(12-19-2022, 01:00 AM)treetop11 Wrote: Have to correect you. We had 8 players in double digit minutes and almost a 9th. Fran had 9 mins. You said in your initial write up that TN was a deep team and you might have said as deep as us ( I can't recall). So if we matched them, don't understand your complaint about depthu.
Hmmm, well the ESPN boxscore and the official boxscore lists these Stanford players in double digit minutes:
1. Jump 40
2. Jones 39
3. Brink 26
4. Lepolo 20
5. Demetre 19
6. Emma-Nnopu 17
7. Iriafan 15
In addition, it lists Prechtel and Belibi at 9 minutes. So I think I was accurate, although it is true that Prechtel and Belibi almost made it to double digits. But maybe my concern is not well supported by minutes played.
Maybe a better way of looking at depth is bench points.
Stanford: 6
Tennessee: 27
Going back to the South Carolina game, bench points were:
Stanford 9
South Carolina 34
Now contrast these two games with Gonzaga and we get very different results with bench points:
Stanford 39
Gonzaga 2
In that game, Gonzaga had only 7 healthy players and we deliberately tried to run them into the ground by widely distributing our minutes (and point opportunities, clearly.) But against South Carolina and against Tennesee our rotation became more restricted, apparently due to perceived matchup problems.
I guess I am curious as to why our bench is not able to be more productive against teams with elite athletes--whether our bench players get too few minutes to be productive or whether it is their lack of productivity that earns them fewer minutes. Or maybe neither--perhaps it is based on defensive matchups that keep them out of games against certain kinds of teams. After all, Emma-Nnopu got a LOT more time against Tennessee than she did against South Carolina (17 vs. 4) as did Demetre (19 vs. 3) and neither of them were productive offensively.