College Hoops Thread '09-'10

[The Poet]

Duke 78 - Baylor 71 = Lesson #4: Rest on offense, work on defense. One of the nags I've been flogging all year is my lack of faith in a zone defense to win you a championship. A zone is fine to throw out a few times a game, to give your opponent a different look, but you cannot depend upon it exclusively. It can win you your share of games, it can give you a successful season, but there are too many ways in which a well-coached team can exploit its weaknesses. This matchup highlighted one of those most dramatically . . . the zone is susceptible to yielding up too many offensive rebounds. When you are defending an area instead of a player, it is much harder to box a guy out. This game was tighter than new shoes until late, when Dook got four second-chance buckets in a hurry . . . three 3s, plus that stick-back slam by Thomas. Shoot, the Blue Devils had 17 offensive boards IN THE SECOND HALF ALONE!, and none were more devastating than those four there. That is not to take anything away from what Scott Drew did with this team, pulling them out of the Dave Bliss abyss and into a position nobody would have predicted when the season started. And I suppose he had little choice but to dance with the girl what brung him. Yet in the end, it was Duke who took her home. Congratulations to them, and good luck to those "spectacularly un-athletic" players (as one analyst called Dook) against WVA - I gotta feeling you might need it.