1. Very disappointing loss, can’t spin it any other way, not a season ender by any stretch of the imagination or reason to throw in the towel, but it definitely sucks. South Carolina isn’t a bad team and that won’t be considered a “bad loss” on the NCAAT resume most likely when it’s all said and done, but it sure feels like a bad loss and as tough as it is to win on the road in league play that was one you really needed to win.
2. Dalton Knecht was once again very good, not as efficient as he has been recently but he was still great and hard to think what that looks like without him. Knecht was 11-24 from the field good for 45.8%, he was 3-8 from 3 good for 37.8%. The rest of the team was 10-34 from the field good for 29.4% and 2-13 from 3 good for 15.4%. That is horrible, and pathetic, and as Barnes said postgame it’s not at all fair to Knecht to have to carry a weight like that.
3. That game resembled some recent season games, where we looked like our talents had been sucked out by the Monstars. We couldn’t hit layups, wide open 3’s, free throws, you name it. Time will tell if that was a one off fluke or if that is a bad sign of something that could show itself again down the road. Idk the exact number but it felt like about 8-10 missed open bunnies, you combine that with at least 5-7 missed FT’s (considering front ends) and you’re talking about leaving 20-25 points out there. You hold a team to 63 points on sub 35% shooting and you should win that game every time, and yet it took a miracle run at the end to even make it a game.
4. I don’t want to bash players, especially veterans, so I’ll just say that if you’ve got Zeigler who was named to the Cousy list recently and Aidoo who recently has been getting All-SEC mentions as a big man they need to be much better than they were. Nobody is going to be perfect, but both had really rough games…and then JJJ once again had another rough outing. At times it really looked as if Santi & Dalton were the only 2 who cared about the game, not sure if it was a look ahead to Kentucky or something else but it was a bad look and something the announcers mentioned multiple times.
5. Big picture as I said in the opening this one doesn’t end your season but it hurts, for multiple reasons. For starters the immediate impact is that North Carolina also suffered a bad loss last night and had we won we almost certainly would’ve moved to projected 1 seed line this morning. Instead we now tumble a spot or 2 most likely, staying on the 2 seed line probably but closing the gap we had built over others on that 2 and 3 seed line rather than moving closer towards the top seeds like we would have with a win. We talked heading into SEC play about getting to 23-8(13-5), we sit now at 15-5(5-2) with 12 games remaining, that goal is still attainable but obviously requires a 8-3 finish over the final 11. With road trips to Kentucky, A&M, Bama & SC all on the slate Tennessee obviously now really has to protect the home court and try to steal a game or two on the road. Finding a way to get a win Saturday would go a long ways towards making last nights loss a moot point, it would suck because of where we’d be had we won, but would mean that we are right back on track, but winning at Rupp is never easy.
GBO!!!!
