Big East Tournament

[Realhoops]

Would have kind of been a bit of lifetime karma if ruling that he didn’t get that shot off ended up knocking Marquette out. But unbelievable play drawn up by Shaka there.

Marquette has been incredible without Kolek. The fact that they could make it to Friday (and I’d expect them to beat PC and get to Saturday) without their POY point guard and we could not even manage to show up for the quarterfinal game with everyone healthy is just so frustrating.

[Altmanforprez]

Getting to the second game each weekend is the key for us.

We are a tough scout and very different/difficult for teams that don't see a D like us with a player like kalk. Really tough on a one day prep.

Pretty disappointed with tonight as you just can play half of each half and expect to win. Especially against a team playing for it's life as tough as PC. Seniors have to be better in those situations.

Hate losing to a garbage fan base like PC

Completely agree on the 2nd game in the weekend. That's where being a 2 or 3 seed is so big for this team, and I think they are pretty safely in 3 territory. Duke and KU already are out behind them. Kentucky and Bama would have to play in their 2nd game if they both win today so only one of them could pass us given their 1st round matchups and likely only Baylor can get a seed boost with their tournament performance. Illinois would have a chance, but the committee has historically ignored the B1G's Sunday championship results when it comes to seeding because it creates so many downstream changes.

The game itself was a bit of a bummer, but I thought Providence played extremely tough. I can't do much, but tip my hat to them and get ready for next week. Normally if we shoot 6/26 we lose by 10+, but the team battled back a couple of times and if we make those free throws in clutch time the game could have easily flipped. Get some rest, get as healthy as we can, and let's have a fun few weeks.

[drbluejay]

I would've given the standout player award to Kalk but I threw it in the lake after we missed 3 FT's in a row including the front end of a one and one after going 20 for 20

[bluejayfan00]

Getting to the second game each weekend is the key for us.

We are a tough scout and very different/difficult for teams that don't see a D like us with a player like kalk. Really tough on a one day prep.

Pretty disappointed with tonight as you just can play half of each half and expect to win. Especially against a team playing for it's life as tough as PC. Seniors have to be better in those situations.

Hate losing to a garbage fan base like PC

Completely agree on the 2nd game in the weekend. That's where being a 2 or 3 seed is so big for this team, and I think they are pretty safely in 3 territory. Duke and KU already are out behind them. Kentucky and Bama would have to play in their 2nd game if they both win today so only one of them could pass us given their 1st round matchups and likely only Baylor can get a seed boost with their tournament performance. Illinois would have a chance, but the committee has historically ignored the B1G's Sunday championship results when it comes to seeding because it creates so many downstream changes.

The game itself was a bit of a bummer, but I thought Providence played extremely tough. I can't do much, but tip my hat to them and get ready for next week. Normally if we shoot 6/26 we lose by 10+, but the team battled back a couple of times and if we make those free throws in clutch time the game could have easily flipped. Get some rest, get as healthy as we can, and let's have a fun few weeks.

We are very capable of losing to a 6/11 or 7/10. Those teams will be just as good if not better than Providence.

[TrueBlueJay]

We are very capable of losing to a 6/11 or 7/10. Those teams will be just as good if not better than Providence.

Yep - same team we have been all season. Hopefully nobody is surprised by this news.

[Altmanforprez]

Of course, we could lose in the 1st round. It's college basketball.

I actually think we match up better with the teams that have been projecting to be on 6 line vs the 7, but the point was more we are a difficult team to plan for on 1 day rest.

[3ontheway]

Providence is 60 NET. They are nowhere near as good as we made them look this year. Carter is a great player, Oduro we made look like Karl Malone this year. UCONN just went to their place and absolutely destroyed them. We were 8 point favorites and, well, it was an underwhelming performance.

We are who we are. When we make a bunch of 3's we can beat anyone, it lifts our spirits on the other end of the floor defensively and we play with great energy. When we don't, we can lose to a lot of teams. Hoping the guys get rested (although they were rested going into last night). Hopefully Ashworth can find his shot in the next week.

[Realhoops]

I am not a bracketologist, so what do I really know.

But I feel in my gut that a win yesterday was absolutely locking in a game today against Marquette being for the winner to be a 2 seed and the loser a 3 seed. And then our team just came out and looked totally unready for Providence and their effort level -- complete and utter dud that nobody is going to somehow convince me wasn't as bad as it felt like it was. And that's the most disappointing part of all, that there was such an absolutely golden opportunity if we just showed up and outplayed a non-tourney team that played 24 hours prior and lost one of its two best players to injury earlier this year. But we didn't.

And now, if you really look at our actual resume (beyond the crazy computer metrics that seem to love us so much), I absolutely would not be even the slightest bit surprised to see us on the four line, despite the committee usually not putting too much weight on a bad loss in the conference tourney. To be honest, watching that performance and then looking back over the season at our home losses to Nova (not in the tourney) and Butler (not in the tourney), our ugly loss at St John's (not yet solidly in the tourney), and our neutral losses to Colorado State and UNLV (not in the tourney), and now two losses to Providence (not in the tourney), I actually wouldn't be utterly shocked to see us on the five line (I don't really expect that, but wouldn't be utterly shocked). We have some great wins, but we also have some losses that are bad no matter what the "quad" category says.

Most likely scenario is we are looking at a three this morning -- but once you move past the 2 line and look at the teams on the 3 and 4 line, you can make cases to put them in about any order at all and there isn't necessarily that much difference when you slip to the first couple of teams outside of the 4 line. Can't think anyone would be shocked to see Kentucky, Bama, Baylor, Illinois, even Duke at least get slotted ahead of us (also not shocking if we are ahead of any or most of them -- it's just that debatable).

[Chicagojayfan]

Disappointing game vs. Providence, but I was fairly resigned to us not winning the BE Tourney anyway (we don't have a rotation to play 3 days in a row anyway and familiarity around the league becomes an issue at this point in the season) whereas I do think we have the roster to win every other day against even very good teams

Rebounding/Turnovers:
We were under 50% in rebounding (47.8%) - we've won games like that, but usually we shot the ball well. When shooting poorly (under 100 game score) and rebounding under 50% we are 1-5 (last night fit into that category)
Turnovers weren't terrible, but at 13.5% turnover percent we didn't do a great job of holding onto the ball, but Providence only turned it over 5% (low, even by our standards, 3rd lowest of the season versus us)

Defense:
Again, not terrible, but also not good enough. 103.3 defensive score on the night and that's a winnable game, when we shoot anywhere near the norm, but last night wasn't that kind of night for us offensively. We gave up .457 eFG% which is pretty middle of the pack for us

Offense:
This aspect of the game was terrible - 6th worst game of the season for us at 96.7 score (and we lost all 6 of those games)- as a comparison, we had 9 games <= that last year and we did win 2 of them. While we won 2, we also tended to have those bad offensive games a bit more often last year. One of those wins was against UConn at home (who was even colder) and the other was against that awful GT team on the road (ugly game)

FWIW, was also the 4th worst eFG% game of the year for us and one of only 6 below 45% for this team vs 8 by last year's team - both this year and last year we pretty much lost every game when we shot like this (1-5 vs 2-6)

Not much on the individual stuff:
It's trite and kinda stupid, but we don't win when Baylor is 6/16, Ashworth 3/13, and Trey is 2/7 and Kalk 1/5 in the first half. On 2 PT shots we were AWFUL in that first half 5/15 (and all of that was with Baylor shooting well in the first half, then going incredibly cold)

I'll also reiterate my opinion that I love Bello, but if we are giving him more than 20 minutes, it will lead to defensive matchup issues. I'd like to see the coaches extend more trust to Miller (and Green off the bench). Now this may not matter in the NCAAT as especially in the first round, we may see a team with smaller lineups where Bello will fit nicely, but a lot of BE teams have length from 1-3 that hurts us

While I can spend a lot of time parsing stuff, this one comes down to a bad shooting night (any rotation stuff is forgotten if we hit our shots). We shot like garbage and we lost. Fortunately, we haven't had many games like this all year so the goal for the NCAA has to be avoiding those types of game. Last year we had our terrible shooting game against Xavier (84.0 offense game score.. yech!) and then went on a nice run. Hoping we have a similar stretch this time

[vivid_dude]

I am so sick of the narrative on this message board that Creighton “doesn’t show up” when we lose. The shots weren’t falling. How many more seasons of LetItFly will it take for CU fans to realize that when that happens, it’s going to be a struggle? Providence is a very good team with its season on the line. Even though the shooting was atrocious and our all-conference best player played his worst game of the year, we still had a lead with a few minutes to go. How is that “not showing up”?

The implications of those words - “not showing up” - are that the guys weren’t ready, didn’t care, etc. Too often, it’s not even implied - fans say it directly. I reject that entire premise.

We basically played six guys yesterday. They care. They worked their asses off. They showed up - they just lost.