Wednesday, January 05, 2011

Harvard hands BC another loss

Yes, we lost to Harvard again. Skinner's losses to Harvard were part of the reason he is no longer our coach. When we lost to the Crimson in the past, fans said Al's laid back attitude left the team flat. Being flat wasn't the issue this season. Donahue had the guys pumped and ready to go. The problem was two fold. First, we were sloppy with the ball. Second our defense is still bad.


Turnovers
. Our success this season has really been driven by our offense. We have been efficient scoring, shooting 3s and preventing turnovers. Tonight we didn't protect the ball. We had 14 turnovers and it cost us when we were trying to catch up. Since our D is suspect, we need our offense to be perfect. Tonight it wasn't.


Defense. I don't and didn't take Harvard lightly. Just a few days ago I tweeted that the Ivies' familiarity with Donahue makes any Ivy League team a tough game. But we would have beaten them with a better defensive effort. Based on the recaps, it seems like we allowed Harvard plenty of open looks. We didn't use our supposed athletic advantage to force a ton of turnovers or block a bunch of shots. I know Donahue has used a variety of defenses. Right now I think we need a primary scheme and need to stick with it.


Bubble time?
This is not a good loss, but it is not terrible. Harvard is going to be decent. Plus you can't take away our good wins from our resume. A winning ACC record combined with our out of conference resume will be more than enough to get into the Big Dance.

9 comments:

Walter said...

Okay, the losses to Harvard were bad, but I don't think they had a significant impact in getting rid of Skinner. They're Harvard, but it's not like we have any sort of big rivalry with them that most people care about. Sure they're in the beanpot and a threat in hockey, but in basketball it's not like the game really matters. Football isn't even worth mentioning.

So yeah, it sucks to lose to them, but with only Duke in the ACC with a better record than us, I'll take the harvard loss with the other positive wins we've had.

It's nice to see Joe with more points, because I think he's going to have to resume his role as a leading scorer to keep us competitive in ACC play.

John said...

Pathetic! My daughter is a JR and we are 0-3. Thank god we are in the easy ACC and not the brutal Ivy where we are 0-2 this year.

Unknown said...

Yeah, that's real, real bad. An ACC that lost two games to Ivy League teams should not make the tournament. It's quite pathetic. If we lost to a 1AA team in football, would that be acceptable? This is similar. There should be serious questions asked early and often.

Erik said...

Too lazy to look uit up so here is my guess on Joe's stat line:
21 pts, 22 turnovers, 1 rebound, 1 assist.

Andrew said...

I'm pretty sure terrible is right on the mark. Never mind that it's the third year in a row. Can't lose to two Ivy league teams.

Bravesbill said...

Now that BC has another horrible loss on their resume, watch them come out and slaughter Ga Tech this weekend. The inconsistency is a big concern.

Ry said...

It obviously sucks to lose to Harvard three straight years and to lose to Yale as well. The inclination is to dismiss the Ivies as awful, but i think that would be a mistake. Yeah, we should have beaten both teams, but from top to bottom, the Ivy League is not a terrible conference. They come in at 15 out of 32 on espn's conference rankings. Harvard has an RPI of 57 and a Kenpom ranking of 100. For the sake of comparison, URI is 54 in the RPI and 110 in Kenpom...right about the same level.

I understand that we need to keep Harvard on the schedule, but it might be nice to make sure we keep playing the Robert Morrises, Stony Brooks, and Riders of the world.

mod10aeagle said...

I went to the game last night with my son. He summed it up quite succinctly with this rhetorical question: "How does Harvard have better athletes than BC?" From about the tenth minute on, Harvard was indeed more athletic than BC -- faster, quicker, stronger, and smarter. Other than rebounding, where Raji and Trapani were pretty strong, Harvard outplayed us in every possible way. BC seemed pumped for the first few minutes, but quickly went flat and played slow, dopey and sloppy the rest of the way.

It was the first game I've seen live, and I was really disappointed in BC's failure to adjust. Most of the game the offense looked lost; they moved without purpose or urgency until finally Jackson would attempt to drive through three defenders. It was really ugly.

Unknown said...

2 losses to Ivy League schools means there is no bubble for us. We either clearly get in to the tournament at the end of the season or we are clearly out. There is no way the committee will take a bubble team that has losses to Yale & Harvard.