Monday Night Basketball

[Masterofreality]

Slipped into Cincy for the game last night. Some of you who have the opportunity to attend every game may be starting to take Cintas for granted. Please don't. I still get chills every time I walk in the building knowing that this structure is only a few feet from Kuhlman and Husman Halls. Thanks to the "fat cat" premium seat holders and the season tix holders for those big annual payments. $2,200 per year plus the Tix prices is heavy stuff.

Now, the game.

Who I was impressed with- Dante, THolloway, JMac.
Who did what I expected- BJ, CJ, JLove
A little below par- DBrown
Freshmen who played like Freshmen- Big Frease, Red-man, BWalsh.

I thought that Dante played a great game. Took and made confident shots and did a great job of handling the press- especially a series of posessions in mid-second half. The kid is starting to blossom. How athletic is THolloway? Wow. JMac is a DBrown athletic clone and works his a$$ off. At one point there was a lineup out there of Dante, THolloway, JMac, DBrown and the Big Frease and I have maybe never seen a quicker Xavier lineup in total on the floor, ever.

Free throws sucked in the first half, but the second half brought it back to over 71% for the game. Fine 3 point shooting. 20 turnovers, but many are easily correctable, especially the offensive fouls.

I loved the defensive intensity. Xavier will have to win early with the D. Understand this about the offense. The entire playbook has not been learned yet by the newcomers so there is a limited amount of stuff that Sean can run when the new guys are out there. Yeah, most of it is motion, but motion is most effective after guys have played with each other for a while and each guy knows when and where to feed a guy. In the meantime, rebound and score second chance buckets, score off of steals and defense, feed the post and score with good kick outs to the vets like BJ and Dante.

Big Frese had a somewhat unpleasant classroom lesson last night. He got pulled twice after A) Missing an assignment on an in-bounds and B) Being less than aggressive in low post D. (About a minute later JLove did what Freaser should have done). What I liked, however, is that when Sean told him why he pulled him, the Freaser took it well. Nodded his head, knew what he did wrong and accepted the constructive criticsm. We sat right behind the bench and it was cool to see the interaction.

This team excites me. We won't go 30-0 and there will be some disappointing games, especially early, but March will be fun again.