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[Gazoo]

OK Negative Nellys. Here are some bright sides coming out of last night:

1. AG's rotation is starting to round out, and players are finding roles.

2. When XW returns it will be after Kostas has been able to get some additional minutes he might not have otherwise.

3. Crutcher finally shot the ball well. Freshmen rarely put it all together at once, so hopefully he can build off this confidence.

4. AG came out of the locker room with his jacket off. It appeared to me he chose to reach for the Vasaline in the halftime locker room and light a fire under some of these guys.

5. Up to this point in the season the 1-3-1 has been kind of a lazy excuse for not playing man to man defense. In the first half MSST picked it apart and just missed shots. In the second half the hands were active and it seemed like the team started to figure out the angles and take them away. Really good effort in the second half on help side defense.

6. I'm not at all happy that AG has appeared to be on a mission to crush Crosby's confidence all season, but, in the few minutes Crosby played it was abundantly clear that his givea**** was broken. We have now reached the point that AG will no longer have to bother playing him at all, and I expect he's done for the season barring injury. Now the rotation can settle in--that's the good part.

7. Not calling a TO: with all the freshman on the team, if MSST would have changed up defenses on the road with little shot clock left, we would have been confused and likely panicked. Our best bet was to make a run at it. You have to separate "best chance" from "ideal chance." If we were a senior laden team, the ideal chance was to call a TO. This team is not ideal.

8. How about the grit.

9. Svoboda is playing out of position. When XW returns I think we'll see him more in a matchup type situation, and not 32 minutes in a game.

10. DD is playing like a manimal considering he's having to basically do it himself.

11. We often felt like prior coaches followed too formulaic of a script in taking out a player that was on a roll. I honestly can't figure out AG's player substitutions. Kostas subbed out at the 16:51 mark of the second half and never returned. Yes, we went on a run after that, but why assume "once a screw up, always a screw up"? Kostas could have really helped at times down the stretch. But, one thing we appear to be seeing is that players who are hot will get the minutes.

12. A lot of our TO's are just dumb. Truly brain dead kind of dumb. Correctable kind of dumb. As the young players settle into roles and adjust to the pace of the D1 game this will self-correct.

Figgie: have we ever had 3 different players with 5 or more TO's in a single game?