2022 NCAA Tournament Open Thread

I never thought of Nova as a “muck it up” kind of team that wins ugly but man, they have done some serious mucking this tourney.

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If they can force a team as good as Houston to have an off night too, maybe they are just that good right now.

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If you want to blame anyone for the muck of this game it’s Houston. That’s what they do. So far Nova is keeping them off the glass which is impressive since it’s also the only way Houston scores consistently

Both teams play glacially slow though so the combination of the two could lead to very low scoring if neither team shoots well

But that wouldn’t explain why our game against Nova was also hideous.

No it doesn’t. But it doesn’t have to. Nova does play very slow so if shooting is off the scoring can be very low so in that respect they can contribute to these types of games

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This game is mucking gross. Score the mucking ball

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The switching is tough too. It’s not something teams tend to major in so seeing it for the first time in a while can be jarring.

Just about as old, and probably just as disciplined! By the way, Hoosiers is one of my favorite all time movies, right after The Legend of Bagger Vance! :wink:

So Jay Wright has to be considered the best coach in the country by a pretty significant margin, right? Who is even close at this point?

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I remain dismayed that Michigan lost to this Nova team. They’re hardly bad and they’re not, like, on that UCLA level of “hey how’d we end up here?!” but dangnabbit anyway.

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My opinion. Give ‘nova credit for playing us tough, they clearly deserved to win. But there’s just no way all of the credit goes to them for Michigan, one of the best 2pt % teams in the country, having such an off night under the basket. At some point it was simply us missing really good looks.

I’ve never viewed Houston as a juggernaut. Their offense basically is miss shots and get offensive rebounds which just isn’t super reliable, imo. So I don’t think Villanova forcing Houston into a slog is necessarily credit to them. It’s how Houston plays too which is why I would’ve always thought we’d have a legit chance against them.

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I think “best coach” is pretty nebulous once you start trying to pin down what it means, said the English degree haver

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I mean, they’re eviscerating the team that had, up until this point, probably been the most impressive team in the tournament. I’m actually feeling better - like we may have just run into another buzzsaw, like … well, like last time we played Villanova in the tournament.

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Generally speaking when a meh defense gives up 20 points in a half there were a lot of contributing factors

Worth saying tho that I imagine Houston’s schedule means that even w a couple tourney wins the error bars around an estimate of their quality is pretty high?

Held us and OSU to 28 at the half. A lot of that is obviously pace, but this is 3 pretty good offensive teams in a row that have had games like this against them.

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I guess but their KenPom AdjD is more or less reg_season_AdjD x 0.9 + tourney_AdjD x 0.1. It’s more likely to be luck than skill.

Trying to come back against a team that plays so slow and scores relatively efficiently has to be absolutely maddening.

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Samuels pump fake undefeated

Not to mention attacking off the dribble from behind the line even tho the defender is giving a lot of space