Bruins Scratch, Claw and Clank Their Way to an Ugly, But Welcome Win

Glad to see you didnt rip yourself too much Ryan I mean Nestor

Stanford beat U$C by a point tonight.

You guys already excited about a letdown loss against Stanford? :-)

Have a great night everyone. See in the am!!!

Hope there’s a FB game thread tomorrow night.

It’s so much nicer with no stress! One thing I love it the bench reaction. Especially Moser and Bobo – those guys are LOVING it!

But regardless of how ugly the game was at times, it always feels good to win at Cal.

Definitely won’t be questioning effort today. Execution? Well, I’ll just allow myself to enjoy this win instead. :)

putting up the post-game thread while “Nestor” leaves little one-liners in the game thread.

Seriously though, this win still hasn’t sunk in. Maybe the anti-mojo took over my brain.

No matter. Despite turnovers and 3-pt bricks and FT atrocities, the team played with heart in the second half. Of course, making those 3’s and FTs helps and taking care of the ball.

Wonder how we can get to do that consistently.

I know they’re a little upset about the situation with their bball team now, but well after the game was over, they had a total of FIVE comments in their game thread. To put that in perspective, we had 1,282. I guess they’ve totally lost interest.

By the way, OJ2 isn’t exactly well liked over there, which is remarkable. It’s not like his baggage was invisible when he arrived.

Our zone defense. Cal shot very poorly. Unbelievably poor. However, we did learn in our podcast (kids you should listen to it) that Cal had tough times against zone D before this season (even though it was without Robertson). Still that discussion was prophetic tonight. Our zone D frustrated them in the second, allowing our offense to get going in second. If we made our FTs (just like we did against ASU) this wouldn’t be a close game.

Of course now I am bracing for a cold shooting day and a listless performance against Stanford.

wow so much good and bad in one game. .. here are my random thoughts in terribly thought out order.

—We can complain about how bad we are at the line, but in reality we shot to form. Cal has only themselves to blame 2-20 3-ptrs for a great 3-pt shooting team.

—. If we have to rely on ND to shoot well to win games we will not win many games. I thought he was weak in man-2-man, but in the zone he might be worse. I think he needs to shoot 70% to be a net positive while zoning and about 60% when manning.

— We can improve on our careless turnovers. How many were forced or due to even decent defense? JA takes a few steps forward on offense then takes them right back with awful and nearly awful turnovers. (except for that clever final pass deflected off the defender’s arm to Roll for the game-winner) Not to mention he can’t catch or lacks concentration when catching. I think JA is getting closer to playing decent offense, but his defense is awful. Man just lay a body on someone going by you and let the refs foul you out.. same goes for ND.

—TH and RN can rebound. Then need to play as many minutes as their fatigue and foul trouble allowes. And our guards are ok at it as well, but then again will we ever be able to fastbreak off a miss needing all 5 players to rebound?

—We clearly need to mix up defenses since we are not really good at either just to throw teams off. Heck maybe we should try a surprise half-court trap in there just for surprise. It’s not like we can prevent teams from getting layups anyway. We may as well get a few steals and easy baskets out of it.

—Which leads to ML. He is terrific in space in the open court, but how often will he get that chance? Talk about fools gold.. his making shots against Notre Dame has given him a tad too much confidence shooting challenged jumpers early in a shot clock.

—Is the pac-10 headed for one bid? Never had a less than 4 I think since it has gone to 64 and as Cal and Washington have now shown no one is that good.

—I am beating my dead horse with this, but I want more bobo. I would like to see RN being able to avoid the center matchup sometimes. Bobo can take up space and surprisingly with a minimum of coaching can get a deep spot and catch the ball in the interior against most pac10 centers that choose to play man. Lets draw some fouls early in the game with bobo and RN and not worry about their inability to make fts if we can pile up foul trouble. Furthermore hide him in the zone defense, but never.. I repeat never with ND on one side of that zone.

That is enough random thoughts for now

I was thinking about you you N the whole second half! I think you were our teams motivation for the night. :0)

Go Bruins!

ML – feel free to mix in a banana. Ok Seriously, how many endgames has this guy missed due to cramping. You’d think UCLA could afford the input of a sports nutritionist or SOMETHING. What the heck is up with the cramps? His battling is gutty, but this simply shouldn’t keep recurring.

MR – More than anything else, more than the 3 point shooting, the savvy drives and distribution, and the “LOL oops” game winner; this guy to me seems to be the emerging leader. There was one occasion they had a closeup on him coming out of a time out where he reminded all 4 other guys on the court that they had only one time out remaining. That kind of small stuff is huge in my opinion.

The season as a whole – It looks like we’ll win when MR and ND have good 3 point shooting nights, not so much when they both don’t..

Pomeroy’s system had predicted a 23-point win for Cal tonight (86-63), and we have now beaten his (current) 2 best teams in the Pac-10.

where the joy of winning randomly washes over you every now and then for the rest of the night.

“We needed to play quicker on offense, setting up the threes for Lee or Roll [who were the hot hands], then quickly going down to Nelson if they were not open. Message to CBH: we are NOT a good half-court team, period.”

I think I was half right. We are a good half-court team if we set up the threes for our hot shooters and quickly go down to Nelson if they are not open. And in the zone we are effective enough defensively, in fact quite impressive in the second half this game.

Did you notice that even Anderson was comfortable in the flow of this offense of looking for the threes and then going inside? And he made two threes very confidently. Mmmm…letting the players play. What a concept!

This is how we beat Cal! We almost lost anyway because of our first half turnovers and our poor free throw shooting, but we played more in control in the second half and cut down the turnovers drastically. If we could have shot our free throws at even a 60% clip we could have won easily in regulation.

I applaud CBH for adjusting his strategy and using the threes to open it up underneath for Nelson, who was the man. Actually, if Lee had been more into his game we could have four super players for the game. Of course, we can’t expect four players every game to play out of their minds, but CBH has figured out how best to use their talent.

This does not mean we are over the hump, but as long as our players play like they did tonight WE CAN BE PROUD OF THEM WIN OR LOSE.

More than their win, which was amazing, I am proud of their grit, their heart and their determination. I look forward to the rest of the season whatever the outcome.

GO BRUINS!