First off the live blog was a lot of fun. We’ll try to do this as often as we can for MN related sporting events. Who knows maybe we’ll be able to do the Super Bowl next week.
I can’t say this enough the Gopher’s are not playing a physical game. They need to play tough. There isn’t a killer mentaliy on this Gopher’s team. Tubby has a tenacious spirit and loves defense. The Gophers for the most part play solid defense, but their bigs don’t play big. When the game is over the Gophers took themselves out of this game by not playing tough.
Evan Turner is a beast. All of the rust is gone and now he’s working to solidify his standing as a potential number one pick in this coming years NBA Draft. From just watching OSU closely twice this year, being the two Gopher games, I’d say they’ve got other legit NBA talents on this team. William Bufford & David Lighty are both solid players and I for one would take either of them to start for the Gophers right now. Unless those two guys really come on strong in the second half of this season I don’t see either going to the NBA this season but next year when Turner is gone and they can beef their individual stats up a bit they’ll both have a chance at getting drafted.
Today OSU played four guards for thirty plus minutes apiece against the Gophers with all four of those guys scoring ten or better. How’d the Gophers counter? They didn’t. Tubby doesn’t have the depth at guard right now to play four guards at a time. Al Nolen is no longer there to shut down one guy from the oposition. Devoe Joseph and Justin Cobbs are just starting to find their legs as leaders on this team. Laurence Westbrook is undersized for Evan Turner and really honestly anyone whose 6-4 or taller. Blake Hoffarber isn’t athletic enough to stay with any of the Buckeye’s guards, he tried desperately but it wasn’t going to happen. Going into this game we knew it was going to be touch for the Gophers to handle the Buckeye’s guards. The Buckeye’s were jacked for this game and the Gophers just couldn’t keep up with or contain any of the Buckeye’s guards in this one. The Gophers are undersized in Westbrook, under-athletic in Hoffarber and way too inexperienced in Joseph/Cobbs. Hey in Tubby’s defense Cobbs is still looking better then Darius Smith.
What I expected Tubby to do in this game was give Damien Johnson, Paul Carter and Rodney Williams more opprotunities to give the Buckeye’s guards trouble on defense and to then force them to guard us on offense. Williams had his best game of the season, but most of his stats came during garbage time. Still I’d like to see Williams being used as a match-up nightmare for other teams more then he is now. Williams is undersized but he’s a freak athletically. Williams changes the way defenses set-up their zones, because he forces man defense. You always have to keep an eye on Williams or an easy highlight alley-oop is coming your way. Williams needs to be run off of screens and picks non-stop, he’s got to run his motor like Rip Hamilton. If Evan Turner had to track his man down non-stop on defense he wouldn’t be able to stay nearly as focused on defense.
Really what is killing us right now is our bigs aren’t playing big. I don’t expect Ralph Sampson III to play huge because he’s more of a 4 with 5 size. Sampson and Iverson are just too much of a liability right now to play together. Plus right now its hard to not have Hoffarber and Westbrook on the floor because they are our best scoring threats. Problem with that situation is that Hoffarber is 6-5 and Westbrook is 6-0 and neither of them are point guards. When these two guys are on the floor we have to put Joseph or Cobbs on the court too. Our two current point guards are not well suited or used to playing in a three guard offense. Our team plays better when we play a true three with either Hoffarber or Westbrook on the bench. The only way we are going to force Hoffarber or Westbrook to the bench is to have one of our bigs step up. Damien Johnson is our best player right now. With out him on the court I don’t think we’d be in most games. Johnson makes up for our sophomore bigs weak play and he covers up for our lack of a true 3 on the floor. Plus Paul Carter seems to be learning a ton from Johnson. Neither of these guys are NBA quality talent but they are NCAA caliber “glue” guys and every team needs these types of players to make it through the NCAA season. Johnson is a senior but Carter is a junior and we are going to need him next year. Look at our team with Joseph/Hoffarber at the 1/2. Then we’ll have Carter/Williams splitting time at the 3. With Royce White, Ralph Sampson, Colton Iverson and hopefully Trevor Mbakwe rotating at the 4/5.
With the pace that OSU threw at the Gophers we never set-up our press. We didn’t play big down low. We weren’t big enough to match-up outside. OSU came out fast but it wasn’t until the 8 minute mark when our second until took the court that OSU really started to run away from us. The whole-sale switch out of units usually allows for us to apply intense pressure. Today with-out that pressure our second unit looked very second rate.
The good part of today is that we still won against Northwestern this week. In the coming week we’ve got two winnable games. Let’s hope we practice breaking the 1-3-1 this week. Get Joseph/Cobbs running the half-court sets a little more. Work Williams into the 3. Maybe its time to put Hoffarber or Westbrook in with the second unit. We need a scoring threat with that group. Joseph/Westbrook/Carter/Johnson/Sampson for the first unit Cobbs/Hoffarber/Williams/White/Iverson but that only works if we can finally get White back. Otherwise, I’d run the three guard set in the second unit with Hoffarber/Cobbs/Bostick with Williams/Iverson in the paint. What do you all think?
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