The Bobcat Nation

Harry dressed out and shooting at the early shoot around. Let’s go Cats!

I was hoping someone would update.

Yay!

Well, I went to both games. The ladies game was really up tempo. Enough 3 pointers made by the Cats to earn a Wendy's chili once again. 92 points scored. Dominated the Griz. Ladies cut the nets down. Great crowd of almost 4000.

Then I went to the men's game. At times it was like sitting in the dentist's chair. Really a struggle to watch. The guys played their hearts out. However, they shot 3 for 20 from 3 point and also missed a bunch of free throws.

UM's defense was smothering. I thought that MSU's defense played very hard. The Griz just have better shooters on their team than we do and more of them.

Good effort to keep it as close as we did. The arena appeared packed to me. There was so much energy in the crowd. Like a huge wound up spring just waiting to burst out. But the Cats could never get a run going to allow that explosion to happen. I really think if they could have made a run, the crowd would have erupted to such an extent that it could have rattled UM and allowed MSU to prevail. Didn't happen.

The most exciting thing of the night was the kid at halftime who made all of his shots, including both half-court and full-court to win 11 grand.

So the MSU women swept the Griz and won the conference championship. We have now beaten the UM women 9 out of the last 11 games.
The MSU men were swept by UM yet again and we are settling in at around the middle of the pack in the conference. For Danny Sprinkle to turn this thing around, he is basically going to have to do what Trish Binford has done for the women's program. He is going to really have to recruit good players who play hard, are athletic and can shoot. The kind of players that UM currently has on their roster. I hope he can do it. The Cat nation is really tired of losing to the Griz. What is this now, 19 out of the last 20 lost to the Griz?
But again. Great crowd and great hustle and effort. Gotta have more good players though.

Go Cats

Are Guliford and Quinlan hurt or what? I just don't understand how we are only playing 8 players in games like this and Ricketts(don't give me wrong, I love the kid) is getting 37 minutes with 1-5 shooting. We run our starters into the ground and the backups don't seem to be getting any experience outside of Fernadez. Maybe that's a page Sprinkle should take out of Binford's book.

Fernandez is the only bench player that will play a lot down the stretch. He plays defense, rebounds, has good moves down low, and shoots the 3. He and Adamu are our only weapons with Harald about 75%. ( he pushed it to about 90% in the second half). None are jump shooters from distance like Harald. We need scorers that can manufacture shots. Then send the big guys to the boards!

God would never allow us to be good at women's basketball, men's basketball, and football in the same school year. It's just asking too much. It took Binford and Choate several seasons to get it going in the right direction. As much as we'd hoped, there's no shortcut or magic formula for Sprinkle. It'll be a long process if he can do it at all.

The fatal flaw in this team is the lack of a shooting guard that can shoot. I can't count the number of times belo was doubled, or Frey had a drive stopped, where the ball was kicked to adamu. The kid does well going to the rim and he gets a ton out of his athleticism, but when you command 0% respect outside it makes defending the team easy. Just help off him or Paulo.

BelgradeBobcat wrote: ↑

Sun Feb 23, 2020 2:11 am

God would never allow us to be good at women's basketball, men's basketball, and football in the same school year. It's just asking too much. It took Binford and Choate several seasons to get it going in the right direction. As much as we'd hoped, there's no shortcut or magic formula for Sprinkle. It'll be a long process if he can do it at all.

This exactly. I have an incredible amount of respect for Coach DeCuire and the fact that he has chosen to stay at UM and build what they have there instead of jumping ship to a bigger school at the first opportunity like many coaches would (and understandably so given the potential pay increase) . I think MSU finally has the guy in place now to build a consistently championship caliber team, but as with Choate and Binford there are no quick fixes and he's going to need a few years worth of his own recruiting classes to really build something special.