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Message: [QUOTE="JoePgh, post: 4538292, member: 1131"] I was at the game, and in addition to what has been said thus far, I can offer the following first-person observations: [LIST] [*]During the pregame warmups, I noticed that Caroline seemed to be overly concerned about being hit by a ball shot by a teammate. During warmups, there are about five or six balls being used, and some of them are bound to hit a player under the basket -- it's routine. But Caroline seemed to think it would be the worst thing in the world if one of the balls hit her head -- an understandable reaction, but I thought it would lead to tentativeness in the game. Fortunately, that proved not to be the case. [*]During the game, Aaliyah missed numerous shot attempts when she was a couple of feet from the basket. Yes, she was being harassed by the defense, but she is used to that. Her shooting line for the game was 4-for-13. A normal percentage for her would be 7 or 8 for 13. So I am forced to agree that (at least in this respect) she is in a funk. Hopefully she bounces back from it as quickly as Lou did. [*]I don't normally agree with the Boneyard caucus that always wants Geno to play the bench more. However, because of Aaliyah's shooting funk in this game and Ayanna's excellent play in the last game against Georgetown, I thought it would have been wise for him to have given Ayanna a few first-half minutes to see if she could be more effective than Aaliyah was in the paint. [*]For a similar reason, I thought that at some point Geno would send Ines in for Nika when Nika kept getting dumb fouls. Ines also performed well against Georgetown and might have provided useful relief minutes, especially since Nika wasn't getting a lot of assists. But Nika was scoring well and playing good defense, and Geno's usual practice is to leave core players in the game even when they accumulate 4 fouls if the game is close. They usually don't foul out, and Nika didn't. [*]I see that some people here have complained about poor defense by UConn in this game, but I don't agree with that -- except for their swoon at the beginning of the 3rd quarter. For the rest of the game, they were defending quite well on the perimeter, and Creighton showed very little inside offense. UConn's defense forced Creighton to take very long 3-point shots, usually at the end of the shot clock, and a surprising number of those prayer shots went in. But most of those makes were at the beginning of each half when the shooters were rested -- they started missing quite consistently later in each half. Overall, Creighton shot 36% from the arc, right in line with their season average. But they took 33 3-point shot attempts (out of a total of 58 shots), which is an ungodly share of 3's in their total offense, and made 12. If they had shot similarly from 3-point range to what they did in Omaha, the final score would have been similar. [*]UConn's defense also caused three or four shot clock violations (turnovers) by Creighton, and I don't believe UConn's offense ever used up the shot clock. That is usually an indication of successful defensive pressure. [*]Regarding the foul on Caroline with 4.8 seconds left, I had a good line of vision and I thought it was a good call -- the defender's hand came down on Caroline's hand as she was throwing up a very low-percentage shot. With 20-20 hindsight, the defender should have allowed Caroline to shoot and miss, and then the game would probably have gone to overtime. [*]Some of the comparisons in the box score are revealing: UConn outscored Creighton 22-14 in the paint (despite all those misses by Aaliyah and Dorka); UConn had 6 fast-break points to [B]zero[/B] by Creighton; UConn won points off turnovers by 14-8; second-chance points were tied 9-9 despite Creighton having 3 more offensive rebounds than UConn. However, UConn did have only 10 bench points from their one bench player, compared to 17 for Creighton. [/LIST] [/QUOTE]

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