Muskies to invade Palestra this time around

Playing St. Joe’s means I get to post one of my all-time favorite photos:

HA!

I’ve been looking forward to this game ever since finding out St. Joe’s would be playing all of its home games at the Palestra this year due to the renovation being undertaken at Alumni Memorial Fieldhouse.  It will be awesome to watch our Muskies play in arguably the most historic gym in the history of basketball.

St. Joe’s has been on a bit of a slide since their brief stay at the top of the conference standings.  After previously winning nine of ten the Hawks are now on a four game losing streak.  Clearly, their only ticket to the NCAA tournament this season will be through an A-10 tournament championship.  But you’d be foolhardy to count the fighting Martelli’s out of any game during A-10 play.  

Not only is Phil Martelli and excellent coach, but St. Joe’s also has the best player in the league this year.  Ahmad Nivins averages a 19 and 11 and is the focus of any defense that comes up against St. Joe’s.  But luckily, St. Joe’s has never employed a style of play that is conducive to exploiting the weaknesses our Muskies possess this year.  

The Hawks have always played a solid half-court man to man defense with an emphasis on forcing tough shots, not forcing turnovers.  If that sounds familiar it should, because it’s basically our philosophy as well.  (Quick Rant:  Those idiots who called into Sean Miller’s show last night to ask why we don’t play zone more often need to open their eyes and look at our style of defense.  It’s called a pack-line defense because we collapse around the ball to make sure no one can drive down the lane unimpeded.  There are actually a lot of zone principles in a pack-line style defense.  Even an amateur’s eyes like mine can figure that out with very little difficulty……ugh)  

St. Joe’s almost never utilizes full-court pressure and only converts 33% of its three-ball attempts.  However, as often is the case with basketball, anytime you have the best player on the floor anything can happen.  

Any who, I just hope our boys realize what an honor it is to play in the Palestra (I’ll bet Jason Love does) because I’ll be very grateful to watch my favorite basketball team play in a gym as hallowed at the Palestra.  Plus, it’s on ESPN2 with a national television audience.  

 

As many of you are aware our main man Mike Bobinski is apart of the NCAA Tournament Selection Committee this year.  I listen to the ESPNU college basketball podcast and it’s usually a good way to kill 20-30 minutes on the days they post a new episode.  The February 23rd version of the podcast features Selection Committee Chairman Mike Slive, who is the SEC Chairman and UCONN’s Athletic Director Jeff Hathaway who also is a member of the  selection committee.  They give some good insights into what the committee goes through not only on selection day itself, but also the days and weeks leading up to it.   Nice to get an idea of  what our boy Mike will be going through in the coming weeks leading up to one of the best days of the year!

Let’s go X!

Xavier is obviously too good for the A10

The Atlantic 10 is obviously holding us back.  We are far too good and we never lose to any team in the conference.  I can’t believe we haven’t gotten out of this pathetic league to play teams that can actually compete against us.   We are just running through every team this season and don’t show any signs of slowing down.

If there is anyone who thinks that Xavier still belongs in the A10, I’d recommend you institutionalize yourself.  I mean when we are winning, we are totally overlooked in the rankings (we only cracked the Top 10 twice this year…THE NERVE!).   Sure we have had a pretty good out-of-conference schedule, but as soon as we hit league play it’s just too easy.

Maybe they should make us a special conference with the best teams in the land so we can actually get some good games in league play, because I am just sick of all the beatings we continually hand out every few days in the Atlantic 10.

Ugh.

X looks to get past Niners

I’m not the biggest fan of these Thursday night games, but if that’s what it takes to get us on ESPN then so be it.  

Last year, Charlotte gave us all we could handle and more.  Leemire Goldwire (top 5 best name ever) took advantage of Stan the Man getting into foul trouble by scoring 35 points and forcing X into 22 turnovers.  Luckily, it wasn’t enough as our Muskies gutted out a two point win.  

Halton Arena is a tough place to play and tomorrow night should be no exception with a “white-out” planned to intimidate the boys in navy.  And thank science we don’t have to listen to Charlotte’s play-by-play guy while being forced to watch online like last year…

I think it’s safe to say Charlotte has been a disappointment since entering the A-10 in the 05-06 season.  It’s also safe to say the 49ers are headed to their 2nd losing season in 4 years of A-10 play.  I know I fully expected Charlotte to be challenging for A-10 titles almost as soon as they arrived.  But now they find themselves near the bottom of the A-10 standings and in rebuilding mode.  Although help is certainly on the way next season.

I suppose it’s a good thing to face the three bottom dwellers after losing at Dayton last week, but obviously we need to win all three to restore confidence.  These final six A-10 games are very important for seeding purposes.  And ya know, to extend a certain home court winning streak over a certain school up I-75.  

Even with Charlotte’s struggles this season, this will be a tough game tomorrow night.  Let us not forget Dayton lost at Charlotte a scant week and a half ago.  But hey, we still be ranked, and have a lot going for us.   Let’s just take care of business this week and get back to the Xavier basketball we all know and love.

Let’s go X!

Ugh

No blood, no foul I guess…

Well, for all those Musketeer fans who think we are too good for the A10,  XU is in the midst of their second losing streak of the season while falling to third in the Atlantic 10 standings behind St. Joe’s and Dayton.  And all the Keystone Light in the world cannot wash out the taste of the loss in Dayton last night.

 I gave our squad somewhat of a pass for the Duquesne game, because who knew the Dukes would shoot the lights out as they did?  But my glass was half-full, and I assumed our boys would bounce back and play their hearts out in the I75 battle.  But this was obviously not the case.

Things that grind my gears:

-Poor free throw shooting continues to be a visibly large flaw with this team.  When we are down in the second half I cringe when CJ Anderson draws a foul.  9-17 as a team.

-We don’t have a point guard.  We may have been spoiled watching Drew Lavender do work, but it is tough not to have a guy who can open up some offense with the ball in his hand.  Turnovers were actually down with only 5 between our two PGs.  Usually one of them has at least that many themselves.  Tutu had 0 assists and 0 points.  Dante had 3 points with no made field goals and only 1 assist.  When you aren’t a strong ball-handling PG (which is, ya know, 90% of being a point guard), you better have some kind of scoring ability.  Drew needs to come back and teach those guys the teardrop, because I cannot bear to watch them drive into a center/forward and get blocked anymore.

- I don’t understand what happened to our defense… The Dick Bennett “Pack-Line” Defense appeared to work well early in the year against the likes of Memphis who plays the dribble-drive style 40 minutes a game.  But Dayton’s guards seemed to drive passed everyone in blue with ease for an uncontested layup.  With our style of defense, we need not pressure the ball at the half-court line.  Especially against fleet-of-foot ball handlers. 

-Dayton’s defense was relentless.  Bradley couldn’t shake his defender to save his soul, but being the quick-shooter that he is, he still went 2-3 behind the arc.  I do feel like the charges they were drawing weren’t getting called for us, but I’m not about to whine about refs here…anymore at least.

-How effing annoying was that poor video feed due to the windy weather?  It made this game even harder to watch. 

-I am officially worried that the 7,084-year winning streak over UD in Cincy is in jeapordy.  Dayton will want that one just as much as the one they dominantly took last night.

-Teams are doing their homework on XU.  They are pressuring the bajeezuz out of anyone who touches the ball.  Cut it ouuuuuut.

Our favorite collegiate basketball team will limp back to Cincinnati with tails between legs to take on the FU Rams who are a solid 3-18.  The D- performance from last night would be enough to defeat the Rams, but lets hope for at least a C+…

Ugh.

We play Dayton tomorrow night so i guess i better write a post….

Pretty sure the only reason I still hate Dayton is because their fans seem to hate us with a passion that at times is incomprehensible to us X fans.  I’ve also heard too many stories by posters on the message boards saying they will never enter UD Arena again because of the way they were treated.  However, that still won’t deter me from going there. (hopefully next season)  Since I made the little sojourn over to Clifton for the first time this past December I must go to UD Arena.  

The funny thing about Dayton is that they are 21-3, come from a decent to good league and yet no one knows anything about them because they’ve been on television exactly one time this year when the Flyers barely eked out a win over St. Louis on the CBS college sports channel.  Now to their credit they have beaten Marquette, but that is also the only quality win they have as well.  And pretty much the only quality team they’ve faced until 7pm Wednesday night.

And by the way, good job promoting this game espn.  I watch a ton of college hoops, which inevitably means i watch a ton of espn, and have seen precisely zero ads promoting the game.  Of course, it does zero good for the game to be on espn classic in regards to garnering any kind of national audience, but could you at least throw us a line one time after the gazillionth Duke/UNC promo.  Oh well, whatever.

Anyways, Dayton sucks.  They’re not even our main rival.  Derrick Brown and Romain Sato (he speaks 6 languages!) left it for the greener pastures of Xavier.  They wish they were us.  And I find it funny that UD fans make fun of the Blue Blob when they trot out “Rudy the Flyer” and his idiotic look.  And you’re really going to intimidate the boys in navy with your “Beat Xaiver” shirts, which will be the 80th straight game you’ve worn those incredibly creative shirts.

Alright, I’ve said my piece.  Obviously, Dayton has enough talent to beat us tomorrow night, especially since it is on their home court, but I’ll be surprised if they can shoot it well enough to beat us.  A team like Dayton should fall right into the laps of our pack-line defense.  

Let’s go X!

How to Lose

Lots of dumb turnovers + missing free throws= loss to Duquesne

Tonight we get our revenge against the Dukes!

Well, the Dukes of Duquesne anyways.  Last year we kinda blew them out of the water from the word go, but we had a little guy named Drew Lavender to handle the non-stop full court pressure Duquesne employs.  And after committing another 14 turnovers against a Temple team that doesn’t pressure the ball even close to the amount we’ll see later tonight you can go ahead and call me officially  worried.

Also, with Sean Miller saying we are, “playing in spite of him,” (in reference to Tutu) isn’t exactly a vote of confidence.  In addition to that, it’s been weird watching this team struggle with point guard play throughout the year knowing next season we will have an embarrassment of riches at the position with Jordan Crawford and Mark Lyons waiting in the wings.  But Tutu is still a huge key to any success we have come March.  Turnovers HAVE to come down not just for Tutu, but the entire team as a whole.  This will be a good test today to see if we can handle the kind of pressure Duquesne brings to the table.

BJ Raymond is straight killing it right now.  4 games in a row with 20 or more points.  Not since a certain 2-time NBA all-star has that been accomplished at Xavier.  The growth of 4 year players at Xavier continues to amaze and make me proud of X.

Looking forward to tonight and hopefully we’ll get a shot of the snuggie army tonight on the television.

Let’s go X!