[TheFarm07]

First off, before I contribute my 2 cents regarding tonight's game, I just wanted to comment that I believe fans can criticize sports teams, even collegiate ones and air frustrations without getting personal or needlessly attacking players' characters. I know that I occasionally let the emotion of the moment get to me and post something that goes too far. Now before hitting that Send button, I take a moment to read what I just wrote and consider the tone of my writing and whether I've crossed a line. I think we can critique decisions, level of play, effort level, play calling, etc. and refrain from calling the players or coaches themselves by unfounded names or characterizations.

I can sympathize with the level of frustration in this thread though. I was unable to watch the game tonight because I had to work late but after reading the comments, I can identify with the source of many of my fellow Cardboarders' consternation.

I am continually frustrated by the amount of unenforced errors in our turnovers. Too many times we force a high-risk, low-reward pass when there's nothing there. Even if it succeeds and we retain possession of the ball, it doesn't seem like we improved our position to score. These are all very smart ladies led by a Hall of Fame coach and I am not sure why we keep pressing the issue when there's little to gain from a pass into a double team or to a player closely guarded by a defender who could pick the ball away.

Secondly, I am exasperated by our lack of ability to solve zone defenses (and our offense in general). Season after season, we have been stymied by zone defenses and we do nothing during the shot clock until a desperation shot at the buzzer. I took this quote from a past game:
 
"The zone...mentioned also was frustrating. Player X, Player Y and Player Z tossed the ball around about 30 feet out, with little or no movement or screening off the ball."

 This quote was not from this season or last year's or even the year before. It was taken from the Tennessee game in which Nneka scored 42 points EIGHT years ago. The players mentioned above was Greenfield, Kokenis and Lindy (who's now one of our assistant coaches). Yet, even as classes come in and out and we've had turnover of the entire roster, we still shut down at the sight of zone defenses. If these type of defenses were so effective, then every team would be using them. They are not impregnable; I've seen good offenses pick apart zone defenses before. We don't need to rely on long range shots either, we need to try to find soft spots in the zone.

Related to that, our offense leaves a lot to be desired. Whenever we have an end of the quarter scenario, where we are keeping for the last possession, I feel like we almost always wait until too little time is left before running a play and then we don't have a Plan B when Plan A is stopped. It seems like we don't have much confidence in running plays early in the shot clock sometimes. I feel like the experiment with the Princeton offense is not going as well as planned. Too many teams know our plays and even though we might score on the occasional backdoor cut, it's not as frequent enough to be consistent. I know Oregon with Ionescu and Hebard is well known for the pick and roll, but as far as I know, we are the only team with a "type" of offense or philosophy. Does Geno run a particular strategy? Is Mulkey known to implement a special philosophy?

Whatever it is, as chimera points out, our offense is not aggressive if it gets into the half court. We are wasting too much time on the shot clock without getting a good look at the basket. We can get over-reliant on one player and that can be easily countered with double teams and denying them the ball.

Perhaps also associated with that is our inconsistency. We can go on spurts where we can seemingly score at will and look like we can compete with anybody, but then there are other times even within the course of the same game, where we go cold and/or make a string of turnovers and let opponents into games without rhyme or reason (e.g. the end of the Oregon State game where we couldn't put them away with a 14-pt lead). I hate arrogance and not giving your opponent credit when credit is due, but sometimes I feel like we need some more cockiness on the team and the self-belief that we are better than our opponents.

We barely beat Colorado the two times that we played them. Meanwhile Oregon demolished them by 40+ points each time. Is Oregon 35 points better than us on a night-in, night-out scale? Though they beat us by a similar scoreline in Eugene, we proved tonight that the gap between our two teams is not that large. We have 9 All-Americans on our roster, but sometimes I feel like we play less than the sum of our parts, which leads to closer than should be games and the occasional loss against a team we should have beaten.

I know UConn is not our favorite team here on the board for many reasons, but you have to admire the consistency of their play. When was the last team UConn lost to a team with more than 4 or 5 losses during a season? Yes, they don't play in a strong conference, but it still takes incredible focus to not only be unbeaten in conference play but breeze through it season after season. After so many easy wins, you would think it would get harder to maintain the same level of motivation and skill every night, yet they still do it. Yes, they've lost by double digits this season, but those were to great teams. But when's the last time they lost to a non-elite team (i.e. not us or Baylor or Notre Dame or MS State, etc.)? You have to go way back to find one (St. John's back on Feb 18, 2012 is the last one I found). Meanwhile, we've had some head-scratching losses over the last few years.

I also agree that Kiana is a very good player who can come up with clutch shots as she did against Colorado, but she is not an All-American. Her shooting is too streaky and unreliable at times, especially her closer range shots (as good of a shooter that she can be, she surprisingly misses a lot of the midrange ones she should be making) and she doesn't get to the line to make up for it. Her drives to the basket are predicated on outfoxing and outmaneuvering her defenders rather than barrelling through them. I also like to see her make better decisions on some of her passing.

As a team, I also feel that we don't make as many open shots as other teams. As Tara pointed out during her press conference tonight, we missed some makeable shots. Though I didn't watch the game, I am not surprised. I feel like we are not as automatic as we should be when we have clean looks. I don't have any concrete evidence to support this assertion, only my memory (biased as it may be). Even making 2 or 3 more of these shots per game would be another 4 to 9 points potentially in a game.

[TheFarm07]

First off, before I contribute my 2 cents regarding tonight's game, I just wanted to comment that I believe fans can criticize sports teams, even collegiate ones and air frustrations without getting personal or needlessly attacking players' characters. I know that I occasionally let the emotion of the moment get to me and post something that goes too far. Now before hitting that Send button, I take a moment to read what I just wrote and consider the tone of my writing and whether I've crossed a line. I think we can critique decisions, level of play, effort level, play calling, etc. and refrain from calling the players or coaches themselves by unfounded names or characterizations.

I can sympathize with the level of frustration in this thread though. I was unable to watch the game tonight because I had to work late but after reading the comments, I can identify with the source of many of my fellow Cardboarders' consternation.

I am continually frustrated by the amount of unenforced errors in our turnovers. Too many times we force a high-risk, low-reward pass when there's nothing there. Even if it succeeds and we retain possession of the ball, it doesn't seem like we improved our position to score. These are all very smart ladies led by a Hall of Fame coach and I am not sure why we keep pressing the issue when there's little to gain from a pass into a double team or to a player closely guarded by a defender who could pick the ball away.

Secondly, I am exasperated by our lack of ability to solve zone defenses (and our offense in general). Season after season, we have been stymied by zone defenses and we do nothing during the shot clock until a desperation shot at the buzzer. I took this quote from a past game:
 
"The zone...mentioned also was frustrating. Player X, Player Y and Player Z tossed the ball around about 30 feet out, with little or no movement or screening off the ball."

 This quote was not from this season or last year's or even the year before. It was taken from the Tennessee game in which Nneka scored 42 points EIGHT years ago. The players mentioned above was Greenfield, Kokenis and Lindy (who's now one of our assistant coaches). Yet, even as classes come in and out and we've had turnover of the entire roster, we still shut down at the sight of zone defenses. If these type of defenses were so effective, then every team would be using them. They are not impregnable; I've seen good offenses pick apart zone defenses before. We don't need to rely on long range shots either, we need to try to find soft spots in the zone.

Related to that, our offense leaves a lot to be desired. Whenever we have an end of the quarter scenario, where we are keeping for the last possession, I feel like we almost always wait until too little time is left before running a play and then we don't have a Plan B when Plan A is stopped. It seems like we don't have much confidence in running plays early in the shot clock sometimes. I feel like the experiment with the Princeton offense is not going as well as planned. Too many teams know our plays and even though we might score on the occasional backdoor cut, it's not as frequent enough to be consistent. I know Oregon with Ionescu and Hebard is well known for the pick and roll, but as far as I know, we are the only team with a "type" of offense or philosophy. Does Geno run a particular strategy? Is Mulkey known to implement a special philosophy?

Whatever it is, as chimera points out, our offense is not aggressive if it gets into the half court. We are wasting too much time on the shot clock without getting a good look at the basket. We can get over-reliant on one player and that can be easily countered with double teams and denying them the ball.

Perhaps also associated with that is our inconsistency. We can go on spurts where we can seemingly score at will and look like we can compete with anybody, but then there are other times even within the course of the same game, where we go cold and/or make a string of turnovers and let opponents into games without rhyme or reason (e.g. the end of the Oregon State game where we couldn't put them away with a 14-pt lead). I hate arrogance and not giving your opponent credit when credit is due, but sometimes I feel like we need some more cockiness on the team and the self-belief that we are better than our opponents.

We barely beat Colorado the two times that we played them. Meanwhile Oregon demolished them by 40+ points each time. Is Oregon 35 points better than us on a night-in, night-out scale? Though they beat us by a similar scoreline in Eugene, we proved tonight that the gap between our two teams is not that large. We have 9 All-Americans on our roster, but sometimes I feel like we play less than the sum of our parts, which leads to closer than should be games and the occasional loss against a team we should have beaten.

I know UConn is not our favorite team here on the board for many reasons, but you have to admire the consistency of their play. When was the last team UConn lost to a team with more than 4 or 5 losses during a season? Yes, they don't play in a strong conference, but it still takes incredible focus to not only be unbeaten in conference play but breeze through it season after season. After so many easy wins, you would think it would get harder to maintain the same level of motivation and skill every night, yet they still do it. Yes, they've lost by double digits this season, but those were to great teams. But when's the last time they lost to a non-elite team (i.e. not us or Baylor or Notre Dame or MS State, etc.)? You have to go way back to find one (St. John's back on Feb 18, 2012 is the last one I found). Meanwhile, we've had some head-scratching losses over the last few years.

I also agree that Kiana is a very good player who can come up with clutch shots as she did against Colorado, but she is not an All-American. Her shooting is too streaky and unreliable at times, especially her closer range shots (as good of a shooter that she can be, she surprisingly misses a lot of the midrange ones she should be making) and she doesn't get to the line to make up for it. Her drives to the basket are predicated on outfoxing and outmaneuvering her defenders rather than barrelling through them. I also like to see her make better decisions on some of her passing.

As a team, I also feel that we don't make as many open shots as other teams. As Tara pointed out during her press conference tonight, we missed some makeable shots. Though I didn't watch the game, I am not surprised. I feel like we are not as automatic as we should be when we have clean looks. I don't have any concrete evidence to support this assertion, only my memory (biased as it may be). Even making 2 or 3 more of these shots per game would be another 4 to 9 points potentially in a game.