Won the Battle, But the War?

Hello Followers:

Well, tonight our young Cougs overwhelmed a decent Idaho team in the middle half of the game and then held on for a 76-64 victory.

A few thoughts before Longball checks in with his (hopefully) first hand takes.

1) A bad win? 

At the start of the game, I was sure that this was going to turn into a rare “bad win.”  The reason?  Defense.

For the first 12 minutes of the game, we played the worst team defense that I’ve seen out of us in the past five or six years.  While I understand why Bone wants to see us extend our defense, the rotations were beyond absymal early on. In addition, the only reason why Casto didn’t foul out in the first 10 minutes was that he was so out of control, he took himself away from Idaho’s penetration.

Thankfully, we stopped overplaying as much helpside and were able to provide better ball pressure after Idaho beat us off the dribble.

But man, when you factor in our lack of size, it sure would be nice to see more pack and less high trap.

2) Thompson needs a twin.

Klay sure is special.  But, we’re still living and dying too much on what he does or doesn’t do.  Simply put, when Klay gets it going, others on the team start to reek with confidence.  We saw it when Abe got hot with Klay at the start of the second half, and we also saw it through Moore in spurts. 

But for us to get better, Capers is going to have to become more aggressive–especially from the baseline.  In addition, we HAVE to get guys like Thames and Harthun more touches early in the game so we have more options to go to throughout the game (and especially with 5-12 minutes left in the second half).

3) Offensive execution.

Love Bones sets–for the most part.  But, we still have too many stretches where we free Klay with cross screens that get him open, but also have him catching the ball either with his back to the basket or faced square to the sideline.  Given Klay’s still slow first step, that set doesn’t leave him with much to work with save that low percentage turn-around.  Conversely, when Klay catches the ball off of a curl (e.g. facing the basket), he and we become instant money.

Also, our offensive spacing plays nicely for Casto to come off of the high screen weak side to crash the boards.  I just hope that come conference time, he doesn’t start picking up some ticky tack fouls on the offensive end when he crashes.

4) Moore’s distribution.

Reggie sure is sweet with his penetration and feel as a scorer.  But as a distributor, he still has too much of a tendency to start the offense on one side of the floor. For him to take his game to the next level, and to better faciliate consistent access into our offense, he needs to start the offense from the center of the floor. And that applies to our transition game as well.

That all said, things look good for us heading into our first and last must win non-conference game against LSU in a couple of weeks.

Lets all hope we can hold onto a big lead in the next couple of contests so guys like Thames, Watson, and Motum can get more time.

We’ll need them to finish third in the conference–which is a very tough, but doable goal for this team.

Amazing, but only three weeks til we begin our conference slate.