Game Day Open Thread - PSU Basketball

PSU Football Open Thread = 1200 comments

PSU Basketball Open Thread = 0 comments

We look ok. I’m going to be scared when we go up against teams with heigth

Friday night = work
Saturday = no work (usually)

Sure, there are a few points we’d like to get better on, but for an opener – it works. Didn’t see any of it, but a quick review of the stats are probably as good a story as any with this sort of game.

And since I missed the bball game, I am making up for it with the gametracker of both the W Soccer (first round vs Rutgers) and W Volleyball (@ Illinois). And I have the radio broadcast of the Icers game on in the background.

There’s no such thing as a Penn State sports addiction….

did Laurinaitis get them, too?

and i am very impressed with battle and cornley.

a healthy cornley is going to be a force in the paint and will lead the big ten in double doubles

battles shot looks improved and he looks bigger/stronger. he looked like scottie reynolds out there causing turnovers and running the offense

the weakness of this team appears like it is going to be defense under the basket, and the more that we give help down low might open up 3s. its nice that we can play some man on man now, we have the quickness to match up with teams in big ten play i think.

however, the offense looks good, everybody is making 3s on offense and i think we are headed to at least a winning record and an NIT berth.

dare i say, maybe we can be awesome?

one step at a time….

Decent amount of people there. I’m not a bball expert but the team seemed to play pretty well.

I was planning on watching it. Instead I worked late, and then came home to a ticked off girlfriend…woooo….

I think W&M gave us more of a game than I was expecting. We jumped out to an early double digit lead and it stayed that way for most of the evening, but we never really put them away until late. I would have liked to have seen them stretch that lead from ten points to twenty. They got the lead as high as 17 early in the seond before letting it dwindle down to nine. Then they turned the intensity knob back up and put them away.

W&M mostly played zone, so it was a night where our shooters were going to have to come up big. They did well shooting 40% from the arc.

They need to work on defending the guys who don’t have the ball. We played man-to-man all night and the Tribe was having success cutting to the basket and getting easy layups. They really did a good job of spreading us out and creating space to get the ball to different guys slashing to the basket. We’ll need to tighten up that defense and rotate the help faster.

Battle had an outstanding game scoring 21 points with five rebounds and two assists. I would like to see him average five or six assists a game. We really need him to spread the ball around and get more people invovled.

Andrew Jones and DJ were pretty quiet all night. Jones seems to have developed a nice jump hook move in the lane during the off season. We didn’t see it much tonight, but I’m hoping to see more of it. He only had 4 points and 4 rebounds in 28 minutes. Three of those rebounds came on the offensive side. We’re going to need him to step it up on the defensive end. Jackson looks good on defense, but I would like to see him get more involved in the offense.

Cornley was our only presence in the middle, but man is he a presence. 14 points and 12 rebounds tonight. He hustles so hard that the other guys sometimes stand around just watching him trying to stay out of his way. Jones and Jackson have to get in there and bang around with him. He’s not going to be able to do it all himself. He’s only 6’5".

We didn’t see much from the freshmen tonight. Babb only got in for five minutes late in the first half. He didn’t get a shot off, but did pull down a rebound. Woodyard played nine minutes and showed some good athletic ability on defense. He had a steal and a basket in his short time. He’s got a thick body and looks like he could play small forward if pressed into it.

We have a good nucleus of players with Battle, Cornley, Pringle, Morrissey, Jones, and Jackson. But we’ll need more help from the bench. The starters scored all but five our our points and played a lot of minutes. I’m eager to see Jeff Brooks in action and I’m hoping he’ll make a solid contribution in scoring and rebounding.

There are some concerns, but it was a good first game. We probably would have lost to a team like this two years ago.