from lack of legitimate post coaching.
As to whether other coaches are outcoaching Lindsay Whalen, I still say mostly no, but with an asterisk. The asterisk is that I believe other coaches are successfully taking advantage of our team weaknesses, such as our shallow bench - for instance by instructing their players to try to get us in foul trouble. Lisa Bluder may have done that herself in the recent Iowa game. On the flip side of that coin, there are no such depth (or other) weaknesses on any of the other Big-Ten teams, so there are no weaknesses for Lindsay to exploit (therefore it's a moot point as to whether or not she has yet learned to do so). Some of these "taking advantage of weaknesses" ploys might seem a bit like dirty pool. Such as, for instance, instructing Kathleen Doyle to go into the game and, well, play like Kathleen Doyle does. Or for instance in last year's Maryland game, when Brenda Frese instructed (well, I suspect she did, but I could be wrong) two of her guards to throw a flop, which they promptly did, and the refs dutifully blew the call and called it a charge on the Gophers (which it wasn't), and the quick 4-point turnaround resulting therefrom launched the seemingly amazing self-destruction of the Gophers' big lead over the last minute of the game - leading to the Maryland win after we handed them a turnover. Was that dirty pool? Perhaps, but you know what they say: "All's fair in love and war and basketball." Has Whalen learned to coach dirty yet? Probably not.
> Why are the Gophers always losing in the 4th quarter, after playing so hard all game? Why are they NEVER the victorious ones at the end of hard fought battles?
Yeah, good question. Two questions there, actually. The answer to first one probably has a lot to do with the second one, namely why are we consistently losing the close battles, and why did we have seven near-win games that all turned out to be a loss in the end, and only a few close games that we actually won. (There was, of course, the hard-fought 2OT win over Rutgers, which was one of the toughest games I've ever seen, and what everybody said afterwards was pretty much literally true, namely that "Taiye willed us to win.")
Part of the answer to the 4th-quarter question, I think, is just tiredness on our team's part. And that's a corollary to the short-bench problem. We just don't have the option to rest our players like the other teams do. And other coaches definitely do take advantage of that. One could claim that Lindsay is being outcoached in the sense that she doesn't rest her players enough whereas other coaches do, but she really doesn't have that option, does she? We quite often see other teams go 12 players deep, whereas we often go only 7 players deep. So I believe tiredness in the 4th quarter is a big factor.
Certainly, I often see some bad turnovers on our part in the 4th quarter. It's hard to fathom that sometimes, thinking that they must be running on a lot of adrenaline, so being at that level of attention, how can they commit so many turnovers that mostly seem to be lack of attention to detail. But perhaps it's more too-much-lactic-acid instead. Maybe it's a battle within the players' bloodstreams between lactic acid and adrenaline.
We had a similar problem in 4th quarters last year. Again, part of that was probably tiredness last year. But part of it was probably Kenisha Bell trying to do too much, and getting triple-teamed at end of shot clocks while stalling. Another factor (this year and last year) is probably starting to stall too soon, and not sticking long enough to the strategy that got you ahead in the first place.
But I think it's got to be really tough when every other team has an extra gear in the 4th quarter, and we don't.
There's another factor that I think partly explains the second question, as to why we seemingy NEVER are the victorious ones at the end of hard fought battles. I'll only outline the issue here since I went over it at length eariler in a different thread. Start with a couple premises. First, the near parity in the Big Ten this year. This doesn't mean each team is equal to all others, like you might think. What it really means is that the Big Ten is partitioned into several sub-groups with near parity of performance in each group. The top group are the league leaders, and the bottom group are the league laggards, but in the middle group, they're all fairly close in their basketball capabilities. So when a pair of teams from the middle group play, it often comes down to a near tie in the fourth quarter, and a lot of the times, it's that 4th quarter play that determines the outcome of the game.
But with such parity (among the middle group of B1G teams) and with the dividing line needing to be drawn somewhere among those midde-group teams as to who makes it to the NCAA Tournament and who doesn't, any un-natural disturbance to the outcome of a game can make a huge impact on whether or not given teams go to the Big Dance. Therefore we don't want any such un-natural disturbances to the natural outcomes of games - if there were any such disturbances, that would be unfair. Because the natural game result might be a score difference of only plus/minus 4 points or less - thanks to the parity among those middle teams - and the disturbance (if any) might be of a magnitude greater than plus/minus 4 points.
Now into that scenario we insert a godawful un-natural disturbance. Namely, the caliber and quality of the officiating. Now that ranges widely from game to game. In any given game, especially in some games (more or less at random) the referees are the dictators of what the rules will be, and said rules for the game may or may not be closely correlated to the actual basketball rules that are printed in the rulebook. Mostly, it's minor shades of "interpretation" of the rules. But the range of interpretation can vary widely between games. For instance, every once in a while you get a game in which they call three times as much traveling as in a "normal" game. Now, whatever direction this interpretation takes from the formal written basketball rules, may be more or less beneficial for one team versus another. So even such minor shades of interpretation of the rules can amount to a great un-natural disturbance to the result of the game. With such parity (in the middle group of the Big Ten) you need as little disturbance as possible, yet the officiating is going to be a disturbance that is, on average, bigger than the difference between the natural scores of the two teams (and by natural, I mean as-if it had been possible by some magic trick to officiate the game perfectly according to the rulebook with no mistakes by the referees).
You could summarize by saying that the standard deviation in the scoring of the game due to the un-natural disturbance of the referees' officiating, is greater than the standard deviation in the natural (perfect) scoring of the game - if you had, for instance, played a series of 10 games instead of one game. The error in the measurement of the outcome is greater than the standard error of the mean of the outcome (for those that want to use the proper statistical terms).
Besides differences in game final scores due to just interpretation by officials, there's also actual mistakes in officiating made by the referees. In my opinion the officiating is pretty bad in general, but in some games it's worse than others. It is widely assumed that this just averages out over the game so as not to benefit one team or another. But this is generally not the case. Usually one team or another gets "screwed" by the officials to some extent - just due to the laws of probability, and not due to any bad intent by the officials. The referees are doing the best they're capable of, in spite of how much you dislike some of their calls. But the probability of bad calls equalling-out and thus canceling, is very small. It's more likely that one team or the other benefits - it's only a question of how much. And I claim that the variability in final scores directly attributable to the referees (either specific bad calls where they missed something or didn't understand the rule, as well as variability due to a simple interpretation emphasis of a given set of refs but that happens to favor the playing style of one team more than the other) is just too large. It's too large with respect to the natural differences between the competing teams. Such that the resulting scores (and their deltas) of games played between two nearly equal (in capability) middle-of-the-pack Big Ten teams is typically more of a measure of which team the referees favored in practice, than it is a measure of the result of the game that would have resulted from perfect interpretation of the written rules of basketball.
As it turns out, the Gophers were on the short end of the stick with regard to the latter phenomenon in most of those near-win games that we lost.
When we started losing by ones and twos and threes, at the first of those games I observed that there were a number of very horrible mis-calls that went in favor of the other team, and it was obvious to me in spite of the fact that I made every effort to put my bias aside and interpret the officiating in as unbiased a manner as possible. Also, this tilt of the playing floor by the officials in this game, was completely sufficient by itself to account for the resulting loss. In other words, in actuality we won that game, but the referees handed the win to the other team instead when they handed in the official score sheet. The bad calls either gave the other team extra points and/or took away points that we otherwise would have scored - and to such an extent that it actually changed the eventual outcome of the game.
I was kinda POed by the latter, so just for fun, I started doing such an approximate accounting on the officiating at every home game. Well that was the beginning of a whole spate of Gopher losses by single digits, and to my surprise, I found that the delta in really bad calls favored the opponent in each such lost game, and (in many or most cases) by enough to have turned what would have been a win into a loss. I only kept track (on each hand) of the really, really bad calls that were obviously bad - ignoring the merely questionable calls. It was really, really surprising to me, to find out that we were, in effect, losing almost every game thanks to the refs. In other words, we had to aim for beating the other team by about 10 points, because the referees were going to take about 3-4 points off our score and add 3-4 points to the opponent's score, for a net adjustment to the final score of 6-8 points.
Now I don't mean to imply that the refs were biased against the Gophers in these games. They were just making a few bonehead errors. Errors like, we hit the ball and it bounces off the opponent's knee out of bounds and they give the opponent the ball out-of-bounds. Or somebody stiff-arms Masha, forcing her out of bounds on the baseline, and the baseline referee calls it out of bounds on Masha, apparently thinking his job was only to watch the out-of-bounds line, and not to worry about who pushed whom out of bounds. They were all just very bad calls, and I didn't count any that I didn't have a good view on. Of course, this was just an estimate of what really transpired, since I couldn't see everything. But it was just surprising to me, having done this informal survey over all the (long) sequence of home games that we lost by a few points, that we actually lost all these games thanks to the referees.
Of course, a lot of people say, well bad officiating is just something that happens once in a while, so you just gotta play better when that happens. But, when there's such parity among the middle-tier Big-Ten teams, such that the best you can do is beat another team by 5 points, but the referees give the other team an un-natural advantage of 6 points, then you're helpless - it's almost like you might just as well have the referees play a game of craps to determine the outcome. Now next year, we might mostly be the beneficiaries of bad refereeing, and we might go to the Big Dance in spite of not really deserving it. But this year, we probably deserve to go to the Big Dance, but are not going thanks to the (bad) luck of the draw on referees, and bad luck that an excessive amount of the referees' bad calls just happened to favor the opponent as opposed to the bad calls that favored us.
What's really interesting on this, is that from my informal officiating survey at the home Iowa game, I know for sure that we actually won that game, but that the referees docked us points and added points to Iowa via some horrible calls, just as surely as if they fudged the scoreboard - albeit completely unintentionally - just due to incompetence on their part. And then at the recent away Iowa game, I was not there nor did I have any video, so I didn't keep tabs directly. Instead, I kept tabs on what our announcers were saying about bad calls. Thus, I have less confidence in the latter estimates. Yet the total bias of bad calls again went in favor of Iowa, and again enough to switch what would have been a Minnesota win into an Iowa win. So even though that's only an estimate of how bad the officiating was, so that you do have to take it with a bit of a grain of salt, it does appear that we got ripped off on the outcomes of two Iowa games.
> Did anyone catch Coach Bluder's interview when she was talking about their 1 point win earlier this season? She talked about how great she thinks the players are for the Gophers. She mentioned, they are quick, strong, can shoot free throws, on the boards, and can shoot behind the arc, but can't understand why they are ranked #11 in the Big Ten.
No, I didn't see that. It would be nice if somebody with access could post that.
But the partial answer to her question for that particular game was, that the referees expended most of their bad calls against the Gophers, thus making the Gophers work their way out of a hole - a hole that, given how good Iowa is, was impossible for us to surmount; however, we probably could have won it in spite of that, except for the fact that we shot ourselves in the foot by only playing Taiye for 15 minutes.
But I would say that Bluder's assessment is essentially correct. The top-7 players (who get most of the playing time) are all what Bluder says they are. Individually, they are all top-notch players. And Pitts too, obviously. The problem is that that set of players by themselves do not constitute the complete set of components that you need for a successful team in the very competitive (in spite of high-degree-of-parity) Big Ten. You need enough quality posts so that you can win the plus/minus on rebounding (and first clue is: one post is not enough), or else you're toast. In spite of good capabilities to get steals, you need better capability to refrain from turnovers yourself. You need better plays and better ball movement and more inside-out plays such that you can get a sufficient amount of assists, whereas we are low on assists (Powell notwithstanding). You need sufficient amount of great three-point shooters such that on any given day that one of them is shooting bricks, you can just bench her - and although we had this with Pitts on the team, we lost the sufficient three-point-shooter headcount when Pitts abruptly left. What's really amazing about this team (and that even Bluder didn't notice) is that in any given game, they can lose on five out of six of the relevant statistics indicative of some of the team requirements just listed above, and yet come within three points of winning the game anyway - which is then escalated to about a 5-10 point losing margin by virtue of desperation fouls.
We are the best team at "almost winning" in the entire Big Ten. But in terms of the above requirements for winning, we are about 1-2 players short of making it to the Sweet Sixteen this year. We'll get there in some future year, I believe, assuming that our incoming recruits can match the graduating seniors in quality but with sufficiently higher quantity.
