Hans8891

It’s a good thing time is running out. Would not want to play another minute. Plus these officials are horrendous. They clearly need the replay option on and and need to rent a clue.

Our inbound is always burst to the ball and if it isn’t open, just pin your guy and hope for the over the shoulder lob.,.

We have to be smarter against the bunnies st the end of the game. Deng got sucked into the land leaving his guy wide open for a 3. Have to know that is what they want down 9 with less than a minute left…

Eli has been a monster today. Attacking the way we know he can. We have shot very well but that comes from movement getting good looks as well. Getting a little nervous about our lack of movement down the stretch. Keep doing what got the lead. Using clock is great but not with 4 minutes left and taking bad shots because you run out of shot clock. And will somebody please tell them that you can score when you beat the press. We have guys up court wide open and we are still dribbling into doubles…. Beat the press, get numbers , and score. Make them pay for the doubles.

Looking back at it, Eli’s pass wasn’t on the 4 point play. Trey just had a step back on that one, but Eli did have a pass out to the left side top for Trey off a base line slash that was a beautiful pass for an open look.

3 assists will tell you everything you need to know about our offense. Jossy works her tail off but she has to create everything in whatever it is that Mal calls an offense. We go from Kacie having to do everything to passing the baton to Jossy. Pemberton, Jossy , and Aumer did a nice job of scoring on the drive but had to do so one on 3 because of our lack of offense. On a positive note, Ibrahim was fantastic. 10 blocks in one game against a team with skilled bigs was incredible. She needs more minutes and will keep getting better.

I actually disagree with that. Some of the best outside looks yesterday came with beating the defender base line, forcing the help side up and getting it across to the weak side. The 4 point play of Trey at the end of the half came from Eli beating his man baseline and swinging it weak side to the top where Trey got a great look. Certainly you need to recognize what is happening and avoid getting trapped but when you force defensive movement, I would much prefer that than continuous dribbling at the perimeter with no creation.

There were a few bad calls each way. The game just didn’t have much flow. There was a bad no call at the end of the game when Trey drove in down3 and got crunched that was tough when every touch had been called before that. But overall it was just a whistle happy game…

Correction. 46 fouls called…

There were some positives yesterday. Reggie played his best game at UND. Cut down on turnovers. Played good perimeter defense- most of the time - and didn’t get sucked down low very often where his size is simply not going to be effective. Mara really is getting better, although he still tends to find himself out of position at times, not really knowing where to go in a team offensive or defensive scheme. No doubt about his athleticism. When we moved the ball, which we did a good chunk of the game, we got decent looks and shot reasonably well - which is why we stayed in this one. When we got back into the Panoam and Eaglestaff dribbling show, that was typically when we went back down by 10. Our team defense is just atrocious game after game. That is what it is and the coaches don’t seem to have any ability or desire to change it. NDSU moves the ball well and they have outside shooters, which is a bad recipe for a team that doesn’t know to rotate defensively and has a very bad habit of leaving people wide open at the 3. I was scared going into this we were going to give up 100 given how many 3s they take and our horrific perimeter defense so was at least a little pleasantly surprised. I am.a little surprised on the comments on here about Eli and defense. He has made some defensive mistakes and is sometimes making bad decisions being overly aggressive, but most of his mistakes come from trying to help out someone else’s defensive mistakes. He ends up coming help side all of the time to help someone who gets it handed to them on penetration. he makes more things happen defensively than anyone else on the floor by a mile. He is hands down our best off ball help side defensive player and his ability to help out on the boards was a game changer yesterday. He had 13 board from a guard position yesterday. If there is criticism to be made of Eli, it is getting him to do more offensively. He makes great drives to the basket but just has not been able to finish for some reason this year.. Amer has had trouble finishing this year as well, compared to last year. I went to the game. It was definitely officiated differently than what we have seen in Grand Forks. The Omaha game in Grand Forks was a football game. This was touch fouls everywhere. 43 fouls called and 68 free throws shot. Deng and Mara both had 4 fouls 2 minutes into the second half. Some of them were just stupid fouls, but a lot of them were just overly quick whistles in my opinion.. Panoam and Mara fouled out. Deng and Eli playing with 4. They called it tight everywhere, but there was not a flow to the game with all of the whistles As noted by others, we hit anything closer to a reasonable free throw percentage and we win this game. Most of the game, our free throw shooting percentage was in the 50’s. There is just no reason why D1 basketball players should have that much difficulty at the line.

Defensively, I am trying to figure out how many coaches we can have on a bench who have no concept of how to correct defensive rotation so that someone is not wide open on the perimeter every time down the court. My y ball teams have better defensive rotation than this team. Do they really think the fact that every team we play shoots 60% and 45% from the 3 every game is a coincidence??? #9 for USD drove right side baseline a dozen times and scored on us almost every time he tried. Does it occur to anyone that maybe we should force him left into our bigs and see what else he can do rather than just give him 25 points doing the same thing every time down the floor???? I know we have poor rim protection inside, but you will always have poor rim protection if you don’t force them into your shot blockers. We just gave a very bad South Dakota team over 100 points on our floor. Everybody gets 90 on us. Just how many coaches does it take to make some kind of defensive adjustment. This isn’t new. It is year after year of no idea how to play team defense. I continue to believe that this team still has some talent and could be better than we are playing, but somebody has to tell these coaches to scrap their existing defensive scheme and try something different. Go to a zone, trap, something. It can’t be any worse than what we are witnessing now. Scoring 90 and still losing by a bunch is just not acceptable…

On an offensive note, for 2/3 of the game, we actually looked like we were starting to get it. We looked great in the first half and for the first third of the second half. What I have said was there all year, the finally picked up on. When everyone overplays the high post pick on Trey, he looked to find them early and it was open and created movement and shots. Our passing was light years ahead of where we have been most of the year. We had 12 assists in the first half. We looked up the court. We made the extra pass. We reversed the ball and got good looks on the weak side. We shot 60 percent up until that point and 50% from the 3 point line with a 7 point lead on 16 assists…. You may be sensing a “but” coming…. Then we stopped doing what was working and went back to being dribble kings with no passing and no movement. In the last 10 minutes, we had 1 assist and probably shot 25%. Meier and Trey would dribble for 15 seconds at a time with double teams. No looks to reverse. No looks up the court. Just one on 2 and 3 ball with bad shot selection. Paul sat on the sidelines and made no adjustments - again…. That was the good news of this game.

We may finally have broken through. We finally beat the press with 2 passes and without trying to dribble through it 3 out of the last 5 possessions and scored each time - with only one stupid turnover dribbling into a trap during that stretch. Right direction if we actually continue it…

We are playing a terrible team and it is 20-17 at the half with neither team breaking 30 percent shooting. We should be up 20 against this team. They went to a zone and we are still busy dribbling for half the possession…

Pemberton has really displayed her athleticism the last couple of games. If we could develop an offense with movement, she is hard to contain one on one. Unfortunately our dribble heavy offense puts her in a lot of double teams that are tough to get open lanes.