Well it's the next day now and I'm still angry and upset that we dropped a home game to an in town rival that was 2-14 coming into this game. I can't believe I'm seeing so many people posting acting like this was an acceptable win, which it was not. Coming into this game we had 3 losses, all to respectable top 100 teams. You simply can't get outplayed and lose this game.
Among the many things that frustrated me about this game is how unprepared we looked. Kampe and the entire team talked all week about not taking the opponent for granted. We were served up their game plan thanks to Jenkins and that free press article: it said they had a new aggressive style of defense which would try to do full court presses on us, and guess what, they did that.
I know our game plan got twisted with the Brock injury, because I'm confident if we had not gotten hurt that we would have won the game based on his excellent brief stat line of 4-4 shooting (all dunks?), 7 rebounds, 3 blocks and 9 points. If he is out for an extended period of time we might really be hurting. He really has been a huge factor on the defensive end for us plus he's our alley oop and excitement guy.
Here is my biggest complaint: Lack of subbing guys and playing with fresh legs down the stretch. I didn't write down the time but I swear we didn't sub out the lineup between the 13 minute and the 4 minute mark. We left the same tired guys in, who yes were our best players but who were not playing at anywhere near 100%. Bringing in some fresh legs could have helped us maintain our small lead before it was gone. Neely is a great defender but he seemed to lose his edge when he was asked to do too much and play too much. He was playing defense, fighting the trap, and trying to generate offense all at once. I don't blame him for one second but he could have used more gas down the stretch when he was overused.
Why did Kampe refuse to let Stevie Clark out of the dog house? This seems to be a complaint only in games we lose, Kampe and his dog house. Yes I was angry when Stevie took two gross three point attempts back to back at the beginning of the shot clock in the first half, and yes I realize he made a mistake on our first possession in the second half, but could you really blame him? He had the fear of the bench in him. He didn't play again after that opening possession and we lost one of our most sure handed ball handlers in a game where we got full court pressed. Just doesn't make sense. Instead Kampe tried to throw Cumberland out there in a really tough situation. I don't know, maybe Clark did something bad on the bench that got him benched but It seemed he should have gotten one more opportunity down the stretch when we had tired guards. Is the dog house even effective? Seems like it's hurt us a lot more than helped us.
Also didn't understand why we went from playing Brad for like 1 minute a game to 9 minutes last night. Yes I know Brock was hurt but it seemed to me that Xavier would have been a better matchup on Hogan due to his size and strength but I guess who knows. Brad didn't play that badly it just seemed like a bad game to say "you're the guy now" and play him as much as we did.
Let's get some discussion outside of just saying how Mercy outplayed us.
