The Bobcat Nation

Boy Altitude sure knows how to pick 'em. This matchup should have sports bars rivited all across the country!

ISU has a stand in head coach, but they won their last game at defending champ Northern Colorado. The Bobcats snapped a losing streak against Portland State in their last outing. With the Bobcats you can pretty much tell how it's going to go in the first two or three minutes. If they make their first few shots then stay tuned...if they come out missing-change the channel.

Go Cats!

Got off to a great start and then started dribbling off our foot and throwing the ball to no one in particular. Got an 8 point lead at halftime-but doesn't feel too secure. Every ticky-tack call has gone against us. Tre Johnson has been a turnover machine. Sean Reed has been smoking hot all half.

Cats win 73-69. Tried to blow a 15 point second half lead with about 5 minutes left. ISU had chances to get within 1 or 2, but couldn't take advantage of some bad MSU turnovers. We also got killed on the boards-gave up way too many offensive rebounds.

Sean Reed got a career high 23 points. Team shot 53%.

ISU bailed us out with some missed free throws.

Good to get a road win-but have to clean a lot of stuff up if they want to keep winning.

Weird game. At times we looked amazing, other times we looked like it was our first time on a bball court

I noticed only 8 players saw time.......according to ESPN's box score. Do we have some injuries?

I haven't seen MSU play all year except for the last seven minutes last night. They looked very athletic to me, however, like most teams that have a large influx of new players they haven't fully developed a lot of team chemistry. One of things that mars team like that is losing leads and struggling down the stretch. Most of that is due to a lack of poise (trust), which usually goes back to having not played together for very long and not being in those situations very often.

While there were some big mistakes in that final seven minutes there were also some very big plays. Singleton's runner in the lane and the clutch free throw shooting to name a couple. The blown bunny could be chalked up as more of a fluke than anything, but some of the turnovers were hard to swallow. Still, especially on the blown bunny, there was some good patience and execution on the offensive end, which is something a young team has to keep turning to and believing in late in games.

ISU isn't a great team by any stretch, but a good team for MSU to have a game like that against. Had it been a blow out, then no lessons learned in that final runout of the game.

overall i was happy with the guys performance last night, like wbtfg said, at times we looked really good...and then a few possessions later we looked clueless. but as a whole i was happy. the guys played pretty well together and often made the extra pass to get a better shot. more importantly we were MAKING those open shots. reid played a great game. i also though singleton played great. didn't force too much and was kind of the leader on the floor which he needs to be.

i also should say that i was loving the zone look huse had going. i thought the 1-3-1 was especially effective. the only thing that was worrisome to me when they were in this set was at times they would have miscommunication when rotating, and a few times singleton was the "1" underneath the basket! looked pretty funny down there surrounded by huge guys. gotta say though, an isu big never scored when he was down there....so maybe it was by design? i guess i just assume not as it seems weird but overall i thought the 1-3-1 was very effective.

good win in a chippy game. hope these guys build on this.

ilovethecats wrote:overall i was happy with the guys performance last night, like wbtfg said, at times we looked really good...and then a few possessions later we looked clueless. but as a whole i was happy. the guys played pretty well together and often made the extra pass to get a better shot. more importantly we were MAKING those open shots. reid played a great game. i also though singleton played great. didn't force too much and was kind of the leader on the floor which he needs to be.

i also should say that i was loving the zone look huse had going. i thought the 1-3-1 was especially effective. the only thing that was worrisome to me when they were in this set was at times they would have miscommunication when rotating, and a few times singleton was the "1" underneath the basket! looked pretty funny down there surrounded by huge guys. gotta say though, an isu big never scored when he was down there....so maybe it was by design? i guess i just assume not as it seems weird but overall i thought the 1-3-1 was very effective.

good win in a chippy game. hope these guys build on this.

In a 1-3-1 there are times where a point ends up underneath. Especially if you are trapping outside. The hope is that you get enough pressure outside that the passer can't see/make passes to guys down there with any confidence.

LTown Cat wrote: In a 1-3-1 there are times where a point ends up underneath. Especially if you are trapping outside. The hope is that you get enough pressure outside that the passer can't see/make passes to guys down there with any confidence.

ya this is true but in every playing and coaching situation i have been in....this isn't ideal. more times than not it's because of miscommunication defending the wing as it looked like to me last night. i bet rod found himself down there 5 plus times last night which i'd be really surprised if huse is aimimg for. i could be wrong though.

ilovethecats wrote:

LTown Cat wrote: In a 1-3-1 there are times where a point ends up underneath. Especially if you are trapping outside. The hope is that you get enough pressure outside that the passer can't see/make passes to guys down there with any confidence.

ya this is true but in every playing and coaching situation i have been in....this isn't ideal. more times than not it's because of miscommunication defending the wing as it looked like to me last night. i bet rod found himself down there 5 plus times last night which i'd be really surprised if huse is aimimg for. i could be wrong though.

Ya--I didn't watch so I have no idea if it was a trapping, high-pressure zone or a conservative one. I teach our kids to always communicate and for our point to not get stuck down there. But we don't trap out of our 1-3-1 either.

ilovethecats wrote:

LTown Cat wrote: In a 1-3-1 there are times where a point ends up underneath. Especially if you are trapping outside. The hope is that you get enough pressure outside that the passer can't see/make passes to guys down there with any confidence.

ya this is true but in every playing and coaching situation i have been in....this isn't ideal. more times than not it's because of miscommunication defending the wing as it looked like to me last night. i bet rod found himself down there 5 plus times last night which i'd be really surprised if huse is aimimg for. i could be wrong though.

It looked to me like Huse was attempting to get as much length and athleticism on the perimeter as possible to get into passing lanes, and had Singleton down low essentially running the baseline trying to get to the shooters in the corners. Unfortunately he got stuck underneath a few times and we gave up some offenseive boards.

Overall I thought it was effective, but I also think that ISU is a pretty bad team. I'm not sure we'd be able to run the same 1-3-1 vs a team like Weber.

This was my first time watching this year's team, but one thing I came away with is that this team really has a lot of potential, but they are also very raw have have a ton of weaknesses. One thing I really noticed last night down the stretch is that we are a total jump shooting team with very few guys who can create their own shots.

that's what i was thinking toowbtfg. as i said...it was effective but i just doubt it was what we were aiming for. i have seen other effective 1-3-1's in which you had one big down low, and two big on the wing, and then your guards were at the top of the key and just below the free throw line. still gives you length on the outside, but not a guy 5'9" under the basket!

like you said, it worked against isu but against better teams i don't have faith. i love the 1-3-1 look and i liked when they ran a match-up zone at times too. huse was really mixing it up and that was nice to see.

I wish our team would get some uniforms that FIT It bugs the heck out of me when our players are always having to tuck their jerseys in every other play. They should be focusing on their (man/next set play) instead of tucking in the jersey every dead ball.

While watching last night's game, I was once again reminded of how over the years Brad Huse teams don't always play smart, play well, or play together....but they alway play hard and bring great effort.

ilovethecats wrote:that's what i was thinking toowbtfg. as i said...it was effective but i just doubt it was what we were aiming for. i have seen other effective 1-3-1's in which you had one big down low, and two big on the wing, and then your guards were at the top of the key and just below the free throw line. still gives you length on the outside, but not a guy 5'9" under the basket!

Your 1-3-1 with Tre Johnson out front was very effective last night -- it was very difficult for our guards to get the ball over/past Johnson in order to swing it from side to side. On the issue of having the PG on the baseline, I'm a Northwestern alum and Bill Carmody runs the 1-3-1 a lot. And he uses the PG on the base line as a standard feature of his version. You think it looked funny with Singleton on the baseline, you should have seen "Juice" Thompson, NU's 5-9 PG, matching up with the likes of Jared Sullinger of Ohio State! But it was largely effective because of the distruptions out front. NU took Ohio State to OT in the Big Ten tournament with it (alternating with a man-to-man, of course).

Bengal visitor wrote:

ilovethecats wrote:that's what i was thinking toowbtfg. as i said...it was effective but i just doubt it was what we were aiming for. i have seen other effective 1-3-1's in which you had one big down low, and two big on the wing, and then your guards were at the top of the key and just below the free throw line. still gives you length on the outside, but not a guy 5'9" under the basket!

Your 1-3-1 with Tre Johnson out front was very effective last night -- it was very difficult for our guards to get the ball over/past Johnson in order to swing it from side to side. On the issue of having the PG on the baseline, I'm a Northwestern alum and Bill Carmody runs the 1-3-1 a lot. And he uses the PG on the base line as a standard feature of his version. You think it looked funny with Singleton on the baseline, you should have seen "Juice" Thompson, NU's 5-9 PG, matching up with the likes of Jared Sullinger of Ohio State! But it was largely effective because of the distruptions out front. NU took Ohio State to OT in the Big Ten tournament with it (alternating with a man-to-man, of course).

thanks. i have seen it run that way from time to time but never knew coaches had a set like this intentionally using their guard in this way. very interesting, and as i said...effective last night. as a whole i liked how huse was mixing up his defenses. i just hope the team continues to improve.

Huse has been running a lot of zone. Was this something he picked up at Montana-they've been renowed for the zone defense since the Heathcoat days.

Having Johnson on the top of that 1-3-1 was very effective. He's got long arms and is very athletic. The trade off was we could not rebound to save our lives-rebounding is a weakness of a zone defense. ISU had 16 offensive rebounds. Fall was getting jumped over. The refs called all the ticky tacky stuff outside, but over the back was fine for some reason.

Tre Johnson is an enigma on this team. He's super athletic and can be a matchup nightmare. But he turns it over way, way too much. He threw it away at least 3 times while trying to help bring it up on the press, he had an uncontested rebound bounce off his hands, and he tried to dribble it out from under the hoop after a defensive rebound and had it knocked away. I know it's common to have the 4 man take the ball out of bounds after made baskets and be a safety valve on a full court press, but Johnson is just a train wreck waiting to happen when he does that. I have a feeling other teams are going to press the heck out of us until Huse gets it fixed. Johson plays hard-maybe too hard. I think he needs to slow it down just a bit. He has huge potential if he can clean up the mistakes.

Shooting as well as we did it should have been a blowout. If we had shot the same percentage as ISU we would have lost big because of the offensive rebounds and turnovers.

Next week will be interesting. I don't expect much at Weber, but that NAU game might be winnable. NAU is struggling, but our record down there is abysmal.