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How do you avoid being 'tight'?

Anyone who watched us tonight knew it, the guys played tight for 40 minutes. They were playing not to lose.

I've been thinking about this second tourney game game all season long, and how we just needed to get over the hump. My question is, how do you avoid that frame of mind? The tightness? Is it preparation? Is it on the coaches? Is it on the individual players?

Too much to ask...

My daughter's team won the Connecticut Class M Girls Basketball State Championship today at Mohegan Sun. They caught on fire the five games in the tournament and won some games they easily could have lost. Nova wins 16 straight including the BET.

Life isn't that good - came down crashing today.

Sun will come up tomorrow. Coaching my little one in the finals of the Connecticut Hoopfest and the madness starts again. Life goes on and we all do our things tomorrow - pain is severe, but we won the BET and have two studs fueling the next generation of our program in Jalen and Spellman...

Don't listen to the pundits - all three on CBS picked Nova - Kellogg, Barkley and Kenny - tonight and all were wrong. They know as much as we do - or less. We blew layups early. They played very tough. We got knocked off our horse a bit. It happens.

This team entertained us for four amazing months. It all came crashing down today. Jalen joins the party in 2 months and the beat goes on!

Dana O'Neil

Highlights:


Villanova: "......They looked timid and tentative, a team more afraid to lose than one searching for a win. "

"This wasn't really that complicated for N.C. State. A team with guards every bit as quick and just as good as shooters as the Wildcats have matched Nova toe to toe in the backcourt and exposed Villanova's major weakness -- its frontcourt. Mixing Lennard Freeman and BeeJay Anya, the Wolfpack ate up Villanova's interior game to the tune of 34 points in the paint to just 14 for the Wildcats. Abu was the real star, finishing with 13 points and 12 rebounds."

"Ball don't lie? Numbers don't either. Villanova's were horrendous everywhere. One of the best 3-point shooting teams in the country finished 5 of 16 from behind the arc."



http://espn.go.com/blog/collegebasketballnation/post/_/id/105528/five-observations-nc-state-upsets-villanova


http://espn.go.com/blog/collegebasketballnation/post/_/id/105528/five-observations-nc-state-upsets-villanova

Hilliard

Hilliard was lost for much of the second half but damn did he try to put us on his back. Really going to miss this guy. I honestly did not expect him to turn out to be as great of a player that he did. Good luck to him and Pinky with their futures.

What Jay and This Program May Need

I think an underachieving regular season as a dangerous six seed is what is in order. I feel tonight pretty much erases doubt that we struggle as the hunted. All past disappointments have had a caveat. The Reynolds senior year team played no D. The team last year looked bad in BET and first round vs UW Milwaukee.

This team was firing on all cylinders. BET title and a beautiful first round performance. Then we come out tonight and within five minutes we are playing out of sorts.

3 point loss.........

Even though Nova got killed on the boards........got destroyed inside on offense and defense.........shot terrible from the arc.......only had 5 TO's. So, you can say N C State didn't win the game, Nova lost it in grand fashion. As poorly as they played, with 30 secs left, they had a decent shot to win or tie the game.
The most obvious malfunction was the play of Daniel Ochefu.......he missed at least 4 layups/dunks, and was invisible on defense. Jay got him out as much as possible, but, getting hammered on the boards (they had 18 offensive boards), he had to put him on the court. And giving some credit to NC State, they took Arch, Hart & Ennis out of the game. Such an abrupt end to the most promising season is hard to swallow; the 33 wins won't be remembered nearly as much as the 2nd round loss to an 8 seed.

This post was edited on 3/21 10:31 PM by Mainliner II

Kiss of death

As it turns out, we would have been much better off losing the BET final and getting a 2 seed instead of a 1. We couldn't handle the pressure of being a one seed. We managed to fulfill all of the predictions of the "experts" out there who said we would be the first #1 out of the tournament. Very embarrassing for our program and the conference. When the conference's best team, by a pretty wide margin, loses to the seventh best team in the ACC, that speaks volumes.
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