Canes vs. GT

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Perfect game to go bad. Wong ice cold, Omier foul trouble on the road against a team fighting for its first ACC win after losing 3 straight. Refs gave GT all the help they wanted. We missed free throws.

And voila! We have an upset.

We'll be back.
Omier really screwed the pooch taking a stupid 3 and then frickin committing his 5th foul
 
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You know it is not your night when the Tech fans were yelling from the stands for Miami to shoot 3s. Thought the law of averages would eventually work out. Not tonight. Nice job coming back but Tech had one dude who lit everyone up and we got a ding dong shooting a 3 at a crucial point in the game that he had no business shooting. Oh well.
 
Of course this sucks and is just plain bad… BUT…

this team needed to lose.

You can only learn so many lessons from ugly/fortunate wins.

Adversity is the best teacher… and I really believe this team needed some adversity to grow.

I just hope they learn the right lessons from this loss rather than the wrong lessons.

The team has too much depth and talent for a bad offensive night from Wong to be an excuse for taking the L. Pack also played lazy for stretches… but that was my whole point above.

Also… Omier is a lynchpin and we are SO lucky to have him but he has to get sat the next time he takes a three. The sample size is way too large for him to have any business chucking it.
 
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Got back from the game and lots of good comments on here but that was disappointing. I won’t harp on the points already made about Wong and Omier because they are all correct, especially about Omier shooting 3’s. But the truth is that no team should win a game in which it was out shot from 3 point range by as much as we were, outshot from the free throw line and out rebounded.

I love Coach L but I thought he went back to Omier too early with 4 fouls (about 6:30 to play) and I really wish he had given Casey more run. The lack of size isn‘t so obvious if we are making 3’s but not making 3’s and lacking size is an almost impossible combination to overcome.

One other factor which I may have missed if it was discussed elsewhere but Wooga was far and away our best player in the 2nd half, even with 2 missed free throws. He dominated stretches of the game with his defense. His re-injuring his leg was precisely when we lost momentum and Omier fouling out was when the game basically ended.

Like @AmherstCane wrote, a team can only learn so much from ugly wins. This will hopefully give Coach L the ammunition he needs.
 
You can only learn so many lessons from ugly/fortunate wins.
At least you didn't buy into the hype that this suddenly 12th ranked team with an amazing W-L record that included some worthy opponents was all of a sudden gonna run away with the ACC title and get a very high bracket seed. Sure, if all the very good players have very good nights at the same time, not even those with extra-extra height, would be immune from our whirlwind...

...but we know how unlikely that is, and we have seen the inconsistency on both sides of the court...also the chuck the hero-ball, lazy sloppy time, inability to finish with a lead, not-smart-play... and how refs and Omier's fear of more fouls can change the tenor of the game immensely for the worse (and at times barely sneak thru with a come-from-behind win over underdogs.)

If this pretty awful loss (actually "ugly") makes the guys work harder, remove any false bravado or overblown sense of superiority in a very competitive league, it might well have been a gainful opportunity. Hope so.
 
At least you didn't buy into the hype that this suddenly 12th ranked team with an amazing W-L record that included some worthy opponents was all of a sudden gonna run away with the ACC title and get a very high bracket seed. Sure, if all the very good players have very good nights at the same time, not even those with extra-extra height, would be immune from our whirlwind...

...but we know how unlikely that is, and we have seen the inconsistency on both sides of the court...also the chuck the hero-ball, lazy sloppy time, inability to finish with a lead, not-smart-play... and how refs and Omier's fear of more fouls can change the tenor of the game immensely for the worse (and at times barely sneak thru with a come-from-behind win over underdogs.)

If this pretty awful loss (actually "ugly") makes the guys work harder, remove any false bravado or overblown sense of superiority in a very competitive league, it might well have been a gainful opportunity. Hope so.

I actually still think the reasonable and achievable goal should be to win the ACC and get a very high bracket seed.

This is a very, very good team that has multiple options and has demonstrated the ability to score, defend, and rebound at a very high level… when they bring “it”.

I’m hoping that this post was prescient and the learning happens (while GT is not a terrible team, they are a bad team):
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Often the case when you have to fight back over and over again your expending so much energy that once you make that run the odds are against you holding a slim lead. Against ND we were able to create distance as the game reached its end. This was just too much to overcome. In some ways a valiant effort to regain the lead but just too much energy expended to close the deal.
 
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We got away with some sloppy finishes in the past few weeks but it caught up with us this time... hopefully we learn and move on....
It’s a concerning trend that we are struggling to close out games. Cornell and UVA served as warnings, and it costed us last night.

Everyone is bringing up the poor 3 point shooting and rightfully so - 5/32 is absolutely abysmal. But WHY did we shoot 32 3’s? That’s an absurd amount. We shot 68 field goals in total, so 3’s were nearly 50% of our attempts. When we saw the shots weren’t falling, coupled with GT fouling us every time we drove the lane, why did we stop attacking late in the game? Tired legs? Complacency?
 
Horrific horrific loss
That's the ACC. Gotta be ready for every game, regardless of opponent. Maybe with the exception of Louisville, there isn't a team in the league who can't beat us on a given night. Not likely too in most cases, but hardly impossible, es[ecially at their place.

I thought GT played excellent defense. Their guards pushed ours out toward half court to start our half court sets. Made us work harder than most teams we've played so far. They also were uncanny from the FT stripe. They deserved the W, credit to Pastner for having them prepared.
 
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Pack and Wong had an off night and Omeir got to play less than half the game.

That’s how we lose. Just need to respond next week. Even when we won the ACC we dropped a game to bottom at GT.

I said 8-2 over the next 10 would put us in position to win the league. Now it’s 7-1 over the next 8.
 
A half dozen ACC losses is still a fine season, especially if you're healthy and peaking as a team at the right time. That's where we stood last ACC season. UNC lost 5 games, Duke lost 4.
 
We are currently #18 in RPI, and we are #39 in NET rankings.

We are 4-0 currently in QUAD 1 wins, only 2 teams have more QUAD 1 wins than Miami that is Arizona and Kansas.

our 2 losses are QUAD 2 losses, so not terrible in that aspect. The QUAD wins/losses and NET rankings play most important aspect in committee and seeding I think.

Providence beating UCONN, and N.C. State beating Duke helped our current resume.

We had a bad night, after a long layoff and Holidays. We need to regroup and refocus. I think we will be alright.
 
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