Thoughts from the Road: Friars Drop First Road Game at DePaul

This Thoughts from the Road: Laying in Bed Edition is brought to you by tweets from Dr. Vance Morgan and fueled by lasagna from Louie’s Pizzeria and Restaurant. 

• I was trying to decide if this game was harder to watch than the game at Creighton that Providence won, 50-48, at the buzzer. My conclusion was that the losing nature of the game did make it harder to watch. The in-game reasons that made each game hard to watch were the same: Providence couldn’t hit shots and they couldn’t clean their defensive glass. The overall rebounding disparity was much worse in this DePaul game, but the offensive rebounding numbers were similar. DePaul’s 18 offensive rebounds led to 22 second chance points against Providence’s 9 offensive rebounds leading to 8 second chance points. That 14 point differential was massive. The Friars are now 6-1 on the road this season.

• Looking at the team stats from this game, it’s stunning that Providence lost a game where they made nine 3-pointers, forced 19 turnovers and got 24 points off the bench. Those three stats in most other games this season would have been surefire winners. The rebounding really did kill the Friars. Ben Bentil going down didn’t help and neither did Jalen Lindsey missing the game due to the flu. When Kyron Cartwright is your second leading rebounder, it probably isn’t a good thing.
• Kris Dunn had one of the worst games of the season against DePaul. It’s shocking because he torched a similar DePaul team last season with a triple-double. Dunn missed a number of shots at the rim and showed clear signs of frustration throughout the night. Whether he was pressing a little harder because Bentil was out is up for grabs. Things that are inexcusable are missing free throws. It’s even worse if you missed front ends of one-and-one’s. The worseness becomes magnified when those misses come down the stretch of an attempted comeback. DePaul was trying to DePaul all over that game last night and give Providence a bunch of opportunities to come back, only to have the Friars imitate the Blue Demon Way. Dunn’s 25% field goal percentage was his worst since the illness-shortened 2/8 first half against Boston College. These two games are the only ones he’s shot below 33.3% from the field all season.
• One of the more striking things in this game how many times Providence was beat back in transition. Ed Cooley must have been close to losing his mind as he watched his team come out slow, have defensive lapses in the halfcourt and then, on top of all of that, watch DePaul players streak ahead of his players for easy transition scores. Aside from the mental lapses in the halfcourt, the rest of it is pure effort. Providence was not the team with the higher intensity level in this game and it showed in rebounding, loose balls and transition defense.
• Providence got some good contributions from their young players, including Quadree Smith’s solid minutes when Bentil went down. The bench scoring was their best since the win against Bryant where they scored 33 points off the pine, including 16 from Bentil who was coming off the bench after injuring his ankle the game before against Boston College. The scoring balance was very good, but without Bentil’s usual 20 points, the other numbers were lacking. The Friars got 50 points from players not named Dunn or Bentil. That would normally be a great thing, except Dunn and Bentil only scored 20 between them.
• I saw Cooley’s postgame comments about this game not being an upset. I get what he was trying to say — that it wasn’t an upset because the other team was better in this game — but I’m not ready to throw my hands up in the air and declare nothing an upset anymore. The Friars were favored on the road by 7 or so points in this game. They lost the game by 7 points. That’s an upset. Sorry, Coach.
• One positive to take from this game is that Ryan Fazekas appears to have turned a corner in his recovery from mono. Fazekas played 29 minutes and made three 3-pointers in this game. That’s his most minutes since the game before he went out with mono and that’s the most triples he’s made in a game since all the way back on November 21st against Brown — he made 5 in that win. The Friars shooting woes have been a big problem in league play and Fazekas being back in the swing of things will be very helpful. Before last night’s game, I would have said scoring help was the Friars’ biggest problem. Making sure Ben Bentil is healthy and cleaning up the rebounding problem are also now on that list.

You can re-watch this game, courtesy of FriarTV:

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgmoQ2wlklk]

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Mike Hopkins

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