The CheckerBoard

We had just came off of a 4 over time game a few nights before. I looked like we got a bit tired, plus please remember that Florida is not your average Joe basketball team. They are a 1 or 2 seed in the big dance at the moment. Hard to be great in every part of the game when you are playing an Elite team like Florida. They are good. They are good to force you into a few bad mistakes. That's what makes them good.

No gameplan is perfect and hindsight is 20/20. At the end of the day, CCM got the W by a comfortable margin, over a good top ten team that is slated to be a 1 or 2 seed in the NCAA Tournament. What more can we ask for?!

There's some truth there. The offense got reallllllllly stagnant down the stretch. But fortunately, tight defense and solid rebounding helped them overcome that and still keep the lead. While we weren't scoring, neither was Florida. That worked last night, but if they had a couple shots fall (remember that open 3 that Boynton missed), it's a different story.

I don't know that it is all that much on Cuonzo, though. It sort of seemed like the players just wanted to run the clock out as fast as possible. No one wanted to deliver the "dagger" except McRae, and he went cold for a stretch. These guys still need to work on keeping their foot on the gas and putting teams away. Still an impressive win though. Basically made up for the cold offense with toughness, and I'm ok with that.

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They had to be tired, physically and mentally.

To me it just looked like tired legs. Just about all everything 52 put up was short. I think we will be fine. I haven't looked at the box score but it seemed like all our most important players played most of the game.

To avoid the obvious answer everyone else has said about their legs I think it was a matter of relaxing themselves. We slowed down tempo a lot and chewed a lot of clock leaving us with a short shot clock, but every time Florida cut into the lead we had an answer. I think the team was relaxed and I never saw it slip out of control. So even though we didn't put the dagger in them this time I liked what I saw from a confidence standpoint.

I thought the strategy was sound but the execution was lacking. In addition Florida is one of it not the best defensive teams in the country. To your point it has baffled me all year that we do not run pick and roll all day. Stokes is the perfect pick and roll big.

Yes you did. Lazy is when you quit trying to create. You kill time and you end up taking a trash three. That's lazy offense in my book.

Very, very hard pass to make with a big guy hedging and Florida playing pretty good weakside help defense. The Florida guy would bluff help from the weakside enough to deter them from making a diagonal pass across the lane. The easiest pick and roll passes to make are from the wing, and Florida was 'icing' or pushing the dribbler away from the screen on the wings. It takes a point good with a very good IQ and awareness to make the pass across the lane on a pick and roll with weakside help.