NCAA Tournament Postmortem

Well, the game was painful. I have just a couple thoughts to offer.

The injury to Luke Loucks hurt us. Loucks had been playing very well, and when he hurt his arm, we lost valuable depth. By the end of the second half, we looked tired.

The traveling call on Derwin Kitchen was wrong. The refs are not supposed to give a timeout to a player as he is flying out of bounds, and Derwin definitely looked like he may have been on the way out. He came down in bounds, however. The ref called him for traveling. The correct call would have been to wait to see whether or not he landed in or out of bounds, and then give him the timeout retroactively when he landed.

It was really quite improbable that Trevor Hughes would beat Toney Douglas off the dribble for the final play of the game. Toney is one of the best on the ball defenders in the nation, and Hughes is merely a decent scorer. Sometimes it's just not your day.

There has been a lot of talk about that final play, specifically why Leonard Hamilton didn't have Solomon Alabi on the court. It is true that Hughes barely got his shot off over a leaping Ryan Reid, and he almost definitely would not have gotten it over Alabi. I'm not sure whether or not it was the right decision, but I can at least tell you what Hamilton was thinking.

Whenever Alabi was on the floor, Wisconsin moved their center, Leuer, out to the perimiter and used him as a three point shooter. Alabi was faced with the choice of either hanging back to control the paint (but leaving a Leuer open on the perimeter), or covering Leuer (but vacating the middle, and any chance of blocking or altering shots). Alabi tried to compromise, but ended up being ineffectual in the middle and allowing Leuer to knock down open looks.

Among our big guys, Ryan Reid is the best perimeter defender, and he's also a very solid post defender. He is not, however a great shot blocker. Hamilton chose to play Reid, and force Wisconsin to beat us off the drive (our man defense had been solid all game), rather than to eliminate the drive but potentially give up an open perimeter shot. Once again, I don't know if it was the right decision by the percentages, but it wasn't a negligent oversight on Hamilton's part.