The Aftermath: Just a little dirty, it's still good

Well, that hurt. It took me two full days before posting about the Gonzaga game, because, well, what is there to say? Gonzaga owns us. As the game went on, it was obvious that we were not ready to play a game like that. Primarily because we hadn't yet played a real road game. I thought that it was a fairly poor performance by the team as a whole - a lack of D on the backdoor cut, poor rebounding, bad outside shooting, and an unwillingness to be factors on the offensive end. UW's game is predicated on rebounding the basketball and creating turnovers, and for most of the game we didn't do that.

I finally looked at the box score today and was surprised by what most of what I saw.
- Romar only really trusts 7 guys on the roster. Harvey Perry, are you listening? Joel Smith, please get healthy.
- 12 missed shots and 4 turnovers by Dentmon. While I think the turnovers are something we will see all year, his shooting numbers were an aberration. Dentmon can get it done against good players, but he will have games like this.
- No rebounds and only 7 shots by Pondexter, including 0 sweet drives. After being such a great rebounder and slasher for the last 5 games, he totally disappeared. Chalk this up to freshmanness. He will have to adjust to playing against more talented players, but he is too talented to be held down for long. An 18 point 7 rebound game from Pondexter would have made the outcome much different.
- 8 assists from Appleby? I think most of these were entry passes into Hawes, so this number is deceptive.
- 4 fouls by Oliver. He got jobbed in this game with 3 50/50 calls going against him.
- Hawes has that strange ability to look bad for large stretches and still end up with great numbers. His little runs where he scores on 4 straight possessions are so sneaky. At one point in this game he was 2-8 with 3 turnovers and 6 points. He finished 9-16 with 4 turns, meaning he scored 14 points on 7 shots and 2 free throws down the stretch with only one turnover. One of these days, he's gonna be great from start to finish and end up with 40 points.
- Take away Dentmon and Appleby's 3 for 20 combined, and the rest of the team shot 28/52.

This team still has problems, and it is apparent that not having Joel Smith will hurt us in the Pac-10, but after this little exercise I feel much better.