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| They blew the roof off the Cutler Center |
Games like this are sometimes hard to watch, there is always an element of one team being really bad and the other good. Hope was good, Olivet was bad but I don't think it was quite that simple. Hope was really good, the kind of good that made me say 'wow' several times, sometimes audibly. Offense and defense was sharp, with ball movement and execution that put a lot of pressure on Olivet to keep up and defensive will that forced them into shots they couldn't execute. This was a complete win in every sense of the word. It was not hard to watch from my seat.
Calvin (you may have heard of them) destroyed this Olivet team 3 weeks ago by 42 so this isn't unprecedented territory. When it goes bad for Olivet it goes really bad. But among the 3 or 4 'really bads' are some games that make you question a lot of things, like staying within 7 points of Mt. Union, or leading Baldwin Wallace by 12 only to fall by 12. Or how about losing to Hiram by 8, the same Hiram that on this very same night took Wooster to the wire. Those are things Olivet has done, more recently they had won two games in row which followed two losses by 2 and 4 points. This was not a team playing bad basketball right now.
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A similar feel:
This had a similar feel to the 2003 game where Hope beat Kalamazoo 100-35. That was a good Kzoo team that went 18-6. It was the perfect combination of brilliance and incompetence that resulted in a game that made no sense unless you were there to see it happen. This kind of made sense though.
Efficiency:
Estimated number of possessions: Hope 78 Olivet 78
High paced game. The first half was something like 46 possessions each, that is up around Grinnell speed. Things slowed down a little in the second half, the culprit mostly being Hope playing some zone.
Offensively Efficiency: 138.11
We have a new leader in the clubhouse for highest efficiency game of the season. This is actually pretty phenomenal given the number of possessions. Curiously the second half was a 141 and that's with a lot of bench minutes being logged. So when I say the whole team was good, this is kind of what I mean. There just wasn't much drop off in execution.
Defensive Efficiency: 73.05
I've mentioned before a certain level of suckitude creeps in when you get numbers this low. The thing is this is a pattern that's developing here lately. Hope's been really good on defense since about the Carthage game. Only four opponents have hit a 100 eff. for a game. This team is sneaky good at defense. I'm gathering Hope's holding most of its opponents well under their season eff. performance.
Rebounding Efficiency:
Hope: 47.4% of available offensive rebounds
Olivet: 32.5% of available offensive rebounds
2nd Chance points: Hope 8 Olivet 8 LOL!
Rebounding seems about as important as what color socks I was wearing for this game. Hope missed 19 shots and grabbed 9 rebounds. Olivet missed 40 shots and grabbed 13 which is kind of a lie because 5 of those were deadballs, so it was really 20%.
Other Interesting Stats:
They won by 51
Standouts:
Other than, like, everybody.
Two guys really stood out in this one. Sam Otto and Harrison Blackledge. Sam played his best game in a Hope uniform and was a big part of Hope building a comfortable first half lead. Harrison played good minutes while Hope was in some foul trouble early (because MIAA refs hate 6-10 255lb centers in this league) and manned the post with VanArendonk and Benson in the penalty box. When the end did come around Harrision had a couple nice post moves and a couple nice threes to round out his day.
Blocks:
Olivet really tried to attack Hope on the right side of the lane. Eventually Hope really figured this out with help defense from the post which resulted in a bunch of blocks. Box score says 10, which seems low.
Hope 70 Alma 67
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| This roof, was never in danger. Fingernails, not so much |
When you've beaten an opponent as many times consecutively as Hope has beaten Alma you tend to get complacent, to expect a win, expect it to be easy. There are a couple thousand Freshmen and Sophomores at each of these schools right now, in their lifetimes Alma has beaten Hope once at basketball and they were to young to even know what a basketball was then.
I was a young man when Hope last lost to Alma, it was a long time ago under much different circumstances. Today I'm just an old guy with a computer, too many opinions and an amazing ability to forget the things this game can teach you about a team. In the immediate aftermath of something like this I typed out words like "didn't deserve to win" without really thinking what those words were saying.
What those words weren't saying was how Fr. Cody Stuive stepped out and drained his 2nd 3 of the half and day in a tie game with 3:16 on the clock to give his team a 65-62 lead. Those words weren't saying that with Hope now leading by 3 Nate VanArendonk went to the post, demanded the ball and deliverd to put Hope up 5. Those words weren't saying that with the shot clock winding down and the game still in doubt Ben Gardner, 0-9 on the night, had confidence in himself and the will to drive the basket one more time to put his team up 5 with 24 seconds to play.
Didn't deserve? Teams that didn't deserve to win don't do those kinds of things with games on the line. Teams that deserve to win make those things happen, they dig deepest when its needed the most. They find a way to make baskets when none are being made, they find a way to make a defensive stop when one is needed. They pull out wins that look like losses, like last night looked. It was a win and fully deserved.
Streak:
42 in a row now. This is only the fourth time Hope's failed to reach 80 points against the Scots since this streak began in 1999. The last time was in 2009 when Terry Smith's team took the air out of the ball and ran the shot clock under 10 on every possession.
Alma's D.J. Beckman:
Man was he good. 25 points on 10-19 shooting. He missed his last four attempts from the floor. At the end of the game DJ ended up with two really good looks one from 2, one from 3, that somehow he didn't make. If those go in, this might have been a different result. The missed ft at the end that ended up in his right hand beyond the arc would have been a miracle. Had he been able to handle it you more than half expected it to go in.
Efficiency:
Estimated number of possessions: Hope 73 Alma 73
Just really never felt like this fast of a game, that might be just me though.
Offensively Efficiency: 96.25
Its not their lowest of the season or of even the MIAA season, but it does break a stretch of 7 pretty good performances in a row. Both halves under 100. Alma probably deserves some defensive credit here for the entire year this is only the 4th time they've held an opponent under a 100 EFF. The previous three were Finlandia and the two Albion games, they won all 3 of those.
Defensive Efficiency: 91.62
This right here is why Hope has one more slash in the W column. This is also 20 EFF points lower than the first time they played Alma and its also the 15th time this year they've held a team under a 100 EFF. They are 15-0 in those games. Hope held Alma to 27 second half points after giving up 40. Second half EFF of 74 after a first half of 103.
Rebounding Efficiency:
Hope: 32.3% of available offensive rebounds
Alma: 22.9% of available offensive rebounds
2nd Chance points: Hope 7 Alma 6
We might have expected Hope to do a little better job on their own boards in this one. Alma did a few things much better in this game than the first, a second video look would probably show rebounding on Hope's offensive end was one of them. The really good part is of course Hope didn't allow many second chances and cleaned up the glass very nicely on Alma's end.
Other Interesting Stats:
Free Throws:
For the most part Alma is a jump-shooting team and the jump-shooting team only went to the line 15 times while Hope went to the line 31 times while attacking the basket. Its pretty simple sometimes. Hope was 25-31% for 80%, not bad for a 68% FT shooting team. If ever there was a game needed to point out how important FT shooting can be, this was it.
3-point shooting:
That nice stretch of games where Hope was shooting 3's like one of the best 3-point shooting teams in D3 came to a screeching halt. The good news is Hope didn't shoot it well back there and still won, they likely lost this game a year ago. This 6 1/2 game stretch since the second half of the first Alma game went 59-119 for 49.6%
Not actually a stat:
Wabash 77 Ohio Wesleyan 66
DePauw 71 Wittenberg 49
Wooster 76 Hiram 71
Ohio Wesleyan 81 Allegheny 76 OT
Capital 75 Marietta 55
Ohio Northern 90 Mt. Union 85
Hope 70 Alma 67
The teams in bold were all ranked in this weeks first Great Lakes Region poll. All of these teams would have been expected to win these games this past week over lesser opponents except maybe Wittenberg who had previously lost to DePauw. As you can see not really any of them went to plan. This is just what happens this time of year and Hope was able to survive their close encounter with the upset kind.
Going Forward:
So there it is, in four days time why February basketball can be so great and nerve wracking all at once. Watching a team hit its high and raise its game to near its highest level and watching the same team pull out a gut-wrenching, fingernail biting, late heroic win because in February everybody seems to be capable of being pretty good.
Final week of the regular season is here, it would feel a lot more like it if there were 2 feet less of snow on the ground, but we've made it. Hope still has everything to play for and will have to do it on the road at Kalamazoo and at Adrian. If anyone thought this would be easy they need only carry around a box score of the Alma game just to remind themselves.
Up Next:
Me vs bee stings, dog bites and saying dumb things.
Wednesday Feb 19 @ Kalamazoo
Saturday Feb 22 @ Adrian
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