Originally published at: https://pistolsfiringblog.com/five-thoughts-on-oklahoma-states-84-47-loss-to-no-1-arizona/
It wasn’t even sort of close.
It started out as a defensive battle, ironically enough, and we hung in there. But eventually they just wore us down and we continued missing shots. And once you get down big like that, shot selection goes out the window because you’re trying to come back with big shots…
And then it just snowballed. At least it just counts as one loss. We need ASU, though.
First 10 minutes was decent, liked the way they came out but they missed some easy shots and some open shots and then it just fell apart. Expected a beat down but boy that second half must’ve been disgusting. Glad I stopped watching at halftime.
Well, that was a reality check. Zona’s gonna whoop up on lots of teams though. But man…ouch!!
GO POKES!
I was hoping for a better showing, but Arizona has a real shot at going undefeated. As long as we don’t let this blowout linger in our heads and we get back to business.
I’m considering pouring this in my eyes after watching that game. But then that’d just add insult to injury.
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Nice looking beverage. Where was this taken at?
With a clear caveat that I’m not making excuses for our performance, I would submit that the officiating in this game was complete garbage. We couldn’t guard them at all without getting called, and meanwhile they were mauling us down low with no repercussions. One steal in particular was obviously a double arm hack. The foul total with four minutes left in the first half was 9 to 4, and it was at this point that the game had squarely been placed out of reach. Again, I’m not suggesting we would have made it a game otherwise, but when adding crap officiating to a team as good as Arizona, it certainly helped ensure that we would get a beatdown of epic proportions from which there would be no return. Once again, the zebras seemed to be protecting not only the home court but especially the top #1 seed.
Bonus side observation!…What the hell was up with the Arizona fans booing when Roy went down early in the game with a turned ankle? And they did it again in the second half when one of our other guys went down, can’t remember who. Poor show of unsportsmanship, and it will be remembered.
This is in Little Rock at a brewery called Moody Brews. It was quite tasty!
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Throwing out that same disclaimer, I noticed this as well and it seemed like Lutz was getting onto the officials more than usual.
This loss appears to be the worst of any team that lost to Arizona this year. This includes University of Denver and Bethune. We weren’t mentally prepared to play. I realize Arizona is great but could Lutz have them better prepared? Where is mental toughness?
I actually appreciate how testy Lutz got towards the end here. Just how many times and how many different ways can he say how great AZ is before it gets to be a bit much? You won by 40. Stop fishing for compliments.
I hope he kept some of this fire and more for his team. If this shellacking doesn’t let them know what it takes to compete with the best in the league, I don’t know what will.
Yes, it was the worst that any team did against Arizona. Couple of thoughts.
This is going to sound pathetic, but it didn’t feel to me like we lost by 40. We should have lost by 10-20, which would have put us in the same company as the other AZ victims, most of whom we would have a 50/50 chance of beating ourselves. The difference was, in my opinion, the officiating I mentioned above, which allowed them to beat us up down low, which caused our low post guys to be ineffective (Parsa tried desperately but couldn’t get on track; Ahmed was like a child among men, which he was; Lefty wasn’t strong enough to post up against the trees); and then when we did have a few good point-blank looks, the ball simply wouldn’t go down the hole (bad bounces, bad breaks). So it was a perfect storm to get walloped.
Oh, and the fans were jerks, booing our injured guys. I came away with a newfound disgust for a different fanbase.
Lutz will have our guys ready for the next string of games. The next five games are all very winnable. Will we win all of them? Probably not, but if we do we win five of our last eight games, we should be a safe at-large team with 9 conference wins and at least .500 in league games and 2 (or maybe 3) quad 1 wins. Let’s not forget that after winning at Utah and before the BYU game, we all felt that if we could beat either BYU or AZ, we would be in pretty good shape coming down the stretch. And that’s where we are.
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I told a buddy of mine in Stilly that I think we can win all of our remaining February games. Whether we do or not is, of course, a different story. But I don’t see why we can’t.