Amazing Win, but is our work done?

For discussion of Vanderbilt Commodores men's basketball games and recruiting.

Moderators: kerrigjl, BrentVU, jfgogold, NateSY, KarenYates, Vandyman74, roanoke, VandyWhit

Jason94
Admiral
Posts: 6121
Joined: Wed Nov 23, 2016 10:15 am
Has thanked: 2 times
Been thanked: 56 times

Amazing Win, but is our work done?

Post by Jason94 »

One of the main criteria for whether a coach is accomplishing his mission (besides making the tournament) is beating UK. UK will always be the gold standard program in the SEC, and while we are unlikely to be at their level on a consistent basis, we should have a good enough program that we can beat them on a somewhat regular basis. For this season, CJS has not only accomplished this feat, but stomped it into the ground and send 10's of thousands of UK fans back north with a one and done appearance in the SEC-T. This is something that JVBK couldn't accomplish and was a part of his downfall, and something that CBD definitely didn't do, though it was probably the least of his problems.

I know there exists studies into whether or not an athlete can be "clutch", or if it is a combination of luck and confirmation bias. We think of Michael Jordan as one of the most clutch players of all time, but is that because he always hit the game winner, or that he took so most every game winning shot and we simply don't recall those shots that bounced off the rim? Regardless, this last 10 games has seen a number of players making "clutch" plays for Vandy and last night, while avoiding the drama with the final play, showcased a number of big plays and shots from different players.

Tyrin Lawrence seems to have absorbed some of Scottie Pippen Jr's tempo, as he uses changes of speed to find openings, and then takes advantage of his height and athletic abilities to score at and around the rim. But he seems to have found both his FT shot and three point shot and hit a number of shots as the clock ran out, and had our final field goal, which pushed the lead to 6 points with about 1 minute to go, essentially icing the win. Manjon similarly has been shooting much better as of late, and his clutchness was best exemplified by the tremendous over and back save that turned into a shot-clock beating three that also broke a UK scoring run. Additionally clutch was the fact that the team went 18-20 from the line - for a team that doesn't have a single player who attempted a FT with an average above 75% to hit 18 or 20 is incredibly clutch. UK otoh missed a couple of huge front ends of 1 and 1's, and went just 11 of 20 from the line.

As the rest of the game has been broken down a ton, I'll add this - for all the game we've played against UK, this was about the most even in terms of officiating. This is not to say that there weren't missed calls, but on the critical calls throughout the game, the refs did get it right. That they called a flagrant against Tshiebwe was surprising in that it was called at all, and the call at the end of the game that reversed the initial offensive foul call against Smith was also a brave call by the refs.

I'll look at the bubble later, but I think we should be in. Road and Neutral site wins against good teams are gold in the committee's mind, and the last 10 days have featured 2 non-home wins against a good UK team that are wins that most schools on the bubble will not possess more than one of. I would ignore the prognosticators, who quite frankly haven't even looked at our overall resume until maybe a week ago, and therefore haven't had reason to watch any of our games until recently, and that is assuming that they hadn't just written us off completely and are only including us in an "also considered" category due to the overwhelming weight of this season ending streak.

We could also just Forrest Gump it, and figure that since we've gone this far, we might as well go a bit further and beat aTm and give the committee no option but to put us in the tournament.