MBB: College Conference of Illinois and Wisconsin

[WUPHF]

Live stats says Chicago had a 30 point lead on Wheaton and then won the game 94-92...is that right?

28 three pointers between the two teams...

[Titan Q]

Live stats says Chicago had a 30 point lead on Wheaton and then won the game 94-92...is that right?

28 three pointers between the two teams...

I didn't watch any of this game but I probably should have.  Just looking at the play-by-play...

http://athletics.uchicago.edu/sports/mbkb/2016-17/boxscores/20161130_acby.xml?view=boxscore


* Chicago led 78-48 with 12:53 to play.

* Chicago led 85-62 at the 9:22 mark, at which point Wheaton went on an 21-1 run to pull within 86-83 with 3:13 to go.

* Wheaton actually took the lead, 89-88, at 2:03, and again 91-90 at 1:23.

Wheaton's Aston Francis, a 6-1 sophomore transfer from Tyler Junior College (TX), scored 35 points.

[GoPerry]

Chicago 94
Wheaton 92

Chicago led 61-42 at halftime based on some unbelievable 3pt shooting (12/22 3FG) and extended it out to 30 with 13 minutes left in the game.  The Thunder kept fighting back, Chicago went cold, Aston Francis and Luke Peters got hot, and Wheaton actually took the lead 89-88 with 2 minutes left.  But Francis and Samuelson finally missed a couple shots and Chicago pulled it out.  Quite a game that many probably clicked off with 10 mins left in the game.

Aston Francis (35 pts, 14/22, 4/9-3FG) is as gifted a scorer as anyone in the CCIW.
Luke Peters, 16 pts, 9rbs, 5 ass
Ricky Samuelson, 19 pts

Chicago had 37 trey attempts and ended up making 17 for 46%.  Chicago, predictably, killed the Thunder on the glass, +21 rebounding edge.  Nobody in blue can even come close to matching Blaine Crawford's 225lbs (20 pts, 13 rbs) or Collin Barthel's 220lbs.

[WUPHF]

Thanks guys...I wish I would have watched.  Too bad this game will not be available on demand.

[Titan Q]

Thanks guys...I wish I would have watched.  Too bad this game will not be available on demand.

https://livestream.com/accounts/5795570/events/6694846/videos/143131046

[augie77]

Augie up 38-35 at half against Oskosh.  Both teams shooting over 60%. Augie had 10 players in the game within the first seven minutes. No question Augie needs to iron out its defensive inefficiencies, which will probably come with time.  One important stat is that they are shooting 81% as a team from foul line thus far for the year.

All of their five leading scorers are shooting 84.6% or better from the line.

[Gregory Sager]

Aston Francis (35 pts, 14/22, 4/9-3FG) is as gifted a scorer as anyone in the CCIW.

I'll dispute that, although there's no doubt at all that Francis can really fill it up.

[Gregory Sager]

Jordan Robinson ended the night with 999 career points. It would've been great if he could've joined the 1K Club on his home floor rather than having to do it in Rock Island on Saturday, but it's not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things.

[Gregory Sager]

Another Meat Loaf night for the CCIW puts the league's record at 29-15 (.659) at the end of phase one of non-conference play.

During the next three game days, as the CCIW inaugurates the new December conference slate, there will be two non-conference games as well. Carroll will take a bye on Saturday, but next Wednesday Millikin will host Webster and a week from Saturday Wheaton will host Calvin.

[GoPerry]

Aston Francis (35 pts, 14/22, 4/9-3FG) is as gifted a scorer as anyone in the CCIW.

I'll dispute that, although there's no doubt at all that Francis can really fill it up.

Would expect no less on a subjective statement and considering who the other prolific scorers in the league are.

[AppletonRocks]

We even discussed after the game that neither of us really had any words to describe what the hell had just happened. I settled for "trap game,"

trap game

I've never quite understood why fans invariably resort to the "trap game" explanation for an unexpected loss that precedes an important game. On the one hand, it may simply be the tendency to fall into groupthink or to rummage through the cliche box when their team suffers that kind of an upset, and in that sense it's probably not worth analyzing too deeply. But on the other hand, I sometimes sense that fans are groping for an excuse rather than an explanation, which is completely understandable; the natural tendency of a fan is to disproportionally attribute the outcome of a game to his own team, whether it's a win or a loss.

There's a couple of problems with it, though. One is that the "trap game" explanation is a pretty severe indictment of your own team. You're not only blaming your team for the loss, you're stating in no uncertain terms that the head coach did not do his job by fully preparing his team for that opponent in a psychological sense as well as a tactical sense. And you're calling out your team's players for being unfocused and undisciplined, which I think is more than most fans would really be willing to do if they stopped and thought a little deeper about the "trap game" cliche.

The other problem is that a basketball game is forty minutes long. If the loss to UWP had come about because it was a trap game, which means that the outcome had been in NCC's hands all along, don't you think that the Cardinals would've realized what was happening at some point and done something to rectify it? It's not as though the Pioneers snuck up on the Cards at the end of the game. North Central didn't score for five and a half minutes pretty early on, from the 15:33 mark to the 9:55 mark of the first half. Don't you think that, if the Cards had gone into the game taking the Pioneers lightly because they were already looking ahead to IWU, that that five and a half minutes in which they didn't dent the scoreboard would've changed their thinking and thus led them to step it up and take control? After all, the score only went from 10-5 NCC to 12-10 UWP during that span.

I watched the game on YouTube last night after I had asked that "what the heck happened?" question here. My take is that the reason why North Central only scored 40 points is that it was about 80% due to UWP playing fantastic defense and 20% due to NCC screwing up. I might even go 85/15. The Pioneers bodied up the Cards down low and didn't give them an inch. They did a phenomenal job of staying on their men on the perimeter off the ball. And they had their hands active at all times, but smartly so -- they didn't get called for a lot of reach-ins, but they poked balls away when the Cards would drive, they got their hands up into shooters' faces, and they wrenched balls out of the hands of Cardinals in tight rebounding situations.

The Cards did force shots, but many of them were late in the shot clock (and I notice that there's already a discussion brewing about NCC's tendencies to take possessions deep into the shot clock as a matter of course). A lot of the shots that they took were on the move without having their feet set or were off-balance shots around the basket, both signs of a team rushing things because it's having trouble creating space for shooters. And when they drove to the basket they were often too strong on their shots, a tell-tale sign of a frustrated team that is forcing things. In other words, the kinds of misses that the Cards suffered last night were indicative to me of a team that was thoroughly taken out of its comfort zone by the defense.

It was like watching Ryan-era UWP rather than current-era UWP, and that's the highest compliment that I can pay to any defense, not just a UW-Platteville defense. You really had to have seen Bo Ryan's Pioneers teams of the '90s to appreciate just how robustly they would bulldog your offense for forty minutes a pop. I only saw his Pioneers teams play two or three times, but those memories stick with me. Every game that they played looked like last night; if you scored 60 points against UW-Platteville in the '90s, you felt as though you had really accomplished something.

Forget the "trap game" stuff, guys. Just tip your caps to UW-Platteville and congratulate the Pioneers on a job really, really well done.

Which will be higher: Seibring's and Sorenson's combined points and rebounds in the men's game, or the combined number of turnovers in the IWU @ NCC women's game?

I wanted to wait until morning to answer this; partially because typing it out on my phone would have been weird, and partially because I wanted to think about it. It was a toss up. Now, I think I'm leaning total combined turnovers in the women's game unless Angry Alex Sorenson shows up and/or Trevor Seibring has the night of his life. Which, if North Central plays like they did last night, isn't out of the realm of possibility.

[/overreactingtoonebadloss]

Well, I was just joking with that comment, so I hope that I didn't force you to use up too much brainpower in contemplating a response. But you've got the right outlook in that you've self-diagnosed that you're overreacting to one bad loss. The Cardinals will be just fine.

As shocked as I am at the outcome last night, I don't have any doubt that it was just one of those games for NCC.  16-55, 29%, from the field?  They likely saw that Platteville lost to consensus-lowly Wheaton last week, playing at home, and simply took the game very lightly and couldn't right the ship.

That's kind of a back-formation way of calling it a "trap game" -- instead of blaming the Cards for looking ahead to IWU, you're blaming them for looking back to UWP vs. lightly-regarded Wheaton -- and I doubt that it's any more valid for the same reason: NCC would've snapped out of it fairly early once it realized that the Pioneers weren't going to be a walkover.

I think that you had it right the first time: it was just one of those games for NCC. That, and UWP probably would've beaten anybody in D3 last night for as well as the Pioneers played on defense.

Again, nobody who roots for North Central has any reason to panic. As badly as the Cards were whipped last night, it's just one game. As I said, the Cardinals will be just fine.

They won't make that mistake Saturday and this will likely be a good wakeup to guard against during CCIW play where we all know that no victory is assured.

Certainly a disappointing loss for NCC fans but no panic button necessary.  I think they are still the team to beat in the league this year. 

One thing I've noticed however:  They sure don't get to the free throw line much which is surprising to me with Sorenson/Raridon anchoring things.  Only 7 trips to the line last night, 8 vs BU, 11 vs Alma.

Sorenson never gets to the line much. He averaged fewer than three FTAs per game last season. This season he's had only seven FTAs in four games. (And he's like a smaller, paler Shaquille O'Neal when he does get to the FT line, but that's another topic entirely.) For a big man, he shoots an inordinate number of jump shots. Raridon is more apt to both back in an opponent and to penetrate, which is why he gets to the line more.

But you're right on the mark in noting that NCC isn't shooting many free throws as a team. Last season the Cards were one of the most prolific teams in the league at the charity stripe. This year? Look at the CCIW stats in FTAs per game:

Elmhurst	30.4
Millikin	26.4
Wheaton	24.3
Carthage	23.6
Carroll	23.2
Augustana	22.4
North Park	20.0
Illinois Wesleyan	18.4
North Central	12.5

Even when you keep in mind that Elmhurst and Millikin have inflated FTA numbers due to their respective games against Greenville, the Cardinals are still shockingly below the rest of the league in terms of how often they get to the charity stripe.

If North Central wore the proper color of uniform this would never have happened. 

[AppletonRocks]

Jordan Robinson ended the night with 999 career points. It would've been great if he could've joined the 1K Club on his home floor rather than having to do it in Rock Island on Saturday, but it's not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things.

Tragic. 

[lmitzel]

We even discussed after the game that neither of us really had any words to describe what the hell had just happened. I settled for "trap game,"

trap game

I've never quite understood why fans invariably resort to the "trap game" explanation for an unexpected loss that precedes an important game. On the one hand, it may simply be the tendency to fall into groupthink or to rummage through the cliche box when their team suffers that kind of an upset, and in that sense it's probably not worth analyzing too deeply. But on the other hand, I sometimes sense that fans are groping for an excuse rather than an explanation, which is completely understandable; the natural tendency of a fan is to disproportionally attribute the outcome of a game to his own team, whether it's a win or a loss.

There's a couple of problems with it, though. One is that the "trap game" explanation is a pretty severe indictment of your own team. You're not only blaming your team for the loss, you're stating in no uncertain terms that the head coach did not do his job by fully preparing his team for that opponent in a psychological sense as well as a tactical sense. And you're calling out your team's players for being unfocused and undisciplined, which I think is more than most fans would really be willing to do if they stopped and thought a little deeper about the "trap game" cliche.

The other problem is that a basketball game is forty minutes long. If the loss to UWP had come about because it was a trap game, which means that the outcome had been in NCC's hands all along, don't you think that the Cardinals would've realized what was happening at some point and done something to rectify it? It's not as though the Pioneers snuck up on the Cards at the end of the game. North Central didn't score for five and a half minutes pretty early on, from the 15:33 mark to the 9:55 mark of the first half. Don't you think that, if the Cards had gone into the game taking the Pioneers lightly because they were already looking ahead to IWU, that that five and a half minutes in which they didn't dent the scoreboard would've changed their thinking and thus led them to step it up and take control? After all, the score only went from 10-5 NCC to 12-10 UWP during that span.

I watched the game on YouTube last night after I had asked that "what the heck happened?" question here. My take is that the reason why North Central only scored 40 points is that it was about 80% due to UWP playing fantastic defense and 20% due to NCC screwing up. I might even go 85/15. The Pioneers bodied up the Cards down low and didn't give them an inch. They did a phenomenal job of staying on their men on the perimeter off the ball. And they had their hands active at all times, but smartly so -- they didn't get called for a lot of reach-ins, but they poked balls away when the Cards would drive, they got their hands up into shooters' faces, and they wrenched balls out of the hands of Cardinals in tight rebounding situations.

The Cards did force shots, but many of them were late in the shot clock (and I notice that there's already a discussion brewing about NCC's tendencies to take possessions deep into the shot clock as a matter of course). A lot of the shots that they took were on the move without having their feet set or were off-balance shots around the basket, both signs of a team rushing things because it's having trouble creating space for shooters. And when they drove to the basket they were often too strong on their shots, a tell-tale sign of a frustrated team that is forcing things. In other words, the kinds of misses that the Cards suffered last night were indicative to me of a team that was thoroughly taken out of its comfort zone by the defense.

It was like watching Ryan-era UWP rather than current-era UWP, and that's the highest compliment that I can pay to any defense, not just a UW-Platteville defense. You really had to have seen Bo Ryan's Pioneers teams of the '90s to appreciate just how robustly they would bulldog your offense for forty minutes a pop. I only saw his Pioneers teams play two or three times, but those memories stick with me. Every game that they played looked like last night; if you scored 60 points against UW-Platteville in the '90s, you felt as though you had really accomplished something.

Forget the "trap game" stuff, guys. Just tip your caps to UW-Platteville and congratulate the Pioneers on a job really, really well done.

Which will be higher: Seibring's and Sorenson's combined points and rebounds in the men's game, or the combined number of turnovers in the IWU @ NCC women's game?

I wanted to wait until morning to answer this; partially because typing it out on my phone would have been weird, and partially because I wanted to think about it. It was a toss up. Now, I think I'm leaning total combined turnovers in the women's game unless Angry Alex Sorenson shows up and/or Trevor Seibring has the night of his life. Which, if North Central plays like they did last night, isn't out of the realm of possibility.

[/overreactingtoonebadloss]

Well, I was just joking with that comment, so I hope that I didn't force you to use up too much brainpower in contemplating a response. But you've got the right outlook in that you've self-diagnosed that you're overreacting to one bad loss. The Cardinals will be just fine.

As shocked as I am at the outcome last night, I don't have any doubt that it was just one of those games for NCC.  16-55, 29%, from the field?  They likely saw that Platteville lost to consensus-lowly Wheaton last week, playing at home, and simply took the game very lightly and couldn't right the ship.

That's kind of a back-formation way of calling it a "trap game" -- instead of blaming the Cards for looking ahead to IWU, you're blaming them for looking back to UWP vs. lightly-regarded Wheaton -- and I doubt that it's any more valid for the same reason: NCC would've snapped out of it fairly early once it realized that the Pioneers weren't going to be a walkover.

I think that you had it right the first time: it was just one of those games for NCC. That, and UWP probably would've beaten anybody in D3 last night for as well as the Pioneers played on defense.

Again, nobody who roots for North Central has any reason to panic. As badly as the Cards were whipped last night, it's just one game. As I said, the Cardinals will be just fine.

They won't make that mistake Saturday and this will likely be a good wakeup to guard against during CCIW play where we all know that no victory is assured.

Certainly a disappointing loss for NCC fans but no panic button necessary.  I think they are still the team to beat in the league this year. 

One thing I've noticed however:  They sure don't get to the free throw line much which is surprising to me with Sorenson/Raridon anchoring things.  Only 7 trips to the line last night, 8 vs BU, 11 vs Alma.

Sorenson never gets to the line much. He averaged fewer than three FTAs per game last season. This season he's had only seven FTAs in four games. (And he's like a smaller, paler Shaquille O'Neal when he does get to the FT line, but that's another topic entirely.) For a big man, he shoots an inordinate number of jump shots. Raridon is more apt to both back in an opponent and to penetrate, which is why he gets to the line more.

But you're right on the mark in noting that NCC isn't shooting many free throws as a team. Last season the Cards were one of the most prolific teams in the league at the charity stripe. This year? Look at the CCIW stats in FTAs per game:

Elmhurst	30.4
Millikin	26.4
Wheaton	24.3
Carthage	23.6
Carroll	23.2
Augustana	22.4
North Park	20.0
Illinois Wesleyan	18.4
North Central	12.5

Even when you keep in mind that Elmhurst and Millikin have inflated FTA numbers due to their respective games against Greenville, the Cardinals are still shockingly below the rest of the league in terms of how often they get to the charity stripe.

If North Central wore the proper color of uniform this would never have happened.

He's right! We need to order cream colored home jerseys! That might have turned the tide! 

[D3_Commenter]

We even discussed after the game that neither of us really had any words to describe what the hell had just happened. I settled for "trap game,"

trap game

I've never quite understood why fans invariably resort to the "trap game" explanation for an unexpected loss that precedes an important game. On the one hand, it may simply be the tendency to fall into groupthink or to rummage through the cliche box when their team suffers that kind of an upset, and in that sense it's probably not worth analyzing too deeply. But on the other hand, I sometimes sense that fans are groping for an excuse rather than an explanation, which is completely understandable; the natural tendency of a fan is to disproportionally attribute the outcome of a game to his own team, whether it's a win or a loss.

Forget the "trap game" stuff, guys. Just tip your caps to UW-Platteville and congratulate the Pioneers on a job really, really well done.

It is not a cliche at all trap games happen, to many teams. Indiana just lost to Fort Wayne before beating North Carolina. If you have been an athlete at a high level you will understand that there is a tendency to overlook opponents with a big game looming. It happens to the best of teams at all levels. This is in noway an excuse to justify NCC's loss, just a mere observation of a good team in a young season.

In all seriousness trap games are very much a real thing - You would have to be blind as a fan to not point out something that obvious.

Pioneers did well sticking to a game plan but, NCC lost - UWP did not win

[WUPHF]

Thanks guys...I wish I would have watched.  Too bad this game will not be available on demand.

https://livestream.com/accounts/5795570/events/6694846/videos/143131046

Thanks man!