Stri Smarts

Our regular contributor Chris Strianese always has colorful opinions and interesting takes on the world of sports, so here’s the first installment of a semi-regular column.

I can’t remember another basketball game where I can remember the exact moment I knew one team was going to lose.  It was midway through the first half and Memphis had just hit 8 of its first 14 three-pointers and I thought, “wow, Memphis better stop shooting so many threes.”  This really isn’t their game–they need to get to the rim.  And then, something incredible happened.  Bruce Pearl went ZONE!  ZONE!  The number 1 team in the whole country, with maybe the best guard in the whole country in Derrek Rose,  just hit 8 of its first 14 threes and you go zone?!?  And then I realized, Bruce Pearl knows they can’t beat him from deep all night.  He’s trying to entice them to keep shooting threes.  That was the exact moment I knew Tennessee was going to win.  And then I thought, “wow, Bruce Pearl is a seriously under-rated coach.”

Memphis, because it had so much early success shooting threes, went crazy when Tennessee went zone and spent the rest of the first half shooting threes from all over the place.  They never established an inside game, and their guards never established a drive/slash games which is their bread and butter.  They took more bad shots in one half than I can remember them taking in any other game all year.  You really have to give Bruce Pearl credit–he really understood how to play Memphis, which makes you wonder…

Where was John Calipari?  There was a 6-8 minute stretch in the second half that went something like this:  Memphis comes down and misses a long-distance three…Tennessee, which had the rebounding advantage all night, grabs the board and runs…beats Memphis down the court…and makes an easy layup.  6-8 minutes!  Same exact series over and over again!  Did Calipari not get the point that an adjustment needed to be made?  Did he really need to watch hit team go 1 for 14 from three-point land before he told them to start driving?  Amazingly, when Calipari did finally tell his team to get to the rim (a point where they were down by their largest margin of the game), they scored the next four buckets unanswered.  It only took him about 20 minutes longer than me and Bry to figure out what Memphis needed to do.  And we don’t coach basketball for a living (which is a huge tragedy).

The other thing that really surprised me was that Tennessee was so much more physical than Memphis.  I remember watching a Memphis game earlier this year and being impressed with how strong they were at every position.  Tennessee manhandled them all over the court.  It looked like Memphis was looking for a whistle every time there was any kind of contact, while Tennessee just kept playing and wound up dominating the boards because of it.  The bottom line is–Tennessee really deserved to win on the road–they were the better team all night.