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Game Recap
Tortilla Tossin’ Player of the Game: I’ll go with Terrence Shannon, Jr. here, but this was such a weird game. Shannon scored 17 on 6 of 11, had 4 rebounds, 1 assist, and 4 turnovers.
Multi-Purpose Player of the Game: Good to have Kevin McCullar back, but we’ll get to the bad stuff in a minute. McCullar scored 10 points, had 5 boards, an assist, 2 steals and 1 turnover.
Game Notes:
- The elephant in the room is the foul disparity, 29 fouls on Texas Tech to 22 to Providence. The Friars shot 38 free throws compared to 24 for Texas Tech. Yes, the refs should have followed their whistles quite a bit more, but there were certainly times where Texas Tech players committed fouls that were simply unnecessary.
- The final offensive play for Texas Tech is the reason why you play these games with these teams. We discussed before the game that part of the reason why you need to play these games is that you need to find out a bit about your team. Who is the closer for this team? Who is going to handle the ball? Who is going to take the last shot? Who does the drive and dish? We found out that Shannon will take a deep three-point shot and make one and miss badly on another when maybe a drive should have been enough. Wilson’s push-off foul was maybe a ticky-tack foul, but he did push off a bit. I probably wouldn’t have called it, but I’m biased and the refs had swallowed their whistles when it came to some other possible fouls in the last minutes.
- The struggles against the zone defense and figuring out how to attack it as well as breaking the press were all part of the equation. The unforced errors and missed free throws were also incredibly problematic.
- More than anything, I am not going to overreact, but generally speaking, there are things to improve upon. I do not want Shannon to be a three-point shooter necessarily because I don’t think that’s the best part of his game, but would open up if he were a relentless driver, that would be a fantastic weapon. Shannon was 2 of 7 last night from deep and with 4 turnovers and although that may be part of his game that has improved, I think the best part of his game is getting to the rim and not settling. I was pretty disappointed to see his last deep three-point shot.
- The 18 turnovers were obviously way too much and to add only 7 assists means that there was no movement and any shots were happening as a result of one player making a basketball move, but having to manually create their own shots. A lot of that had to do with the Providence defense, but I don’t think there’s a ton of shot-creators on this team.
- I thought that once Mylik Wilson was inserted as the point guard, the team figured out the zone and his passing and organization I think helped quite a bit in the second half. The advanced stats box score indicates that this was true as Texas Tech’s best lineup was McCullar, Wilson, Shannon, Obanor and Santos-Silva. Williams was a huge negative on the floor yesterday, marking a -7.2, the next closest negative player was Warren who was -0.8. Williams did help neutralize the Providence center, but he was 1-9, only grabbed 2 rebounds, fouled out and had 2 turnovers. That’s not a productive day. Maybe MSS should have earned more minutes as he was maybe better than what Williams was doing.
- I think that if Adams had his druthers, he would have had Wilson and McCullar on the floor at the end of the game, but McCullar’s decision to jump out on that player and earn that extra foul wasn’t ideal timing on his part and so he sort of took himself out of the equation. I sort of need McCullar to hedge, but not foul and he has to know that.
- There is no lack of things to work on for the next 6 days because Providence pretty much laid out what Rick Barnes and Tennessee needs to do to beat Texas Tech in New York City. Be more adept at scoring on the zone defense tighten things the defense in the second half. I know that a big stat was that Providence didn’t’ score for an extended period of time in the second half, but they also shot 53% from the floor, 58% from the three-point line and made 80% of their free throws. Obviously, the free throws you can’t control, but you can control sending them to the line 23 times (to an extent, I realize that refs play a big part of the equation).
- I feel like this was a bit rambly and I’m not really pleased with the lack of recognition and how to solve some of these issues on offense and defense. I’m not overly worried about this loss, but I am extremely interested in the response.
- Up Next? Tuesday night December 6th at Madison Square Garden against Tennessee.
Highlights