Villanova Game Thread II

[taa71458]

Incredibly satisfying seeing Dixon dribble it off his foot.

[Django]

If Doc doesn't give his prestigious "player of the game" to the backboard, I'm calling BS.

[gtmoBlue]

Love the pretty games, but the proof of the pudding is winning ugly. Way to win Jays! I believe this is our 1st win at Finneran? Let me check…. Yep. Before today we were 0-Fer (0-7) at the Pavilion and 3-1 @ Wells Fargo Ctr. Great win!

RDJ…

[Syajeulb]

Love the pretty games, but the proof of the pudding is winning ugly. Way to win Jays! I believe this is our 1st win at Finneran? Let me check…. Yep. Before today we were 0-Fer (0-7) at the Pavilion and 3-1 @ Wells Fargo Ctr. Great win!

RDJ…

Maybe double check.

[Jays26]

Love the pretty games, but the proof of the pudding is winning ugly. Way to win Jays! I believe this is our 1st win at Finneran? Let me check…. Yep. Before today we were 0-Fer (0-7) at the Pavilion and 3-1 @ Wells Fargo Ctr. Great win!

RDJ…

Jesus

[cu8493]

Good thing you didn’t have tickets to the game Gitmo. You’d have been sitting by yourself watching some intramural games. I think your history re not winning at The Pavillion may be correct, but we are still 0-for there. Game was at Wells Fargo Arena today.

Agree 100% that this was a great, grity, ugly win on the road.

[Chicagojayfan]

Not a pretty game at all, but it's great to win the tough Big East road slugfests no matter how we get it done

some key metrics:

Turnovers: we have a great chance of losing when we have a Turnover% over 20% and yesterday was 22.8 (2nd worst of the season). We lost to GT and Nebraska like that, but we beat St. Johns in a game like that because our D was good enough to still slog it out and win

Rebounds: 4th best rebounding games of the year - total rebound percentage of 60.8%. We are 14-1 when we are over 50% / 2-5 when under 50%. Especially given how we don't get turnovers on the defensive end, this is a key for us to get enough possessions to keep shooting and to win

3 PT FG%: We've been under 40% only 5 times this year (8x last year). We are 1-4 this year, and were 2-6 last year). We helped make up for it by shooting great within the paint and by playing great D though

Defense: I may argue this is our best defensive game of the year. Nova is a top 20 offense this year and has scored a ton of points on everyone. Add in that they are a tough and ugly matchup for us as Dixon typically can pull Kalk out of the paint. Putting Green on Dixon was a genius move by Mac (and one that makes a ton of sense. He's big enough to not get demolished in the paint, can move and cover him out to the 3 PT line, and allows us to play Kalk more in the paint w/ our traditional offense... Now if they had a Traudt at the 4, we may not be able to do that, but it definitely worked yesterday)

Individuals:
-Kalk continues to make a great case for BE POY and for All-American status, IMO.
-The 2 fouls (1 phantom) that were called on Ashworth show just how important he is to this team. Davis looked good for the future, but we need Ashworth on the floor as he's our only legit ballhandler right now.
-Tough day shooting for Neal, but he continues to show overall improvement in his game. I thought his D was outstanding yesterday and he was tough on the board with some hard blockouts to snag rebounds
- Green was critical yesterday as he's seemingly the only guy we have who can defend Dixon (the only guy in the BE?)
- McAndrew hit a couple of huge shots when we needed some offense/any offense
- Fedor is still a work in progress. Not ready just yet to be a big plus in a game like this
- Miller came up with a huge play in his first play of the game

Good win and puts us where we want to be for the stretch run. Seems just surreal that we are in position to potentially win the conference... amazing amount of credit to the players and coaches for what they've done since Pop went out. Fingers crossed we're healthy and ready for these upcoming games.

[drbluejay]

My standout player of the game goes to Kalk once again. Kalk is truly an amazing player to watch.
I saw 2 standout plays of the game in the final 8.8 seconds, as in Green's timeout play and the backboard tip play.
Green is my unsung hero for his defense on Mr. flop while the backboard gets the game ball.

[gtmoBlue]

Hmmm. ESPN/data skrive listed the game at Finneran. My mistake. So we’re still 0fer there. Thanks.

[Minnesota Jay]

Rebounds: 4th best rebounding games of the year - total rebound percentage of 60.8%. We are 14-1 when we are over 50% / 2-5 when under 50%. Especially given how we don't get turnovers on the defensive end, this is a key for us to get enough possessions to keep shooting and to win

Won't argue the importance of rebounding, but looking at total rebounds like this instead of respective offensive and defensive rebounding rates is mostly a backwards-looking statistic. The majority of missed shots are rebounded by the defense - ie. you're more likely to cede more total rebounds because you're losing (missing shots) than you are to lose because you cede more total rebounds. We're 14-1 when we have more total rebounds because we don't shoot 20% from 3 in those games.

To that end - We are 10-2 when we have the superior rebounding rate, vs. 6-4 when we do not.