Game Links:
Tortilla Tossin’ Player of the Game: TJ Toppin in his return from injury, he went 11 of 19 for 26, 10 boards, 2 assits, 4 blocks, and 2 turnovers.
The Motion:
- Highly disappointing. To lose a conference opening game to a team where you are the double-digit favorite, at home is a real bad way to start Big 12 action. The problem was defensively, UCF wasn’t that great of an offensive team, but all of those drives to the block, I am thinking there should have been a defender to help and that didn’t happen. So many easy buckets basically at the block. And then you had a UCF team absolutely career from deep, 43% from the field from the 3-point line and they made 86% of their free throws. Defensively, that entire game was unacceptable.
- Advanced stats say that Overton, McMillian, Williams, Anderson and Federiko were all negative in their defensive performance, probably meaning that while these players were on the floor, UCF was scoring at will.
- This is an aside, but I think it is becoming clear that there’s not an alpha dog at point guard at this point. Hawkins is a fine point guard, but he’s not an alpha and can’t play defense like Toussaint did last year. I don’t know what you do about that other than try to mold what you’ve got in the team you have.
- You know that it’s not going well when two of your best players go 1 of 9 from the floor in the 1st half. Chance McMillian can only get off 2 shots for the entire half and misses both, while Williams goes 1 of 7. They each showed up in the 2nd half, which is fine, but that sort of half isn’t going to cut it.
- This was the first game that McCasland had Toppin and Federiko play together quite a bit and it didn’t work as well as you wanted because those two bigs couldn’t stick with the UCF players, namely Hall.
- After the game McCasland said that there were scouting mistakes made and I don’t recall a time when McCasland said that the entire team has to be accountable. Scouting playing a major part of knowing what players are going to do so that’s interesting.
- So many stats were in favor of Texas Tech, except for shooting percentage. Texas Tech won the rebounding battle, 38-34, won 2nd chance points, 18-, and won points in the paint, 52-28.
- Head coach Grant McCasland: “It was a disappointing start. That’s an understatement. Give them a lot of credit. Darius Johnson and his leadership and physicality and the way they guarded made it extremely difficult on us. Their switching and physicality and then drove it at us and put us on our heels. We couldn’t guard them. That’s on me 100 percent. I have to have us ready to go defensively. To start Big 12 play with this lack of physicality and let a team come into our place and let a team score 87 points is ridiculous. There’s a lot of improvement we can make. I love our team and our team identifies that we can play good offensively and score, but we have a lot of growing up to do and experience that is needed to be a legitimate contender in this league. I loved our scrap at the end of the game.”
- Advanced stats say that Toppin was +16.1, Federiko was +8.6, Hawkins was +6.9, and McMillian was +1.0. Negatives were Walton at -8.6, Anderson -4.5, Overton -3.2, and Williams -0.1.
- Up next is on the road at Utah on Saturday, January 4th with tip-off at 6:00 p.m. and on ESPN+.
Highlights