re: Auburn vs Arizona Game Thread

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In our two biggest games he's been nearly invisible and he's supposed to be this top player. He's good when it’s easy.

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His lowest scoring game was Mich and he still had 15 in it. Sitting at 13 right now. This will likely be his third game all season where he doesn’t score 20+.

All our players have a lot of room for improvement. Depends on their mentality if they want to grind through the season.

Tahaad Pettiford against Arizona: Career-high 30 points, 10-19 FG, 5-9 3pt FG

Everyone else for Auburn: 38 points, 11-44 FG, 1-16 3pt FG

I don't even know what to say. Hopefully they shoot good enough at the right times and we just make the tournament this year. Will be close to a miracle to drag this team into the post season. Most of these dudes are soft.

Arizona felt way bigger than us, but really only 13 was bigger than anyone we had.

Our defense was atrocious.

Our offense may have been worse.

Turned it off at the half.

Arizona and Michigan are final 4 type teams. I think we are going to be fighting for a 7 to 10 seed.

We need to construct our roster better next year.

Hall is good when he is driving and collecting fouls. To me, his entire game is completely dependent on refs blowing whistles when he drives to initiate contact. When they swallow the whistle he is going to have a bad night.

If defenders are allowed to bang on him, he doesn’t get to the line and they aren’t afraid to guard him tight. He doesn’t seem to have the top tier quickness to just blow by excellent defenders to make them pay when they aren’t cautious about drawing a foul. That good but not elite quickness seems to be one of his issues on the defensive side too, where he has trouble guarding guys with an explosive first step.

They were bigger and more physical. We just don’t have that bid physical dog like Dylan and we need 2 of those. Hopefully our staff is learning anf gonna make changes next yr.

I also hate seeing these stud freshman and us not having one.

This team will never be good on defense. It has actually improved some over the season, but high level offense/oriented teams are going to make us look silly. Overton gives effort but routinely gets beat physically. Hall is seemingly out of position half the time. Note whenever there is a free run at the basket or swing pass to an open shooter, its usually Hall trying to recover to that spot.

After the NC State game, Pearl talked about the high ball pressure and our guard's inability to handle it. His take was that we actually want that pressure as we should be able to break it with a simple pass, playing 4 on 3 at the basket. Well, we struggled with it again against Arizona. Tonight's strategy was for Pet to dribble around it. We don't have the ball handlers this year to deal with ball pressure and the result is that we are not running ANY offense. The shot selection is terrible, taking mostly jacked up 3s and low % 2s. Even Murphy doesn't get many high % 2s as he doesn't take the ball to rim strong. Does he know how to dunk?

This team will win some SEC games with streaky shooting and hopefully some home court help, but I think it will be a struggle to get to .500 in the league and questionable to make the tournament without some heavy coaching and improvement at many levels.

Can't even inbound at times.

eta: And being full court pressed is hard to watch.

I don’t disagree, lil Pearl has to emphasize physicality and develop defenders and rebounders. We can’t lose everytime we play a 7ft center. So far we’re making them look unstoppable

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Pearl making a huge mistake this 2nd half, We have gone pure solo ball on offense not even trying to run plays.

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Arizona was tough and will be ranked #1 after Purdue lost, but this AU team just came unglued.