[BostonCard]

last year we had a bunch of good 3-pt shooters, and one bad night from outside against uconn cost us the ncaa's. we can have occasional bad 3-point nights in the regular season, but a single 3-point night like we just had against cal will bounce us from the ncaa's. in our championship year, we had quite the opposite - surprisingly good 3-point games from ashten and haley that saved our bacon.

Hence the adage "live by the three, die by the three", but I have yet to find a shooting statistic that is rock solid stable.  I mean, we made up for a dreadful three point shooting night with an above-average free throw shooting night (though we are a decent free throw shooting team).  The bottom line is that in basketball sometimes cold shooting happens.  Sometimes the other team's defense has something to do with it; sometimes the shots just don't fall.  The best teams pair very good scoring with very good defense so that even if they have a bad shooting night where they score 23 points below their average because they shot 15 percentage points below average (and 15 percentage points below their three point shooting average), as we did against Cal, they can still win by holding their opponent to 56 points, which is what our defense typically holds teams to.  Stanford can be beat (every team can), but it will likely take a combination of us having a sub-par offensive game and our opponents scoring more than our typical opponent does.

BC

[BostonCard]

last year we had a bunch of good 3-pt shooters, and one bad night from outside against uconn cost us the ncaa's. we can have occasional bad 3-point nights in the regular season, but a single 3-point night like we just had against cal will bounce us from the ncaa's. in our championship year, we had quite the opposite - surprisingly good 3-point games from ashten and haley that saved our bacon.

Hence the adage "live by the three, die by the three", but I have yet to find a shooting statistic that is rock solid stable.  I mean, we made up for a dreadful three point shooting night with an above-average free throw shooting night (though we are a decent free throw shooting team).  The bottom line is that in basketball sometimes cold shooting happens.  Sometimes the other team's defense has something to do with it; sometimes the shots just don't fall.  The best teams pair very good scoring with very good defense so that even if they have a bad shooting night where they score 23 points below their average because they shot 15 percentage points below average (and 15 percentage points below their three point shooting average), as we did against Cal, they can still win by holding their opponent to 56 points, which is what our defense typically holds teams to.  Stanford can be beat (every team can), but it will likely take a combination of us having a sub-par offensive game and our opponents scoring more than our typical opponent does.

BC