Countering my own argument, the Gophers' shooting percentages by quarter were 23.5%, 30.8%, 36.3%, and 46.7% -- not a sign they were running out of gas. Of course, though, fatigue can show itself in stats other than shooting percentages.
> ... Either the other teams are just playing better than we are under pressure, or we're making mistakes due to fatigue simply because we're not deep enough. Bench points in this game favored Ohio State 25-2.
> Countering my own argument ... Of course, though, fatigue can show itself in stats other than shooting percentages.
Re-emphasizing your fatigue argument,
@let'sbeclear, I think there's good support for that. As was already noted, the Gophers only went 6 significant players deep (after discounting the two players, Adashchyk and K Bello, with 5 or fewer minutes). These six played a mean of 32.17 minutes each (with a median of 35 minutes).
Computing the same for Ohio State (again, after discounting the one player who played only 5 minutes), OSU went 8 significant players deep for a mean (and median) of 24.5 minutes. Putting it another way, the 8 significant OSU players got an average of 15.5 minutes each of bench-time rest during the game; whereas the 6 significant Minnesota players got an average of 7.83 minutes each of bench-time rest during the game. In reality, Scalia got 4 minutes of bench rest, and both Pitts and Bello got 2 minutes of bench rest during the entire 40-minute game. That's a heck-of-a-lot more lactic acid per Gopher player in the fourth quarter. See
https://www/.webmd.com/fitness-exercise/guide/exercise-and-lactic-acidosis
That might explain how the go-ahead/winning bucket got scored by Ohio State, namely that the Gophers were too spent to mount a situation-aware/energetic/effective defense against the OSU inbounds play in the last couple minutes. Brunson, who otherwise had a great offensive game, might perhaps have been a bit spent by that time. She was in the back ostensibly guarding Patty. But Patty sprinted around her and headed right into the paint, unguarded, for the easiest layup we could have possibly given them. Not even any screen. She just bolted for the layup, and nobody there to defend her, because Taiye's attention was occupied by Juhasz.
I don't want to pick on Brunson too much, because there's plenty of blame to go around throughout the entire game. For instance, besides Brunson getting caught napping, after mounting what was a pretty awesome last-second defense, not a single player of the five had the energy to grab the rebound. Or maybe it was just a bad bounce off the rim, I don't know.
I'll posit the following 7 potential ways that the Ohio State game could have ended up more favorably (namely, in a win for the Gophers):
(1) If the referees don't make (what I believe to be) that last bad call on Destiny Pitts (and although I didn't get a good view of it live and can't find it on the highlight reel, her post-game comments plus other posters' comments convince me fairly strongly that it was a bogus call), then we got a great chance of scoring and thus putting them in the need-to-foul situation instead of us, and we have a good chance of winning the game.
(2) If our bench was deeper so that we could rest our starters more during the game, so that we had a much-more rested starting-five in the game for those last 6 minutes (from the point where we were up by 7), then I'm pretty confident that we would have won the game.
(3) If, in spite of the fact that we don't have a deep bench, Whalen had (crossed her fingers and) went deeper into her bench anyway - thus giving the starters more rest - then I'm pretty confident that we would have won the game.
(4) If our guards were taller, they might have been able to avoid some of the 6 blocks in which they penetrated the paint well, but got stuffed by the taller Ohio State players. Plus other paint-penetration shots that they took had to be altered significantly to avoid the block, turning a straightforward (makeable) shot into a difficult shot. We had one block (by Taiye) to their six blocks, a delta of 5 blocks. If any one of those blocks was not-a-block but goes into the hoop instead, we win - or at least have them in a need-to-foul situation with seconds left in the 4th quarter, as opposed to us being in that predicament.
(5) If only our guards had dumped off the ball more often to Taiye in the paint (as opposed to taking an acrobatic shot or getting blocked) then certainly we would have won. Guards, why are you not feeding our most reliable scorer? She only got 7 shots off the whole game, and either made or got free throws off-from most of the times that she was given a pass in the paint (including that awesome full-court baseball pass by Scalia). In contrast, Juhasz got 11 shots off (but scored less points than Taiye did off her 7 shots). Plus Patty (see number (6)) got 6 shots off. What gives, guards? In a game in which you're penetrating into the Ohio State tall trees, why aren't you dumping the ball off to your best in-the-paint player a sufficient amount of times?
(6) If we had been effective in defending against the "Patty Machine," then we certainly would have won this game. Patty shot a perfect 6-for-6 on the game (one triple, the rest two-pointers), including the game-winning score that we gave her on a silver platter by sleeping on an in-bounds play. Besides her three-pointer, all five of her two-point buckets were layups. And most of those layups were pretty much given to her by means of bad Gopher defense. That includes numerous times that she slipped in behind the zone, coming in along the baseline un-noticed (until too late) so as to score an easy layup. Plus she got 10 rebounds.
The way to defend against the 6'3" Patty would have been not to expect Taiye to defend against both 6'4" Juhasz and Patty at the same time. Taiye did an awesome job defending Juhasz, largely taking her game and typical points away from her, and outrebounding her 10-2. But it's simply unreasonable to expect one 6'2" player to simultaneously defend against both a 6'4" player and a 6'3" player (who is fast and has a tendency to slip inside the back-side of the zone). The way "not to expect Taiye to defend against both Juhasz and Patty at the same time" would be to (at least for some small fraction of the 40-minute game time) give her a little post help off the bench (see points (2) and especially (3)). Although they made some free-throws, Hubbard and Powell and Adashchyk were a combined big-O for 15 from the field in this game in a combined 53 minutes. Does anybody think that, if a mixture of K. Bello and Sconiers had been put into the game (that is, in addition to T. Bello, not just subbing for her for a few minutes) for some fraction of that largely wasted 53 minutes of playing time (thus adding rebounding and taking defensive pressure off Taiye), and been allowed to share (say) 10 of those wasted 15 shots among themselves and Taiye, that one or the other of Sconiers and/or K. Bello and/or T. Bello would not have been able to score at least one extra bucket (plus replace the relevant part of the above guards' free throws)?
Even taking a possible extra Taiye shot out of the equation (since we covered that in number (5)), I computed what the probability is, of the hypothetical scenario in which a combination of K. Bello and Sconiers (given enough playing minutes) took a total of 10 shots, but missed all ten of them. That probability = 0.00001694. In other words, impossible for all practical purposes. Or equivalently, the chances of one or the other of these two making at least one shot, given the opportunity to take ten shots, is equal to 99.9983%. In other words, it's almost certain that they would have made at least 2 points, if given the opportunity to take 10 of those 15 wasted guard shots. We only needed two more points to win that game. It was thus a virtual certainty that we would have won the game, under the alternate reality that we had benched the guards that couldn't hit a bucket, and instead let K. Bello and/or Sconiers take 10 of those wasted shots in the span of sufficient minutes to take those shots.
Shot opportunities are as valuable as gold. They should not be wasted on guards who are shooting 0-15 in this particular game. Not when two post players, whose height is also desperately needed, are sitting on the bench, and both have season-to-date shooting percentages of .667.
(7) If we had been more effective in scoring points off turnovers, then I'm pretty confident that we would have won the game. For some crazy reason, it seemed like many of the various difficult shots we took after getting an OSU turnover couldn't find their way through the net, whereas when OSU got turnovers off us, they were always ending with an acrobatic shot that went in. Ohio State got 20 points off turnovers; whereas Minnesota got only 8 points off turnovers. Since we only needed two points to turn-around the final score into a Gopher win, if we only had scored one more time off those turnovers that we forced on Ohio State, we win. On the other hand, the turnovers per se were pretty even - Minnesota had 16 and Ohio State had 14. Look at the turnovers by quarter ...
1Q Turnovers: OSU 7 turnovers, Minnesota 2 turnovers
1Q Score MN 12 - OSU 16 (OSU takes quarter)
2Q Turnovers: OSU 5 turnovers, Minnesota 5 turnovers
2Q Score MN 16 - OSU 18 (OSU takes quarter)
3Q Turnovers: OSU 1 turnovers, Minnesota 6 turnovers
3Q Score MN 18 - OSU 10 (Minnesota takes quarter)
4Q Turnovers: OSU 1 turnovers, Minnesota 3 turnovers
4Q Score MN 17 - OSU 22 (OSU takes quarter, Minnesota loses game)
It seems rather counter-intuitive, but (for example) in the first quarter Ohio State out-turnovered us 7-2; yet they still outscored us 16-12. This was obviously a quarter in which we didn't get as many points off those 7 turnovers as we should have (e.g., if we got two points off each of those turnovers, that would be 14 points right there, compared to the 12 points we actually scored in the quarter - which is mostly non-turnover points). I suppose, chalk it up to bad shooting by the Gophers, see ...
> ... the Gopher's shooting percentages by quarter were 23.5%, 30.8%, 36.3%, and 46.7% ...
Also strangely, the reverse situation holds in the third quarter, where the Gophers out-turnovered Ohio State 6-1; yet we managed to outscore them 18-10 in the third quarter. That's when we continued the comeback started in late 2nd quarter, and took the lead.
The three Gopher turnovers in the 4th quarter (two in excess of OSU's one turnover) had a big impact on the final result of a loss to Ohio State. In fact, the Gophers were winning the quarter right up to the point of 6 minutes left in the quarter, and then a combination of Gopher turnovers plus a bad (tired?) Gopher defense (including napping on an important OSU in-bounds play) plus good OSU offense let Ohio State eek out a one point lead that they turned into victory via lack of a Gopher rebound on that last defensive stand.
And one of those excess Gopher turnovers in the fourth quarter was arguably due to a bad call by the referees (see number (1)).
