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Username Post: Women's Game
dperry 
Postdoc
Posts: 2211
dperry
Loc: Houston, TX
Reg: 11-24-04
03-19-17 12:01 AM - Post#227659    
    In response to penn nation

In fairness, part of the reason we were ahead so much is that A&M shot absolutely horribly for the first 3 quarters by their standards, and while we had something to do with that, they also just missed a bunch of outright open shots. In normal circumstances, we'd have been up 5 or 6 at the end of the third and they would have roared by us with five or so to go. Nevertheless, when you're up by 21 with 12 or 13 to go or whatever it was, you've got to get the job done, and I don't care what the refs did. One thing is that when Hillsman got two fouls early, they should have started attacking her more; she was keeping the Aggies in it early on, and by having Nwokedi and Stip and Ross go to the hole more, they could have either given her more fouls and gotten her out of the game, or else got some easier buckets if she held back on D to avoid fouls.
Again, overall, I'm glad that McLaughlin was willing to take the chance on Chambers, because she has really stabilized the backcourt the last couple of years, she's allowed Ross to move to the 2 where she improved mightily (this, probably more than anything, got them over the hump last year), and she's been a great leader and provided a lot of energy. However, against higher level competition, she has just not been good enough, and the backcourt in general has not responded like they needed to. Again, in the last few minutes of that game, you could just see them freezing up, and not being able to create any opportunities for themselves, as has happened too many times in the past few years against teams like this. Obviously, they've got the defense down pat now; if they want to get to the next level, they've got to start taking up the offense a notch. While they don't literally play the old-style Princeton offense (this game, I wish they did; they would probably have gotten a couple more back doors and won this thing), they take the same approach, which is slow the game down, limit the opportunities for both teams, and hope that you get luckier than they do. As we found with the men all those years, that only works every once in a while. To really get good, you have to get to the point where you can actually take on the other teams physically, as the men's teams that have made the tournament for the Ivies the past few years have shown. The hopeful thing is that, as far as I can tell from the limited history I've been able to find about Holy Family online, McLaughin did figure out how to do that there eventually. I'm hopeful that the players he's bringing in next year will begin a new phase of evolution in the history of the program, but we'll see.

Well, in 20 minutes we went from having a huge success to show future recruits to something that may potentially be actually detrimental to the program, now that we've got the biggest choke in the history of the tournament branded all over us. I normally save the video of Penn's appearances in the tournament, win or lose, but I just can't do it with this one; it hurts too much. I'm really sorry that Sydney and Kasey had to go out this way. I have to go to bed now, since I've got church in the morning and I'm going to have enough trouble sleeping as it is, but I'll give a wrapup and look ahead to next year sometime in the next couple of days.
David Perry
Penn '92
"Hail, Alma Mater/Thy sons cheer thee now
To thee, Pennsylvania/All rivals must bow!!!"

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