cactus wrote:
Northeastern kind of stunk this year. They lost 16 games
Look deeper - five of their nine CAA regular-season losses were by one possession; two others were by two possessions.
I said for weeks here (while I heard often that NU wasn't that good) leading up to the CAA tourney that if they got the 6 seed, they would be in the CAA finals. Sure enough, they were. They managed to handle a Towson team in the semis that Hofstra had no answer for at home not long before that. Brace, Boursiquot, Walker are all good. And, they of course, had the CAA's leading scorer in Roland. Don't go by 16 losses. They were a lot better than you think.
cactus wrote:
Yet, Hofstra was clearly wearied in the second half, and went over 6 minutes without so much as a decent look. At that point you had to be thinking they were going to lose the game, everyone I was watching with was thinking it. They played great the last 8 minutes after that to close it out, no doubt, and don't want to take anything away from the big shots that Ray and Pemberton hit, and later Buie, because i'll greatly enjoy rewatching that sequence 100's of times in the future...but Northeastern ran out of gas themselves, and moreso. I'm not so sure in the 3rd of 3 games they would have beat a better or deeper team than a shorthanded 16 loss Northeastern squad, simply because that's what history has shown in this tournament since 2013, even when Hofstra has superior talent...and that's where it felt like that second half was going for a while. There's no way in 2016 that they gave two Hofstra all time greats like Buie and JWF enough minutes during the season that they could meaningfully contribute during the final that went into OT where half the team was in foul trouble and Green was shot. Same thing in 2015 when Nesmith barely reached the rim on a key 1-1 late in the game.
So, I'm supposed to believe that Hofstra was wearied (that it wasn't good Northeastern defense and lack of Hofstra's offensive execution) during a second-half scoring drought, yet LATER ON, with a title on the line, they managed to go on a 20-6 run -- playing with a bunch of energy at each end -- to win the game?
That's completely contradictory. Why would they go on a huge, clutch, championship-deciding run AFTER being "wearied" when they should be even MORE tired by that point? Sorry, but that just makes no sense. You don't make the plays they made and the shots Buie made over that stretch later on if you were already too tried to make plays earlier. Not buying that one AT ALL.
cactus wrote:
Even more so now than then, NONE OF THE OTHER GAMES MATTER except the 3 in the conference tournament, because the league is locked in as a 1 bid league. Joe has got to develop his bench during the season with that in mind. Would be a huge mistake to look at this year's win and continue to ignore giving meaningful minutes to the bench - those minutes speed up their development and make them a potential option to contribute in the conference tournament.
Ideally, you'd love to be about 8 players deep, maybe 9. I never bought the notion that you can't win the CAA tourney without a bench and I find it curious that this is brought up again now, of all times, after Hofstra JUST DID THAT. But now, after seeing it twice (Delaware winning the CAA tourney in 2014 using basically only its bench and Hofstra doing the same using its bench even less than that), I'm definitely not buying it. This is a tired, old argument which has now been proven twice in recent years in the CAA tourney, including most recently, by the team that I heard repeatedly "could never win a CAA tourney that way."
I agree, that doesn't mean it's ideal. Yeah, you'd like to have a bench. But the bench doesn't play for a reason... they're mostly not that good.