Some good (and bad) points in this thread. I've got to chime in with a bit now that I've got some time to do so.
The first thing this game told me is that we way underestimated Irving. I don't believe we thought he'd be able to do the things he did and finish consistently. We knew our pressure was a) going to give up back-doors and b) give up drives b/c it always does, but it also forces teams to throw the ball out of bounds at times and generally get very frustrated offensively; see VaTech and Gonzaga. We had a solid plan to limit Singer as much as we could and make someone else beat us, and once Irving and to a lesser extent Smith started getting by us, we had no answer. I don't believe zacker (I believe) was way off base in suggesting a zone, but that hasn't been Frank's MO, so he probably wasn't comfortable doing that. Plus Duke is probably better than anyone else at running offense with the floor spread as much as they did last night, that is something we probably won't see from anyone else really.
Pullen/McGruds is the new Pullen/Denis as far as offense goes. The play of Kelly/Samuels was nice and necessary to play at a really high level, but Frank's teams still will need to have more from the lead guards. Irving's production was nice and he's played well this year, but McGruds is showing the most ability to step in to make up for Denis IMHO. Granted, he's a much, much different player; I'm solely talking scoring punch here, and its clear we need him to be the 12-15 point guy opposite Pullen for this team to be one of the best in the country and contend for the Big 12.
Pullen's frustrations came first from the defensive end IMHO. You could see the body language start after the 4th or 5th time he got run by Irving. I wasn't worried, b/c its not uncommon for Pullen to have slow starts scoring and even defensively, and I really thought after he finally hit a shot he would be good to go, but the frustration lasted the entire game. The other thing that usually gets Pullen going is a run out with a lay up and FT, but he couldn't get that either. Once he started forcing things (and failing) his frustration only grew leading to the silly TOs. McGruds not stepping up when he had some very nice looks while this happened only compounded our problems.
Okay, I've got to go there. FT% matters. Before you get worked up, I'm only talking about making it to Martin team expectations; 65-68%. Do that, and his system is fine, but we can't live with 50% and expect it not to cost us in big games. Overall, our FT rate is still fine, not great, but it will get better. And our defensive FT rate is bad, but we have played good teams with good guards. Irving,
We've got plenty of guys that will get better, namely Sprads and Asprilla. Sprads got introduced to real speed, but I think once he settled in he played okay. Not great, but good enough, it was just his tough start (which was when Duke went on their initial run) really was costly. And I can see that Asprilla does get it and can be an effective offensive player, he's just got to get more comfortable here. With his experience, I think he equates much more adjustment-wise to a JUCO transfer b/c not only did he not play top notch competition in games, he also didn't see much in practice, unlike Kelly for example. And those two need to get much better for this team to be one of the best in the country and win the league, which I think is still the expectations.
Overall it was a frustrating game b/c we simply couldn't make the run to get it to a 2-3 possession game. Ugly TOs and missed shots were consistent and defensive pressure leading to stops wasn't. We were hoping to be good enough to knock off #1, but we weren't. But in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't change anything for this season. We're still more than capable of winning this league and being a Final 4 team. Granted, it will take adjustments and improvements based on the problems we had, but all those seem doable to me. The fact that we've already pretty much destroyed two likely tournament teams should give us some confidence that we're still a pretty darn good team, in spite of at times looking silly against Duke.
