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Shades
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singinerd54
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RavenDog
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 Posted: 02/20/23 10:15 pm ::: |
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| All Bett’s are off with Lauren…She’s a Monster of the finest degree!
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singinerd54
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GlennMacGrady
Joined: 03 Jan 2005
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| Posted: 02/20/23 11:22 pm ::: |
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| UCLA got off 17 more shots than Stanford, out-rebounded and out-assisted and out-stole and un-turnovered them, but lost by 10 FTM's—mainly from the hands of Brink, who was 15-15 from the FTL. |
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Howee
Joined: 27 Nov 2009
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Location: OREGON (in my heart)
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| Posted: 02/21/23 12:24 am ::: |
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What an odd game. 
Various oddities:
-Brink leads the team in assists, with 3??
-Hannah Jump fires off exactly 2 three-pointers?
-Nearly half of UCLA's rebounds were O-boards.(17of 36)
-Ashten Prechtel: It's senior night and she doesn't get to start, AND plays about 49 seconds? Shame on you Tara.
-I finally got to see Lauren Betts play more than 3 minutes. Yay. 
The entire first half, I'm thinking, "UCLA is ranked??" Now, I haven't seen much of them, but was NOT impressed. And then....came the second half. 
I gotta say, I was most UNimpressed with Stanford's handling of a not-fantastic press by UCLA. I can't imagine how they'd deal with Ohio State's press. Guard play is still a deficiency at The Farm.
Final question: Is Haley Jones' hair real, or is that a purchased look? I think it's pretty nice, but I have no idea about such things.
_________________
Oregon: Go Ducks!
"Inévitablement, les canards voleront"
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ArtBest23
Joined: 02 Jul 2013
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| Posted: 02/21/23 1:21 am ::: |
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Great effort by UCLA, disappointing outcome, I felt sorry for the UCLA players.
I think the final moments were a grade A example of why people sometimes question Close's coaching chops.
UCLA was down 2, with the ball, got it across midcourt with 32 seconds left and 23 seconds on the shot clock. They NEEDED a basket, needed at least 2 pts to create a tie. Players paused and looked to their bench for instructions, and even though UCLA still had 2 timeouts, Close had them just play on rather than stop and talk over a good play.
They dribbled it around outside the arc for a little bit and with 22 seconds left gave the ball to Osborne who dribbled around until there was 7 seconds on the shot clock when she just drove into the middle of the much taller Stanford players bunched in the paint and forced up a bad shot from about 6 feet away that hit the front of the rim. Nobody was setting a screen for her, nobody was moving or cutting or making themselves available for a pass. There was no play; it was just "go make something happen on your own."
Of course Stanford got the rebound, UCLA had to foul, Stanford made both free throws ( as they'd done most of the game) AND it was essentially game over with 12 seconds left down 4. The final losing margin was 5.
That possession with 32 seconds left was the key point of the game and Close did NOTHING to put her players in a better position to get the tying or winning basket.
It's her job to stop the game, get her players together and say "this is our best play in these circumstances, we've worked on this play 100 times in practice, if you all do what we've practiced, xxxxxx will be free for a good shot. Now go out there and execute and let's win this game."
"Give xxxx the ball and let her figure it out while the rest of you stand around and watch our very talented 5'9" guard drive into the paint and attempt to make a desperation shot against three 6''3" Stanford defenders" isn't coaching.
Osborne's a really good player, but she deserves better than to just be abandoned by her coach like that.
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singinerd54
Joined: 18 Feb 2009
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| Posted: 02/21/23 10:07 am ::: |
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| Well said, Art. I had similar feelings.
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RavenDog
Joined: 19 Feb 2007
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| Posted: 02/21/23 6:32 pm ::: |
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| singinerd54 wrote: |
| Well said, Art. I had similar feelings. |
+1
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fancy_daniel
Joined: 12 Oct 2005
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| Posted: 02/22/23 2:56 pm ::: |
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| ArtBest23 wrote: |
Great effort by UCLA, disappointing outcome, I felt sorry for the UCLA players.
I think the final moments were a grade A example of why people sometimes question Close's coaching chops.
UCLA was down 2, with the ball, got it across midcourt with 32 seconds left and 23 seconds on the shot clock. They NEEDED a basket, needed at least 2 pts to create a tie. Players paused and looked to their bench for instructions, and even though UCLA still had 2 timeouts, Close had them just play on rather than stop and talk over a good play.
They dribbled it around outside the arc for a little bit and with 22 seconds left gave the ball to Osborne who dribbled around until there was 7 seconds on the shot clock when she just drove into the middle of the much taller Stanford players bunched in the paint and forced up a bad shot from about 6 feet away that hit the front of the rim. Nobody was setting a screen for her, nobody was moving or cutting or making themselves available for a pass. There was no play; it was just "go make something happen on your own."
Of course Stanford got the rebound, UCLA had to foul, Stanford made both free throws ( as they'd done most of the game) AND it was essentially game over with 12 seconds left down 4. The final losing margin was 5.
That possession with 32 seconds left was the key point of the game and Close did NOTHING to put her players in a better position to get the tying or winning basket.
It's her job to stop the game, get her players together and say "this is our best play in these circumstances, we've worked on this play 100 times in practice, if you all do what we've practiced, xxxxxx will be free for a good shot. Now go out there and execute and let's win this game."
"Give xxxx the ball and let her figure it out while the rest of you stand around and watch our very talented 5'9" guard drive into the paint and attempt to make a desperation shot against three 6''3" Stanford defenders" isn't coaching.
Osborne's a really good player, but she deserves better than to just be abandoned by her coach like that. |
I think these are all fair points. The issue has been that she is coaching A LOT already, so at some point, the players have to execute. They have improved over the season, but it is also an issue of Charisma trusting other players. Near the end of the game, she was unwilling to pass it over to Kiki. I've seen this many times with teams that I know when the senior player wanted to take over. Perhaps they were trying to get Charisma fouled but clearly it didn't work.
One thing I have noticed with Close critics (especially on the UCLA board) is they'll focus on one play and harp on it incessantly as to the reason why she's a bad coach. At the end of the day, she has done more with less such as those years when her tallest post was 6-1 and she still got her team to the Sweet Sixteen and nearly upset UConn. There have certainly been some tough games, but there have been some high moments as well.
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ArtBest23
Joined: 02 Jul 2013
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| Posted: 02/22/23 4:27 pm ::: |
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| fancy_daniel wrote: |
I think these are all fair points. The issue has been that she is coaching A LOT already, so at some point, the players have to execute. They have improved over the season, but it is also an issue of Charisma trusting other players. Near the end of the game, she was unwilling to pass it over to Kiki. I've seen this many times with teams that I know when the senior player wanted to take over. Perhaps they were trying to get Charisma fouled but clearly it didn't work.
One thing I have noticed with Close critics (especially on the UCLA board) is they'll focus on one play and harp on it incessantly as to the reason why she's a bad coach. At the end of the day, she has done more with less such as those years when her tallest post was 6-1 and she still got her team to the Sweet Sixteen and nearly upset UConn. There have certainly been some tough games, but there have been some high moments as well. |
Sorry, but I don't think I was relying on one play, other than as one recent obvious example of what I've observed throughout her UCLA tenure. I found the absence of coaching at the end of the Stanford game to be pretty much typical for her.
If they had stopped and Close had called a play that. for example, called for Kiki to get open off a screen and for Charisma to then get her the ball for the shot, I sincerely doubt Osborne would have been "unwilling" to follow those directions and would have kept the ball herself instead. Leaving those decisions completely to the players to make is precisely the problem. I can't think of another major coach who would have done that. Auriemma or Mulkey or Walz or VanDerveer or McGraw or Frese or Schaeffer or McGuff or Meier would have most likely called time out (especially with 2 left and only 30 seconds to play) or at least would have been standing up yelling out exactly what play they wanted run. Personally I think some of those coaches overcoach and micromanage sometimes throughout the game, but at a critical moment in the final 30 seconds, coaching is not optional and that's what these people get paid to do. Olivia Miles, for example, when asked after her game winning shot against Louisville, commented that Notre Dame practices those end-of-game situations as part of every practice, that everyone knew just what they were supposed to do, and that, while she took the shot earlier and from longer distance than planned because she was running out of time, it otherwise went as designed. It wasn't an ad hoc playground play that won the game. So Citron knew to inbound it to Watson, Miles knew to get a running start around Watson, Watson knew to get it to Miles as she went by and to set a screen to give Miles enough room to get open, and Miles made the shot to win. In UCLA's game, even Carolyn Peck expressed surprise that Close didn't use a time out to get her team set up to make the critical shot. That's how you end up with forced desperation shots in traffic and lose.
As for doing "more with less," I consider it the opposite. This is her second #1 in the country recruiting class - a pretty remarkable accomplishment actually that very few coaches ever get a chance to enjoy -- and she hasn't achieved anything near what one might expect with such an array of talent.
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fancy_daniel
Joined: 12 Oct 2005
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| Posted: 02/22/23 5:31 pm ::: |
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| ArtBest23 wrote: |
| fancy_daniel wrote: |
I think these are all fair points. The issue has been that she is coaching A LOT already, so at some point, the players have to execute. They have improved over the season, but it is also an issue of Charisma trusting other players. Near the end of the game, she was unwilling to pass it over to Kiki. I've seen this many times with teams that I know when the senior player wanted to take over. Perhaps they were trying to get Charisma fouled but clearly it didn't work.
One thing I have noticed with Close critics (especially on the UCLA board) is they'll focus on one play and harp on it incessantly as to the reason why she's a bad coach. At the end of the day, she has done more with less such as those years when her tallest post was 6-1 and she still got her team to the Sweet Sixteen and nearly upset UConn. There have certainly been some tough games, but there have been some high moments as well. |
Sorry, but I don't think I was relying on one play, other than as one recent obvious example of what I've observed throughout her UCLA tenure. I found the absence of coaching at the end of the Stanford game to be pretty much typical for her.
If they had stopped and Close had called a play that. for example, called for Kiki to get open off a screen and for Charisma to then get her the ball for the shot, I sincerely doubt Osborne would have been "unwilling" to follow those directions and would have kept the ball herself instead. Leaving those decisions completely to the players to make is precisely the problem. I can't think of another major coach who would have done that. Auriemma or Mulkey or Walz or VanDerveer or McGraw or Frese or Schaeffer or McGuff or Meier would have most likely called time out (especially with 2 left and only 30 seconds to play) or at least would have been standing up yelling out exactly what play they wanted run. Personally I think some of those coaches overcoach and micromanage sometimes throughout the game, but at a critical moment in the final 30 seconds, coaching is not optional and that's what these people get paid to do. Olivia Miles, for example, when asked after her game winning shot against Louisville, commented that Notre Dame practices those end-of-game situations as part of every practice, that everyone knew just what they were supposed to do, and that, while she took the shot earlier and from longer distance than planned because she was running out of time, it otherwise went as designed. It wasn't an ad hoc playground play that won the game. So Citron knew to inbound it to Watson, Miles knew to get a running start around Watson, Watson knew to get it to Miles as she went by and to set a screen to give Miles enough room to get open, and Miles made the shot to win. In UCLA's game, even Carolyn Peck expressed surprise that Close didn't use a time out to get her team set up to make the critical shot. That's how you end up with forced desperation shots in traffic and lose.
As for doing "more with less," I consider it the opposite. This is her second #1 in the country recruiting class - a pretty remarkable accomplishment actually that very few coaches ever get a chance to enjoy -- and she hasn't achieved anything near what one might expect with such an array of talent. |
I'm gonna disagree. UCLA was down by two points with 30 seconds left and Close did call a play on the sideline. It was really just straight up down defense by Brooke Demetre. Saying that Close let Charisma down was really an exaggeration (and quite frankly, melodramatic) on your part and hence why I say you're really placing the emphasis one one sequence. The team, does get tight at the end and Charisma probably tries to do too much. They're starting to loosen up, but that is confidence on the part of the players. I've seen it all over the Pac-12 and WCBB this year where the teams are not playing to their full potential despite coaching. I saw it recently with Colorado vs. Arizona.
And I stand by what I said regarding doing more with less. I thing the big issue with that first #1 class is they had no strong reserves coming off the bench besides Burke who came a year later (as well as losing Caldwell). So essentially, the team had only Jordin Canada as pg for a long time. I think to be successful, you have to more than one class contribute. But that goes into recruiting which is a whole other issue.
I'm pretty proud of the team and the coaching staff. The match-ups are hard and at every position. Brink and Betts were beast and Haley Jones is tough and the team was in it and they did not give up after falling behind. To me the toughness factor is a big one. I know Close does have a lot of detractors, but again, I think people are overly critical in terms of people focusing on few specific negatives with nary a mention of any positives.
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ArtBest23
Joined: 02 Jul 2013
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| Posted: 02/22/23 6:01 pm ::: |
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"No strong reserves' and no backup pg is truly no excuse.
In the 2017-18 season, Notre Dame lost two players to ACL injuries in pre-season, and two more in December. The injuries included their only two spare guards. So they played the rest of the season with a total of only seven scholarship players, and both bench players were bigs. Ogunbowale, Young and Mabry each averaged 35 minutes per game. They had no backup guards at all. Yet they went 15-1 in the ACC, 35-3 overall, and won the NCAA Championship.
Sorry if I don't have a lot of sympathy for those complaining about their teams being shorthanded (This seems to be the excuse de jour for UConn fans these days as well.)
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fancy_daniel
Joined: 12 Oct 2005
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| Posted: 02/23/23 10:26 am ::: |
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| ArtBest23 wrote: |
"No strong reserves' and no backup pg is truly no excuse.
In the 2017-18 season, Notre Dame lost two players to ACL injuries in pre-season, and two more in December. The injuries included their only two spare guards. So they played the rest of the season with a total of only seven scholarship players, and both bench players were bigs. Ogunbowale, Young and Mabry each averaged 35 minutes per game. They had no backup guards at all. Yet they went 15-1 in the ACC, 35-3 overall, and won the NCAA Championship.
Sorry if I don't have a lot of sympathy for those complaining about their teams being shorthanded (This seems to be the excuse de jour for UConn fans these days as well.) |
Fair enough. But you are talking about two guards that have gone on to the WNBA. Having two versus having one is a huge difference. It is a guard game after all in the NCAA tourney. And that is by far an exceptional team and one whose journey we will rarely see in WCBB. It's been done maybe 2-3 times?
And I appreciate you mentioning UConn. But that team is tired both mentally and physically. You're just being a hard ass.
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