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Game Recap
Tortilla Tossin’ Player of the Game: Not difficult to pick Terrence Shannon, Jr. in this game as someone had to score adn it was Shannon, who scored 18 points, going 6 of 14 from the floor while grabbing 12 rebounds, 2 assists, 3 turnovers, and a steal.
Defender of the Game: I usually don’t give this out, but how do you not award this to Daniel Batcho. If there was an available rebound, Batcho was grabbing it. Batcho scored 4 points, grabbed 11 rebounds, just 1 turnover and 2 blocks and generally just affected the game.
Multi-Purpose Player of the Game: Kevin McCullar had 8points on 2 of 8 from the floor, had 10 rebounds, 5 assists, 2 turnovers, and a steal. I thought his court vision during that run in the first half was terrific.
Game Notes:
- Well, that was a slug-fest and teams have to win slug-fests all of the time so I’d win them against ranked teams at Madison Square Garden. Texas Tech made 31% of their shots, 16% of their three-point shots, while Tennessee made just 26% of their shots and 15% of their three-point shots. The funny thing is that there were plenty of open shots and they just didn’t fall. I thought that this was the opposite of the Providence game where the refs just swallowed their whistles for the most part and let the teams play. I’m also okay with that too.
- The number going around is the fac that there were 100 rebounds in this game, 54 for Texas Tech and 47 for Tennessee. That’s fine and all, but a couple of other things that were more interesting, which is that Texas Tech had 15 turnovers, which seems like a ton, but when you consider there were 61 shots, that’s maybe not all that much. Tennessee had 71 shots. Both teams scored nearly half of their points in the paint, 28 for Texas Tech and 26 for Tennessee.
- Adams very much tightened his rotation and that was generally fine, but he didn’t trust his bench other than Batch at all this game. And Batcho was a bit of a game-changer and revelation for this game. Batcho really did change the flow and without his interior defense and rebounding, I don’t know that Texas Tech wins this game. As to the other bench players, Arms was the only other bench player that had double-figure minutes.
- From an advanced stats perspective, the Net +/- best player was Shannon at +4.1, but the other four positive players was McCullar, Warren, Batch, and Arms. Both Obanor and Williams were negative in their impact. Their stats weren’t that bad in the grand scheme of things. Obanor was 4 of 16, so he took the most shots of the team, and grabbed 7 rebounds and had 3 turnovers, while Williams scored just 7, grabbed just 3 rebounds and was 3 of 9 from the floor.
- Head coach Mark Adams: “I thought we did a good job of keeping them where we wanted to and contesting their shots and rotating,” said Texas Tech head coach Mark Adams who earned his first win over a ranked opponent as the program’s leader. “I thought we did a great job with our pressure and guarding them. We wanted to put pressure on them and I thought we did that.”
- This was a +.6 win above replacement, which is really good and important for tournament consideration. The Providence loss was -.1.
Highlights
💦 Splash city 😉 pic.twitter.com/K1o3D21bkM
— Texas Tech Basketball (@TexasTechMBB) December 8, 2021