{"id":125,"date":"2008-02-24T07:45:06","date_gmt":"2008-02-24T12:45:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.broadstreetbelievers.com\/?p=125"},"modified":"2008-02-24T08:54:50","modified_gmt":"2008-02-24T13:54:50","slug":"stri-smarts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/?p=125","title":{"rendered":"Stri Smarts"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/em><\/p>\n

I can’t remember another basketball game where I can remember the exact moment I knew one team was going to lose.\u00a0 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.”\u00a0 This really isn’t their game–they need to get to the rim.\u00a0 And then, something incredible happened.\u00a0 Bruce Pearl went ZONE!\u00a0 ZONE!\u00a0 The number 1 team in the whole country, with maybe the best guard in the whole country in Derrek Rose,\u00a0 just hit 8 of its first 14 threes and you go zone?!?\u00a0 And then I realized, Bruce Pearl knows they can’t beat him from deep all night.\u00a0 He’s trying to entice them to keep shooting threes.\u00a0 That was the exact moment I knew Tennessee was going to win.\u00a0 And then I thought, “wow, Bruce Pearl is a seriously under-rated coach.”<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 They never established an inside game, and their guards never established a drive\/slash games which is their bread and butter.\u00a0 They took more bad shots in one half than I can remember them taking in any other game all year.\u00a0 You really have to give Bruce Pearl credit–he really understood how to play Memphis, which makes you wonder…<\/p>\n

Where was John Calipari?\u00a0 There was a 6-8 minute stretch in the second half that went something like this:\u00a0 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.\u00a0 6-8 minutes!\u00a0 Same exact series over and over again!\u00a0 Did Calipari not get the point that an adjustment needed to be made?\u00a0 Did he really need to watch hit team go 1 for 14 from three-point land before he told them to start driving?\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It only took him about 20 minutes longer than me and Bry to figure out what Memphis needed to do.\u00a0 And we don’t coach basketball for a living (which is a huge tragedy).<\/p>\n

The other thing that really surprised me was that Tennessee was so much more physical than Memphis.\u00a0 I remember watching a Memphis game earlier this year and being impressed with how strong they were at every position.\u00a0 Tennessee manhandled them all over the court.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The bottom line is–Tennessee really deserved to win on the road–they were the better team all night.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[41,42],"class_list":["post-125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-college-hoops","tag-memphis","tag-tennessee"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=125"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}