Midweek Conversation is stuck in a rut with Xavier

Brad: We just got flat out spanked today. 31% turnover rate, 29% behind the arc on 24 attempts, allowed 1.25 points per possession. This wasn’t a contest at any point, it was a lesser getting curb stomped by a better one. Loyalty is the reason to watch right now. It got us in Twitter trouble when Joel said this a few years back, but this team is bad at basketball.

Mary: You’re spot on.. Hard to find reasons to watch other than habit for me.

Joel: I somehow get us into Twitter trouble a lot. The last few games were what passes for encouraging because they looked like a real basketball that just couldn’t get it across the line. You could see that group winning three in three at MSG to sneak in.

The way they played today, the end of the season will be a mercy. It was embarrassing for a team that is all perimeter like Creighton to completely eat in the middle like that. It’s like they had recorded our practices, knew what defensive scheme we would run, and had a plan to destroy it. McDermott coached circles around Steele.

Bryan: Is Greg McDermott the Marcelo Bielsa of the Big East? Maybe. What I do know is that Krampelj came into the game as their only threat in the post, and they exploited our ball screen defense to get his whatever he wanted.

Brad: Bry beat me to the obvious Leeds reference, but it’s something to see so comprehensive an outcoaching at this level. You genuinely wonder how it can happen without some practice viewing chicanery. Obviously that wasn’t the case and no one is suggesting it was, but such was the gulf in class.

Xavier started this game with a 25% chance of winning. After ten minutes it was 10% and by KenPom’s reckoning, the game was decided by two minutes to play in the first half. Xavier had no answer, they never looked like have an answer, they never came close to coming back. Unlike Joel, I thought the second Georgetown game demonstrated this team couldn’t run the table at MSG. This game drove that home emphatically.

Joel: Because this is the internet, we should be clear that we’re not actually accusing Greg McDermott of anything, it’s just that the beating was so comprehensive that it appeared that one team had an unfair advantage. In a sense, I’m glad that happened this year because I think Steele will learn from it and wins and losses don’t matter at this point anyway.

Speaking of learning, Q (31.8% from deep) hit his first 2 threes and then shot 5 more without success and Naji (22.8%) went 0-4. We are apparently just going to keep doing this.

Brad: We don’t really shoot that many threes comparatively, I think that it’s just that we are so bad at them that all of them seem like bad decisions. This team shoots threes as roughly 37% of their attempts, which is just 213th nationally. The ludicrous thing is that is higher than last year’s 35% mark.

We just keep going in these same circles.