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- Aug 27, 2011
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There has been no analysis that basically with about 16 minutes to go we took the air out of the ball to shorten the game allowing some closing of the score by IS when our lead was 17 points. This is Jim Calhoun's old ploy, how many times have we seen it with a big lead? KO said basically that we can last them out. It was very strategic and the game was not as close as it looked though i admire IS greatly.
It's one thing to take the air out of the ball on offense (although 10+ minutes left is way too long to do this). It's quite another to entirely stop playing defense, which is what we did in the last 8 minutes.
Based on the play-by-play, in the last 8 minutes I count 20 possessions, and 14 times they scored a basket. (And of those 6 non-basket possessions, 2 were a wild back-and-forth sequence where they blew two fast breaks and we were lucky enough to end it with a layup of our own, and 1 was Kane missing two free throws.) They scored 31 points in the last 8 minutes. We got 3 legitimate stops. Moreover, their possessions took no time at all. The time between obtaining the ball and scoring, in seconds, was: 16, 10, 6, 21, 17, 15, 10, 11, 11, 5, 7, 5, 3, and 1. They completely negated our effort to burn clock.
Given that we didn't play defense down the stretch, we were fortunate to hang on. If either: 1) that wild sequence with a missed Kane layup, and then 2 back-and-forth turnovers in the span of 10 seconds ends with them scoring instead of us (making it 65-60, rather than 67-58 with 3 minutes to go), or 2) Giff misses that corner 3 that made it 70-63 with 1:45 to go, there's a good chance we don't win. Fortunately, we had enough positive outcomes on offense that they had to go into desperation/fouling mode before they had a chance to go for a tie.