After a big win over a pretty damn good team in Dayton, its only natural to come out a little flat the next game...particularly when the game is against an inferior opponent. Players are human, they know when they watch film if a team stinks. I just wish I'd took this into consideration before predicting a 50+ point win. Who's the idiot here? Me.
I call this game an "uncontrolled blowout". The final score indicates a blowout, but the score was attained late in the game due to Creighton's superior depth. Northern Colorado is better than I gave them credit for being, and I apologize for that. They were good enough to take advantage of Creighton's lack of energy and parlay it into keeping the game very competitive for 25 minutes.
Along the way, Creighton got dominated on the boards, although I wonder how much of that has to do with the style they chose to play. They strayed from the offensive sets that had worked so well against St. Joseph's and Dayton, and had more players around the perimeter -- and tried to force the ball inside to the bigs as much as possible. Developing a better inside-out game is one of the things Dana Altman has mentioned in interviews a lot this year, and I have to believe that they saw this game as an opportunity to work on that. So I won't be concerned about the rebounding statistics. I will write them off as an anomaly, or as Incubus would call it, Anna Molly.
What I will be concerned about is the injury to backup center Kenton Walker. From all available reports, its a wrist and/or hand injury, and depending on the prognosis after further tests, the Jays will be without his services for anywhere from two weeks to two months. Ouch. And with Coach Altman publicly stating that Kenny Lawson's lack of conditioning only allows him to play for four minutes at a time, that leaves the Jays without a suitable backup when he comes out.
Chad Millard, a solid if unspectacular player when he plays in position -- namely, the four -- has played a fair number of minutes at the five this year, giving up a lot in both height and bulk. Its lead to people who sit around me at games to gripe about him, when any criticism is completely unfair. If you want to criticize someone for it, direct it to the bench. He's not a five, period. He plays it because he's asked to, sacrificing better numbers for the better of the team. Now he'll be asked to play the five for perhaps as many as 15 minutes a game.
My bet is we'll see a change in substitution patterns. We'll see Lawson come out whenever the opponent's best big comes out, so that Millard isn't mismatched against someone with a HUGE height advantage.
Lawson is no Tolliver (yet), but Millard is no Manny Gakou either. You bet.
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Lost in the Walker/Lawson/Millard talk is that Kaleb Korver continued to emerge as one of the best players on the team. He's entering Booker Woodfox territory, where every time he shoots, you expect it to go in, even if he's shooting from the Moon. That stretch at the end of the game where he made a three, stole the inbounds pass, and made another three -- an unbelievable eight second stretch of awesomeness -- is one the school should save for his senior night video.
Woodfox had another stellar game, but at this point, that isn't news anymore. Dude is a scoring machine, he's unstoppable, and I'm close to retiring the Polyfro Player of the Game award and just giving it to him on a semi-permanent basis. I need the fake sponsorship funny munny too much, or I would, believe me.
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Today's Polyfro Player of the Game has no sponsor. I had Buddweiser lined up to do it, but then they found out "UNC" meant Northern Colorado and not North Carolina, and they bailed. That's alright, I still love their beer, and I'll still misspell their name intentionally to make it obvious to everyone that this whole sponsorship thing is a sham orchestrated for my own amusement.
Cavel Witter gets the nod for this one. He's struggled so far this year, so to see him come out and hit 3-4 from the arc, drive the lane and draw fouls, dish out assists and not turn it over was encouraging. You bet.
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