Thoughts on the Stanford game and this team after a day of cooling off.

[UTE98]

This team is very prone to stretches of absolute terrible defense and offense. Watching Reid go off yesterday was absolutely unbearable. 

 

I love what Rawson brings, but he is a liability on defense against big men. He was great blocking shots against the DII and lower D-1 teams, but he is not big enough to defend the big men in the Pac 12. Johnson is still a freshman and doesn’t have the body. Jokl, where is he??? Heard good things about him, but he’s MIA. For as fast as Collette is making moves to the basket, he is inversely slow on defense.

Bonham was an incredible game finisher last year, but perhaps without Poetl he doesn’t get teh lanes he used to because the defense can play help defense without worrying about Collette, Rawson, Johnson and if I were a coach I’d let Kuzma shoot wide open shots with less than 10 minutes in the game, I haven’t run the stats but his shooting percentage seems to take a huge dive late in games.

 

This team lacks even one player with a killer instinct this year.

[Utes49ers]

The Cal and Stanford losses boil down to poor guard play. Plain and simple, our guard line did not play well enough to win either night.

[Matthew Thomas Castleton]

Well, we lost to Cal and Stanford on the road last year too, and we have EXACTLY THE SAME RECORD THROUGH 11 CONFERENCE GAMES AS LAST YEAR (6-5). Remember, last year’s only went 13-5 in Pac-12 play because they won their last 7 conference games. Is that likely this year? Probably not. But don’t give up hope with the Utes yet. All you naysayers might think the season is over, but I think that you just might be wrong about that.

[Minnesota Ute]

It’s not over, but it’s going to be difficult if not impossible to make the NCAA now. We really needed to not lose to any of the teams at the bottom. Since we did, now it takes a miracle win at Oregon, or a deep run in the PAC tourney. I’m not sure this team is built for that. 🙁

[TheJuggernaut]

We’ll need at least one, maybe two, wins over Az/Oregon/UCLA just to get back on the NCAA bubble. We can’t even beat those teams at home, why would we expect Ws over them in Eugene or Vegas?

Beating the remaining bottom feeders on our schedule, Cal at home, then another bottom feeder in the PAC tournament isn’t going to get us an NCAA at large bid.