Pilots vs. Western Oregon

The most amazing part was that we put a guy on the floor who's 6'11" and 285 and he looked like a midget next to 2 of their guys....

I'd like to come up with something positive....

I can't.

Not much farther down than losing to a team that's a full division lower than you are. Although come to think of it, losing to Cascade (which is NAIA) would definitely be worse. And that's a regular season game, too.

*Proceeds to bang head against wall*

Yea, that game was hard to watch. When the team came out I immediately noticed how skinny our team is (with the possible exception of Hannidal). Even before the tip Western Oregon made us look small (except that little number 12), probably not a good sign when we go up against the Oregon and higher end WCC teams. What I think really showed tonight was that there are a lot of freshmen on this team and those freshmen looked like freshmen and thats not good. Ito did have some pretty impressive slashing cuts but his size minimized there effectiveness and he looked just a little off. Watson only really decided to show up in the last couple minutes. Hannibal sort of reminded me of Marcus Lewis. He had a couple nice moves and then had trouble finishing but he's young and thats pretty understandable. On the flip side, I really liked watching Ravio, which is pretty crazy when you take into account the hate I had for his older brother. I think he could turn into something special.
Also, I don't know if anybody noticed a couple noteworthy spectators. Coop came in pretty early on in the game. And on the top row behind the hoop sat a large portion of the PSU basketball team, Jones, Dominguez and Tiefenthaler (sp?). If we lose to PSU I might need some heavy medicating.

Wow, I did not expect this when I woke up this morning...That is a very bad way to start the year out...

Just looking at the box score, it appears that Raivio is our biggest contributor: 14 points, 4-7 from the field, 3 assists, 2 steals in 23 minutes. I was shocked that Smeulders played only 4 minutes, that Thompson started, Watson only took 5 shots, and that Sikma took 11 shots.

It looks like (again, only from the stat line) Knutson and SIkma were able to do alright fown low. The eached grabbed a fair number of boards.

The scariest thing to me is what someone mentioned above: we just look way smaller than the other teams. Oh crap. This is not good.

We'll see how the next game shapes up I suppose. Sigh.

The pilots sure did look nervous outthere. I also notice that our players were looking a lot to the bench for direction. I know there timing and choice of shot was totally off. Hopefullly on the next exhibition game on Saturday will be a diffirent outcome.

Losttime

Smeulders, to me, was the biggest disappointment in the game. I'm not sure why he didn't start, but picking up three fouls in four minutes is just ridiculous. Still, I was surprised to not see him out on the floor at the end of the game... I'm wondering if maybe he is hurt a little bit or something? He looked OK, but you never know... or maybe he was just in the dog house after all the fouls?

Anyway... the big thing I noticed was that on offense we didn't seem to be really running the plays. At the scrimmage, I was encouraged because they were doing a good job of working the ball from the outside to the inside to either a quality shot or back outside for an open look. Last night... seemed like they were dribbling around for a while and then maybe penetrating and kicking out or just kind of forcing a shot because, well, what else are you going to do with it? I can definitely see lots of areas for improvement on the offensive end.

As for effort... how many times have we seen this happen? Seems like every time we play a team like this (Concordia, Seattle U, Lews & Clark, etc.) we never really play very enthusiastically. Usually we end up pulling away at the end based on talent, but remember... Pooh and Donald's senior year we lost to Seattle during the regular season. I can't explain why, but struggling to teams like this does have a precedent.

Anyway, I'm definitely interested to see how they come out on Saturday against Concordia. If they come out lackadaisacal, I'll be very disappointed. If they come out looking like they've got something to prove, I'll know we've got guys with the right kind of attitude to improve through adversity, since that's what we're going to have to do a lot of this year.

Positive thought for Geezer:

Hey, it's not every day that the Pilots get to be on the wrong end of an upset!

*Continues banging head against wall*

So true....

Here's my positive thought... during halftime a friend of mine came up and we were talking about how the first half didn't look so great, and he joked, "Well, what do you expect when the average age of our guys out on the floor is 17."

Yes, this sucks. Yes, I wanted to jab a fork in my eye after we lost our last chance to tie the game on a bad pass. Yes, I'm hating life this morning.

But we can't get too carried away. It's one game, the team is super young, there was tons of experimentation with line-ups and match-ups, it was Halloween (when weird things always happen)... and it's only pre-season. Honestly, we can pretty much just pretend that this didn't happen, which is what I think my chosen defense mechanism is going to be... just like that time a few Halloweens ago when I met that girl dressed like a piece of bread at a party...

Good points, Stoney

I'm all for deleting this thread and pretending Concordia is our first game....

You must remember that the team is made of kids right out of Hish School. It is Division I basketball not high school. There are kids on the team that weigh 165 pounds. They are not going to bang the boards or even get close to it. There are kids that should not even be on the team so don't expect miracles. As I said before Freshman and Sophomore do not win games and UP is playing with alot of them without experience. Last year the team had alot court time and 4 seniors left not including Jones and Emerson who both had court time. Don't set your goals too high but I think Rev's contact will expire before UP has a winning season.

My personal opinion is that beating the Western Oregon University Wolves would not be a miracle. I do expect better performance, also not a miracle.

I'm not going to freak out about this loss, but I I am going to shake my head in disbelief. And I am going to expect that this team be competitive.

Ouch .... 37% shooting from the floor with our starting backcourt at 13%
## Player Name, FG-FGA
34 WATSON, Sherrard, 3-5
43 SIKMA, Luke, 4-11
45 KNUTSON, Kramer, 3-5
04 THOMPSON, Walter, 1-6
05 ITO, Taishi, 1-9
01 RAIVIO, Nik, 4-7
3 NIEDERMEYER, Ethan, 3-4
12 SMEULDERS, Robin, 0-3
20 STOHL, Jared, 0-2
32 CARTER, Marcus, 1-2
55 HANNIBAL, Jasonn, 2-5
TEAM total = 22-59 .... 37%

I disagree with a couple of points 68OrBB makes. First of all, I still have confidence in Coach Rev, particularly given the description Coop gave at halftime. Rev's under contract for three (?) more years including this one, and I have every confidence that we'll see a winning season before then.

That being said . . .

Last night we weren't playing a Division I basketball team. We were playing a Division II basketball team that lost by 60 (sixty) points to BYU last year. I'm not happy now, but if we don't beat Concordia by more than 40 . . .

You know... looking at the stats, it's kind of maddening that we didn't perform a lot better. Yes, we didn't shoot very well, but neither did they really... 37% for us and 43% for them. We outrebounded them, had less turn overs, had more assists, shot better from the line (though we actually shot pretty poorly from the line), had less fouls... they hit a few more three-pointers, but it wasn't like they were just bombing us to death.

In the end, we just couldn't seem to make the key buckets that we needed to, I guess. But it's hard to pin-point one thing aside from field goal percentage that is a clear indicator of why we lost. Really, I think it had more to do with a lack of being able to run plays to get high-percentage shots and clean looks at the basket and an inability to make stops when we needed to.

But enough is enough is enough... let's just worry about Saturday.

Oh, and before I forget, I think Rochin and Dionnfan made plenty of good points, especially about not expecting mircales but definitely expecting the team to be competitive and out their busting their asses. And we didn't see that last night. I'm willing to excuse it because it was preseason and because of youth and because of line-up experimentation and all of that. But we better see some improvement quick, otherwise we'll be in for a MUCH MUCH longer season than I think any of us were expecting.

As for the future... I truly believe it's in good hands with Rev and the rest of the coaches. I know it's two years down the line and a lot can happen in two years, but just think about it... we could have four senior starters (Ito, Smeulders, Raivio, Niedermeyer) a huge and experienced junior class (Sikma, Knutson, Stohl, Porter, Hannibal). If we can add a a few talented recruits into that mix (Somogyi, hopefully, plus another soph and two frosh)... that's a very nice picture of a team that could be solid, talented, and perform well in conference. Kind of like Santa Clara last year or SMC this year. I really do think we are building towards that type of level.

But as of today, we lost to a DII team. So... there's still a long way to go.