Gopher hoops dropped another home game to a team at the bottom of the conference
Saturday’s men’s basketball game was incredibly disappointing, but frankly it shouldn’t be terribly surprising. This team is difficult to predict and depending on what you want your narrative to be, has either been overachieving or missing several opportunities to move up a tier in the Big Ten pecking order.
Both are probably true.
The dramatic improvement we have seen from this squad over the last two months has been remarkable. They have taken down some very good teams and played very well in road games.
They have also lost at home to the teams currently sitting in last and second-to-last in the Big Ten.
This team has managed a winning record over their last 10 games.
They also started 0-6 in conference and have achieved feats like allowing Penn State to win their first (and only) road game of the season.
It is frustrating…but again, maybe it shouldn’t be.
The reality is that they play the games for a reason. Games are not won or lost based on where teams are in the standings. And it is especially true in basketball that sometimes you play well enough to beat teams that are better than you (Michigan, Oregon, UCLA) and sometimes you play poorly enough (or the other team plays well enough) to beat you, even when you might be the better team.
I have two significant problems with this team and largely the Ben Johnson coaching tenure.
One, the Gophers are not nearly talented enough to beat anybody just because we are more talented. And they haven’t approached this level in several seasons. It is debatable, this season, if we are more talented than Washington or Penn State or Northwestern.
They have done a great job of getting better throughout the season and finding ways to beat some truly good teams. But the frustration is very high when you drop games at home to teams that are at your level.
And secondly, the reason we are losing some of these games is not because we are being outplayed, it is because we go long stretches in every game where the offense is useless. Sometimes it might be as simple as missing shots that are decently open (see Penn State loss). Sometimes we go long stretches without running sets through one of the best players in the conference (see Wichita St and Wake Forest losses). And sometimes we just have a stagnant offense that appears to forget every offensive fundamental taught (reverse the ball, move without the ball, make crisp passes, etc). It is a breakdown of execution…read as “coaching.”
Talent and coaching matter more than anything else in college basketball. Know what you run, teach it well and bring in talent to support that. Johnson and staff have done decently well at both, but this season is a textbook in frustration because neither is (or has been) good enough.