I was at the game. The crowd wasn't great at the beginning of the game, but the team did everything possible to kill any sustained crowd momentum. There were times when the crowd stood up started cheering trying to spur on the team, but they just weren't making any plays.
The crowd wasn't great, but this loss rest squarely on the shoulders of the players and the coaching staff. UConn's half court is by far the slowest and worst I've seen in years. Their plays simply do not create any scoring advantages, and most of the points they end up scoring are off of high risk dribble penetration. I watched the Kansas Oklahoma game the other day and from the tip off till the end of triple overtime, those two teams were executing their half court offenses two to three times faster than UConn did.
I've been a Ollie supporter from the very beginning, but I must admit I'm starting to wonder about his courtside coaching. He just sits there and watches while his team sleep walks through their offensive sets. I'm no coach getting paid millions of dollars, but I'd be giving my team an earful and telling them to run the offense at a much faster pace, or I put the next guy out there who was willing to do it. I don't know if it's lack of leadership, or someone needs to bark at their teammates to get to the right spots, or the players just simply need to be moving to the right spots at the right time. One observation that I had was after they execute their first play, for example of a pick and roll, they simply pull it back out and restart all over again. It's as if they have no secondary or third sequence to their offense. Watching Kansas and Oklahoma, when their first sequence didn't do anything, they're right into the next rotation and into the next and so forth. There wasn't this constant try something, stop, pull it out, try something again, stop, pull it out. You get the idea.
While sitting at the game, I begin to remember Calhoun standing, stomping on the sidelines, rushing over to players and getting in their faces. If a player wasn't doing what he was supposed to do, he'd pull them off the floor and sit down, where one of the other coaches would talk to them, and then send them out there again. I just am not seeing that kind of teaching technique going on by Kevin Ollie in the staff. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think this team needs good case of tough love. If they continue to play this way, they'll play themselves right out of the NCAA tournament and into the NIT.
I know many will point to some of the bad shooting by DHam as to why they lost, but there's a lot more to what's going on with this team.
Still a lot of ball to be played, just two games into the AAC season, and plenty of time to right the ship. KO needs to get them moving in the right direction, and soon. They can't afford to lose many more AAC home games. The away games are going to be hard enough.
