Butler Game Thread

[Eye of the Jay]

Good thing for the Jays is the whole season is still ahead of them. 7 of last 9 games are Quad 1 opportunities. If we can get up to 8-9 Q1 wins by the end of the season we’re a lock for a Top 4 seed.

Flip side of that is 8 out of the remaining 9 games are just gonna be a 40 (or more) minute dog fight. Hope the team’s ready to rise to the challenge.

[Jaybird]

They shotgunned crap in all night and still only won because some goof blasted a 40 footer on his way to the locker room at half.

Fenway Blackjack. Or, Fairway Jizzback. The Screech-like goof in question. I commented shortly after he came in that he just didn't look like he belonged. I may have been mistaken. He was a 21% 3pt shooter coming in. But that 3 from parking lot C was the difference. Or, at least it's the one I keep thinking about.

[vivid_dude]

They shotgunned crap in all night and still only won because some goof blasted a 40 footer on his way to the locker room at half.

Fenway Blackjack. Or, Fairway Jizzback. The Screech-like goof in question. I commented shortly after he came in that he just didn't look like he belonged. I may have been mistaken. He was a 21% 3pt shooter coming in. But that 3 from parking lot C was the difference. Or, at least it's the one I keep thinking about.

I’ll have nightmares about those three seconds. Ashworth was brilliant for not touching the ball so that the shot clock and game clock aligned. Then he hoisted his three too early and gave Fireplace Shuttlecock just enough time to cut the lead to 4 and keep Butler’s insane offensive momentum going. I bet he hacky sacks a lot. Great shot though.

[Dough Boy]

People tuned into recruiting may remember that we were pursuing Bizjack at one point

I think this is the first 2023 to announce a visit to the Hilltop.

[wildjays]

The Bluejay Beat podcast is posted up for our Patreon subscribers. Matt and Jacob break it all down.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/bluejay-b ... =join_link

[DC_JAY]

This wasn't a "bad loss" in a technical sense, but it was a very disappointing loss. It's hard to win on the road in college basketball, and Creighton has somehow allowed two middling Big East teams to win in Omaha--both down top players and both forced to play night games in front of sold-out crowds. To me this wasn't as disappointing as the Nova loss, as Butler shot lights out. Creighton is going to win 98 out of 100 games in Omaha when they score 98 points.

Though the Jays went to half with a four-point lead, I felt queasy. They played an excellent first half, scoring 50 points. Normally they would be up 10-15 points after that kind of an effort. But when Butler swished that second three in the final 30 seconds of the half as time expired, it looked like Fortune had decided to smile upon them.

Winning the league regular season was always going to be a tall task, but this loss makes it exceptionally difficult given the way that UConn is playing. Gotta protect your home court.

[Chicagojayfan]

No real diagnosis for last night other than that while we didn't play great D, especially early on in the game, Butler was on fire and went crazy. It's not unprecedented for that Butler team -- they had an even better offensive game against Texas Tech earlier in the year (132.1 vs. 130.3 last night).

Nor is it unprecedented for us to have this kind of game defensively (UNLV was 127.4 vs. 130.3 for Butler or in 2022-23 Nova at 125.4 or in 21-22, Nova at 125.0 and Colorado State at 130.1). The defense in the UNLV game was somewhat hidden by the very slow pace, whereas this was the 2nd fastest game of the year for us, only behind Iowa

Despite everyone thinking we like to play fast, I think it's more precisely that we like to get opportunities to push the pace when we get stops, but otherwise prefer to play at a more moderate pace, which likely helps our defense. Extremely fast or extremely slow games seem to cause more problems for us

I guess it definitely hurts our chances to win the BE, but I'm really not as focused on that - UConn obviously accomplished all of their goals last year despite finishing 4th. I'm more worried about this team developing the way I think it can as the season goes on. Go into Providence and win on the road, then look to get back the home losses when we travel to Butler and Nova.. then we'll see

On the plus side, is this a formula that other teams can exploit regarding our defense? I don't think so, and I don't even think it's an exact formula that Butler can hope to tap into when we play them on the road.

I said last night that it reminded me of the way some of these smaller conference teams can light up a top seed during March Madness. Until another team shows that last night exploited some sort of fundamental defensive flaw (and nothing I can see indicates that), I'm going to chalk it up as one of those nights.

Sucks that it happened, but these things happen and that's why they play the games

[drbluejay]

2 Thunderous dunks by Baylor give him my standout player of the game.
I can't believe we had 4 guys with over 20 points and close to having 3 guys with double doubles.

[SeattleJay]

The good news: Ashworth has really come on.

Going into this game, I was concerned about defensive matchups. With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, I can't help but wonder if Green could have helped. We needed a long athletic defender.

Oh, and brilliant move by Motta to bring in a 3rd string center to shoot a few 3's.

[Chicagojayfan]

The good news: Ashworth has really come on.

Going into this game, I was concerned about defensive matchups. With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, I can't help but wonder if Green could have helped. We needed a long athletic defender.

Oh, and brilliant move by Motta to bring in a 3rd string center to shoot a few 3's.

You and others are correct on Ashworth - him playing with the kind of confidence he's been showing will be huge for us down the stretch. He was even 4/4 at the rim last night! Wonder if he's starting to see what he can do with Kalkbrenner demanding so much attention in the paint?

Agree on Green. I thought we could at least have given Telford a different look with a big guy with long arms.

And honestly, while I get that Traudt is likely a bad matchup as well (and even given that matchup issue, how the heck do you give your 2nd best bench guy 0 minutes?), playing Traudt or Green at the 5 instead of King on games when King doesn't have it, HAS to be an option for this team. That could also give us a chance to vary the defense a bit to be more aggressive when Kalk gets a break -- go out and hedge on the screens aggressively with the smaller guys out there