B1G Game 5: Gophers Visit Illinois (1-12-20)

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Only way I see the Gophers winning is if Sconiers can play all 10 minutes of the 4th.
 



baller4life said:
Trust me, if you think this board fleshed out the post-NW game drama... you have nothing close to the full story.
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How would you know? You didn’t know anything about the Bello twins.
 

Ignatius L Hoops said:
I'M Assuming, they support Pitts.
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Wouldn’t it be shocking if Powell didn’t support Pitts, seeing as they were high school teammates?

Maybe the twins and Pitts were involved in the same detrimental activity.
 



Had a chance @ the end but terrible TO on the in bounds play. Like the fight and play of the freshman.
 

GringaGopher said:
Had a chance @ the end but terrible TO on the in bounds play. Like the fight and play of the freshman.
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Tomancova was right there to lob it in at least. Get the ball back from her & still time to get organized.

Honestly played better than expected given the circumstances. Was surprised Sconiers got 0 minutes in the 4th when I said she should play 10. :)
 

And again cannot do an inbounds pass. Is this even worked on in practice? Too many disturbing trends with this team. FREE throw shooting sunk their chance. is this now Scalia’s team?
 




baller4life said:
Trust me, if you think this board fleshed out the post-NW game drama... you have nothing close to the full story.
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Why do this? Its clear your close to someone on this team, whatevers going on behind the scenes should stay there and get it figured out. Posting stuff like this is just silly.
 





Ironic that the loss comes on a combination of (a) inability to get the ball inbounds, plus (b) hitting only 9 of 18 free throws by the best free-throw shooting team in the Big Ten. (To clarify a bit, before this game we were shooting free throws at a .768 clip as a team, including .748 for the subset of Pitts and the Bellos, but the rest of the team without the latter was shooting .787 from the charity stripe. How does a .787 free-throw team shoot .500?)

Positives:

Taking a huge deficit to a one-point game with possession in a matter of minutes in the 4th quarter (a reversal of a trend).

A couple nice NBA threes by Scalia. She’s developing Pitts-like “no fear.”

A couple incredible 1-on-3 moves with pretty-looking made shots by Powell down the stretch.

Adaschyk steps up to make 2 out of 3 three-pointers.

.43 rebounds per minute by Tomancova (9 in 21 min). And .28 rebounds per minute (5 in 18 min) by Sconiers. And .19 rebounds per minute (7 in 37 min) by Scalia from the guard position.

Crucial rebound by Tomancova down the stretch.

Only 11 turnovers - still too many (well, arguably at least one too many, as it would have been nice to have that one last shot that we worked so hard for), but one less than Illinois had, and 10 less than the 21 turnovers that lost the Northwestern game.

Negative:

We lost the rebounding battle 39-40. We could have used a couple Bellos and a Pitts (averaging among them a cumulative 17.0 rebounds per game).

I do believe that this team (as fielded), plus a Pitts and a couple of Bellos, is capable of beating any team in the Big Ten.
 
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Katogopher said:
And again cannot do an inbounds pass. Is this even worked on in practice? Too many disturbing trends with this team. FREE throw shooting sunk their chance. is this now Scalia’s team?
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I remember last year’s game with Maryland that the Gopher should’ve won, but they lost it on an intercepted inbounds play.
 


Okay, for the second time in less than a week I have to say, I really miss Stollings' inbounds plays. They were designed to score. Today, as usual, the plan was to throw it deep to the back court. Ick. I'd prefer to see some one diving to the hoop.
 

It's odd to see inbounds plays be an issue at this level. Felt the same way with Tubby Smith on the men's side.
 



Seems like the Gopher team members need some support through this difficult situation as well. Nice video of Illinois, but not sure why we need to see this. They won on the back of Gopher's difficult situation, and the remaining players played hard.
 

bbwannabe said:
Seems like the Gopher team members need some support through this difficult situation as well. Nice video of Illinois, but not sure why we need to see this. They won on the back of Gopher's difficult situation, and the remaining players played hard.
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Why would anybody advocate censorship? If you don’t wanna watch it, don’t watch it. Other people can decide for themselves. Capeesh?
 


bbwannabe said:
Seems like the Gopher team members need some support through this difficult situation as well. Nice video of Illinois, but not sure why we need to see this. They won on the back of Gopher's difficult situation, and the remaining players played hard.
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He shows it cause it fits his narrative of hating Whalen as the coach. He complained about it since day one. He also doesn’t like Reeve despite her winning 4 titles.

But a bad loss like this plays into his hiring Whalen was bad. He would be thrilled if the program blows up in her and her supporters face and then he can say I told you so
 

bbwannabe said:
Seems like the Gopher team members need some support through this difficult situation as well. Nice video of Illinois, but not sure why we need to see this. They won on the back of Gopher's difficult situation, and the remaining players played hard.
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> They won on the back of the Gopher’s difficult situation, and the remaining players played hard.

Both true points. After suffering through the Illinois video, and then re-watching our own highlight reel, I realized a few things, including how much Illinois leveraged our misfortune to their advantage, as I’ll outline here.

Illinois normally starts two 6’2” posts and plays their three posts an average of 72.3 minutes. In this game, their posts played 71 minutes, not much different. In other words, they played a two-post scheme 89% of the time, and small ball 11% of the time. Being short on both their post scoring punch and guard scoring punch, the Gophers had no choice but to play (one-post) small ball the entire game. So it was their two posts on our one post about 9/10ths of the time.

But the Illini further leveraged our misfortune by starting the 6’3” Blazek and giving her 36 minutes instead of her usual 21.3 minutes. Besides the extra one-inch height advantage (and the extra post advantage), Blazek is, well shall we say, built like a tank. And she played the tank role well, scoring 6 of the first 8 Illini points in the low post, with an overall contribution of 9 points (almost double her average 5.5 points), shooting .800, plus 5 rebounds and 3 assists. Hey, it’s the dog-eat-dog Big Ten, and you can’t blame the win-starved Illini for kicking us when we’re down.

The following also helped them out quite a bit (namely by giving Illinois the extra two free points that ultimately put us behind by one and needing a bucket late in the 4th quarter, instead of vice versa). Look at our highlight reel at 7:50 in the first quarter. Tank Blazek first braces herself, then stiff-arms Sconiers right to the floor, leaving herself wide open for the lob pass and easy layup. How the refs missed that foul just boggles my mind. What, were all three refs busy playing video games on their smart phones at the time? Not sure whether Taiye or Kehinde could have remained standing after that tank stiff-arm. The reason Tomancova got more minutes toward the end of the game may be simply because she’s the only one with sufficient strength to hold ground against Blazek.

In any event, this is the third Big-Ten loss in which, besides plenty of other issues, the loss could also be directly attributed to bad officiating.

Besides outrebounding us, the 89% double-post Illini outscored the small-ball Gophers in the paint by a 38-30 margin. And the three Illinois posts outscored the Gopher posts 21-6. To be fair, Masha (who arguably played in lieu of a second post) scored 8 points, so call it 21-14 instead. Then of course, Taiye (had she played) would have scored enough more such that our single-post would have outscored their double-post.

But that just brings us back to what we already knew: We need Taiye, and Pitts and Kehinde.
 
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