B1G Game 18: Gophers Host Maryland (3-1-20)

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Katogopher said:
I know it’s senior day, but if you want to be like a Maryland program, might as well your freshmen so they get a feel what it’s like to be competitive in the league. So why is Powell on the bench?
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Powell knows how to be competitive. Why risk injury to her in a mega-blowout? Rest her up for the hopefully 5-games-in-5-days BT tournament.
 

99-44, we "held" them to less than 100. Nice to see that all four seniors were on the floor together for awhile.
 

whalenfan said:
I dont disagree that they need better ball movement but Maryland switches everything and you gotta be able to take advantage of switches and we dont have anyone that can break em down or take advantage down low.
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I'm surprised we didn't run a 1-4 high set and exploit the 1-2-2 matchup zone Maryland was using. Instead we stood and became easy to guard.
Seeing the ladies come out at halftime it looked like they just didn't care. Terrible body language.
 

When was the last time you saw this team with 33 turnovers. Whalen will have more talent next year. If this team doesn’t improve it’s on her.
 

Rickman55 said:
When was the last time you saw this team with 33 turnovers. Whalen will have more talent next year. If this team doesn’t improve it’s on her.
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Whalen has a lot of pride...Another season like this and she will consider walking away.
 


MennoSota said:
I'm surprised we didn't run a 1-4 high set and exploit the 1-2-2 matchup zone Maryland was using. Instead we stood and became easy to guard.
Seeing the ladies come out at halftime it looked like they just didn't care. Terrible body language.
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I'm surprised they didnt try it but that would require one of our guards finishing over length which they really struggle with. We really need a low post scorer to open up things.
 


Rickman55 said:
When was the last time you saw this team with 33 turnovers. Whalen will have more talent next year. If this team doesn’t improve it’s on her.
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How do you know the best talent isn’t leaving?
 

It's difficult to point out anything new about today's performance; but..

1) Our future didn't look promising.
2) Sometime during the game I think they stopped listening to Lindsay. Things didn't change after the timeouts.
3) To me, the low point was in the fourth quarter when the team was just walking up court with their backs to the ball. Owusu was pushing it right up their butts; she even committed a charge when the Gophers were slow to get out of the way.
 




Agree that it was difficult to find any positives in this game today. We did play both IO. and Indiana competitively. I think this blow out shows how much our talent level needs to improve to be @ the top of the Big. I don't agree that our future is not promising and IMHO Whalen will do what Cheryl Reeve told her which is to stay the course. My level of optimism will go down if Powell and others leave after this season.
 

whalenfan said:
I'm surprised they didnt try it but that would require one of our guards finishing over length which they really struggle with. We really need a low post scorer to open up things.
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You are right. Maryland is tall and strong, which is a nightmare matchup against our present squad. Coach Whalen needs to recruit some bigs.
 

baller4life said:
The worst thing any coach can do is lose their team. But what did you think would happen?
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I thought the team would respect the fact that the State of Minnesota is paying for their education in return for their best effort.
 



MennoSota said:
I thought the team would respect the fact that the State of Minnesota is paying for their education in return for their best effort.
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Then again, the State of Minnesota is paying more money to the coaches to make Marlene Stollings look like a better head coach than Pat Summitt.
 

MennoSota said:
Watching the game at the Barn right now. My take, after a horrific 2nd quarter, is that these girls are not well coached. No ball movement or cutters on offense, just standing and being easy to guard. Funnel defense with no help.
Maryland may have better athletes, but our girls are completely unprepared to play.
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I was at the game. It was a tough watch. Maryland is really good, their speed, length and effort just overwhelmed the Gophers. Just no answer for what Maryland could do. They were much the best, just goes to show how far from a top tier competitive program we are. Season went down the drain after the Pitts suspension. Whalen's lack of coaching experience is starting to show. This was not a fun game to experience even if impressed by how good Maryland is.
 

I hope we can stay positive for next year. I hope Lindsay and staff can turn things around. There is more height to the team next year and potential posts.
 

SpaceJunkie said:
Then again, the State of Minnesota is paying more money to the coaches to make Marlene Stollings look like a better head coach than Pat Summitt.
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Who's Marlene Stallings? Oh yeah, the coach who couldn't win here and left.
 


MennoSota said:
Who's Marlene Stallings? Oh yeah, the coach who couldn't win here and left.
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That just proves how terrible the current coach of the Gophers is, since at least the Gophers won an NCAA Tournament game and never finished as bad as 5-13 (11th place) in the Big Ten under Stollings, while Whalen took over that 2nd Round NCAA Tournament / Top-25 caliber team and turned them into one of the worst teams in the Big Ten.
 


SpaceJunkie said:
That just proves how terrible the current coach of the Gophers is, since at least the Gophers won an NCAA Tournament game and never finished as bad as 5-13 (11th place) in the Big Ten under Stollings, while Whalen took over that 2nd Round NCAA Tournament / Top-25 caliber team and turned them into one of the worst teams in the Big Ten.
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and ran off her best player
 

Well (in a sense) quarters 2 and 4 weren’t quite as bad as quarters 1 and 3. We held them to 15 and 16, respectively in 2 and 4. Problem is, they held us to 6 and 5, respectively. The multiples (of Maryland scoring to Minnesota scoring) for each quarter were:

Quarter Multiple
1 2.31
2 2.5
3 1.9
4 3.2

Essentially, there’s nothing for it. Except for that nice early 6-1 lead, the longer we played the behinder we got. If we played for 80 minutes, it would have been about 198 to 88.

For one thing, their press and height just wore us out. We needed a rest every possession (after 6:53 in 1Q when they tied it up). No sooner do we get it across the time line, than our 5’6” to 5’10” guard gets trapped by two 6’+ Terps. We had almost double digits of shot clock violations (one would have to check the play by play). They were a substantial portion of our 35 turnovers. You just can’t be successful against Maryland without a couple six-foot guards and a couple 6’4” to 6’5” posts.

A couple stats say it all.

Minnesota assist:turnover ratio = 5:35 = 1/7
Maryland assist:turnover ratio = 24:18 = 1.33
Minnesota points:turnover ratio = 44:35 = 1.26
Maryland points:turnover ratio = 99:18 = 5.50

Powell had 1 assist and 10 turnovers. She suffered the most from the Maryland height since she’s the shortest.

One decent stat: we had 33 rebounds to their 34 - only one shy of their total. Taiye had 10 of those (closest competitor was Diamond Miller with six, then Shakira Austin and Diva Hubbard with five).

Taylor Mikesell shot 6-8 from deep. Not sure how we were completely unable to cover her, when on the other end we were barely able to get a shot off. One interesting thing to note is that in women’s college basketball (on almost all teams anyway) three-point shots are set shots. That means you just can’t shoot threes (successfully, anyway) over a 5-inch taller defender - unless you’re lucky enough to get wide open. We were lucky that way 6 times out of 23 triple attempts. Maryland shot 8-18 from deep, netting 6 more points from 5 less possessions.

The only Gophers that shot reasonably well were Taiye (.500) and Masha (.429). Not coincidentally, they’re the tallest post/guard, respectively in the primary rotation.

We’re just not tall enough. Or fast enough.

Another interesting factoid is that Minnesota and Maryland both committed 18 personal fouls; coupled with the fact that Minnesota made 8 of 10 free throws, but Maryland made 19 of 23 free throws. Both decent percentages. But what’s up with Maryland getting to shoot 23 times, and us only 10 times, when both teams committed 18 fouls. Seems weird at first, but I figured it out. It’s part of Frese’s diabolical game plan. She instructs her team to go ahead and foul all you want while the Gophers are starting to initiate a play, but refrain from any shooting fouls. So we got less than half as many free throws because (1) we basically could hardly ever even get a shot off, so hardly any opportunities to get fouled during a shot in the first place; (2) Frese instructs her troops to refrain from shooting fouls; (3) their free reign to foul us on any non-shooting play just disrupts the few play opportunities that we had (given that they burned half our shot clock with press and half-court trap, plus they’re too tall to shoot over); therefore (4) since we had so few opportunities to make a play and shoot a shot, and the few opportunities we had, they disrupted us via non-shooting fouls that broke up our play, not to mention our 35 turnovers, we didn’t really get many shots off. If you don’t shoot, you don’t get many shooting fouls. For that matter, if you don’t shoot, you don’t score. Like maybe 44 points worth of “don’t score.”

Maryland had 61 attempted field goals on which they shot 59%. Minnesota had 54 attempted field goals, quite a few of which were desperation shots, on which they shot 27.8% (less than half the Maryland field-goal percentage). Is it any wonder we scored less than half the points?

I have to add that Brenda Frese, although obviously a coach that brings good results for her team, annoys me so much that I can barely stand to look at her while she’s coaching. I had to ask myself why is it that I despise her so much. Only thing I could come up with, is that if (hypothetically) I had made the big mistake of getting recruited and signing with her Maryland team, her screaming at me and the team would drive me crazy so fast, that I’d be outta there quicker than you could say “transfer portal.”
 
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BBJones said:
You mean like Destiny Slocum?
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Yeah, perhaps - I’m guessing similar to Destiny Slocum, who got Big-Ten Freshman of the Year at Maryland, and national Freshman of the Year, but apparently disliked Maryland enough to pay the NCAA wait-out-a-year penalty so as to transfer to the Oregon State Beavers. Where she seems to be thriving. But this article https://www.google.com/amp/s/wtop.c...ne-slocum-2-others-transfer-from-maryland/amp claims it might have just been too far from home. And also notes that two other Terps transfered out that year.

But in this post https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.te...-from-maryland-because-it-wasnt-the-right-fit Destiny Slocum denys the homesick theory and says “Maryland wasn”t the right fit.” Or maybe Frese wasn’t the right coach for her.
 
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Shades said:
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OK, let me clarify. I didn’t actually click the Like button on this. Just one of many bugs in the iPhone version of this application. For some reason most embedded videos don’t play. I clicked the Play button 10 times trying to get it to work. App must have thought that I really liked it cuz I clicked it so much.

I did manage to find the clip on the web later. And yes, I did like the few good plays we made. The rest, not so much.
 

SpaceJunkie said:
That just proves how terrible the current coach of the Gophers is, since at least the Gophers won an NCAA Tournament game and never finished as bad as 5-13 (11th place) in the Big Ten under Stollings, while Whalen took over that 2nd Round NCAA Tournament / Top-25 caliber team and turned them into one of the worst teams in the Big Ten.
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Whoa, let me bring you back to reality a bit.

I’ll get back to Marlene’s positive contributions in a short sec.

But first we should acknowledge what’s fairly clear to most of us GHers in hindsight: Namely that Stollings was always a short-timer by her own intentions, and was largely using Minnesota as a place to pad her resume in order to move on to a better paying job.

She milked Minnesota’s existing assets to do so: stars like Rachel Banham and Amanda Zahui B. and future stars (perhaps a tiny bit less stellar, but eventual stars just the same) such as Carlie Wagner.

At the same time, she booked cream-puff non-conf schedules that padded her won-loss record, but made it nigh unto impossible to make the NCAA playoffs due to horrible SoS dragging down our RPI.

Even with Rachel Banham and Carlie Wagner, Stollings couldn’t initially coach us to an NCAA playoff game, and she mal-coached us in the ensuing WNIT to a one-and-done for that Rachel Banham led team.

Fast forward to the year you mention, 2017-18, in which we did finally make it to the NCAA playoffs with a team led by Carlie Wagner and Kenisha Bell along with up-and-coming Destiny Pitts. You describe that team thusly ...

> ... that 2nd Round NCAA Tournament / Top-25 Caliber team ... (and) ... at least the Gophers won an NCAA Tournament game ...

That was not a Top-25 team. Recall we had the Bubble Party that year, and up to the last minute we weren’t sure whether the NCAA considered us a top-64 team. But they did, and we beat Green Bay, so perhaps we were a top-32 team. But then we had to play Oregon, and they were way better than us, although we held our own for a while. That year’s Gophers were a good team, but not a ranked team.

That was the last year Marlene hitched her wagon to a star left over from the pre-Stollings era - namely Carlie Wagner. Then Marlene jumped ship - to the delight of many GH posters. And Whalen took over the reigns the following year. Carlie Wagner had graduated. Carlie left behind a good team, but not an elite team.

Whalen did not “take over a Top-25 Caliber team and turn them into one of the worst teams in the Big Ten.” It’s largely a different team that Whalen took over.

To Stollings credit, she did bring in some good talent. I think she brought in Kenisha Bell (although I’m not certain). She brought in Jasmine Brunson and Gadiva Hubbard. She brought in the first wave of Michiganders, namely Destiny Pitts and the Bellos. And these were all good recruits - all developing into very good players. In particular, Bell and Pitts and Taiye Bello were all ultimately nominated as candidates for national awards for their positions.

Although Stollings spiffed up her resume in advance of job hunting, largely on the basis of star power left over from Pam Borton, Whalen needed to build on top of Stollings’ recruits. This takes time. In particular, we’ve been short-handed from day one on Whalen’s teams. We naturally lost a couple recruits with the coaching change, and it was not possible to hustle fast enough to replace them all. Plus Hubbard was injured last year. And two of this year’s recruits were injured from the get go, and another having to sit out a year per NCAA. Plus more miscellaneous injuries during the season. And the unfortunate loss of Pitts - our star player - to bad management by the Athletic Department.

Whalen has been playing with 3/4 of a decent team ... not with 100% of a top-25 AP ranked team. Teams have been killing us all year because our team is exhausted playing a 7-player rotation. Plus we have one great post in a league that now requires 3 great posts (2 starters and 1 backup).

On Sunday, Whalen had to play her 3/4 of a pretty good team with too-few posts against a 13-player (and 15-staffed) 7th-ranked basketball team, namely Maryland

Give her a break. Let’s let her recruit a full team first, rather than judge her on how well her exhausted 3/4 team stands up to a possible Final Four team.
 
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