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Message: [QUOTE="JoePgh, post: 2640702, member: 1131"] I noticed something else about her strategy which I think is to her credit: For nearly the first three quarters of the game, her team was deliberately burning off the first 15-20 seconds of the shot clock to slow the game down and not risk turnovers with aggressive passing. Only at that point would they start to run their offense. I think the low shooting percentage arose from the fact that they were rushing when they finally tried to get a shot up with only 10 seconds remaining on the clock. Some of their 3-point attempts were just heaves as the shot clock was expiring. HOWEVER, with about 3 minutes left in the third quarter and her team down by about 19 or 20 points, she realized that continuing with the same strategy might keep the losing margin respectable, but it had no chance of winning. UConn was up by too much at that point, and there were only 13 minutes remaining to make it up. So she called a timeout, and during the timeout, she obviously told them to stop freezing the ball and run their normal offense from the beginning of the possession. [B]That is very important because it shows that she was still actually trying to win the game, not lose by a respectable margin.[/B] As a result she lost by 25 points (and was down by 31 when Geno started to pull his starters). She might have lost by 15 if she had stayed with the original approach, but the altered approach gave her team its only chance to win at that stage of the game. In the past, I have seen teams like Rutgers, Villanova, and Central Florida stick with the "slow-ball" strategy even when they were down by a significant margin, thereby giving themselves no chance to win. Quinnipiac didn't do that. I'm sure that if she had only been down by (say) 5 points at that point in the game, she would have continued with the original strategy on the theory that anything could happen in the last few minutes of the game. I think the reason why the Bobcats had so few turnovers (fewer than their season average) is that they spent all that time in the first three quarters just dribbling the ball and making no attempt to score. They didn't play that way against Miami, and I'm sure they had more turnovers as a result. It had nothing to do with the quality of UConn's defense, which (to my untrained eyes) was excellent for the entire game. [/QUOTE]

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