Oregon State at PSU

[DustRunner]

Looks like the Beavers lost by 6 . . . SIX . . . points on the road at #10 Kansas today.

Not bad, considering that they're missing both Brandt and Gomis for the rest of the season. It's going to be a tough test for us on the 12th.

 

[VikThunder]

That is a friggin' impressive performance by the Beavs.

 

[BroadwayVik]

What I care about is that our Viks make good decisions, play as a team so that we can be proud of them and that there is the gym is full of PSU supporters. It would be socially embarrassing if the crowd were biased OSU's way or that Stott were rendered a neutral court.

*****************************PSU Vikings celebrating their win over #7Gonzaga**********************************

This would be a great opportunity for a televised PSU crowd to do a flash mob dance routine.

 

[BroadwayVik]

Mike Lund declares Vikings's Game With OSU Sold Out To General Public (PSU student seating not yet filled)

So does this mean the game has been sold to OSU supporters, reducing the game from a home court advantage to a neutral court or, worse, an OSU advantage? If so, this is an absolute failure in administering ticket sales. Who wants to attend a game at their university in a hostile environment on their own home court? I think I'll be watching the game on TV (and grimacing throughout). I might have to turn the sound way down or off. Why do I get the feeling the ethos was "PSU student game experience doesn't matter, covering our financial obligations does."

If so, this will be truly a falling-on-one's-own-sword blown execution of what could have been a wonderful opportunity for an exciting game day experience. But perhaps it is foolish Oregon leadership who hold, for some perverse reason, that wonderful emotional experiences must be held back from PSU students as this keeps them in a Healot status. This kind of societal structuring is truly destructive to the state, providing pathological joy to few at dire cost to many. Such statutory public policy (social idiocy) must not be allowed to continue. They must cease projecting their shame on to and scapegoating of PSU students.

If attendance turns out to hold a Viking home advantage, however, I'll be the first to admit a job well done. Do your utmost, Athletic Department, and you, ticket sales manager.

 

[martymoose]

Not sure if OSU was looking way past this game or not, but I think that there's some good things to take away from this game tonight.

Couple of thoughts.

I had a feeling that this would be a closer game than one would play out on paper, for the same reason that we tend to struggle in larger arenas. Put a team that usually plays in plays in a small box (the stott), and it's a totally different environment. Same goes for a team that is used to a large open arena and is put into a small box. I could be wrong, but OSU did not shoot well from the outside.

Next. Geving's ability as a game coach sort of stuck out tonight. When OSU switched to a 1-3-1 zone press we saw about the worst ten minutes of offense in organized basketball. Not division 1 basketball, but organized basketball. This includes 5th grade girls basketball. Eight points over any ten minute span will usually reel in a loss, and it certainly did tonight. I would have rather seen us punt. Yes, punt. Too bad that span probably cost us the upset.

Some randoms:

- The white out looked more like a creamsicle. Hopefully we can do the home and home with OSU again. Their fans were very pleasant down south last year, and very pleasant tonight as well.

- Parker regularly backed down Pac 12 guys on the post tonight for really good looks at the bucket tonight. Even his misses were good looks.

- Oh Chris Rastatter, Gregory Nixon, and Mark Cook. Boy were you guys terrible. Those two OSU travel calls in the first half that were missed should be grounds for your whistles being taken away.

- Moore. 7-7 from the field in 23 minutes. Me thinks that if he plays 30 he'd be 10-10.

- What is more unbelievable on the OSU roster? Starks being listed at 5'9", or Burton being listed at 295lbs?

- I wish we had a better opponent than George Fox on Saturday. Honestly, I'd rather just get in to conference play after tonight.

 

[Pounder]

OSU's next games are Chicago State and Howard. I doubt they're looking forward. Supposedly their two best players are out, so they're hobbled and came out tentative. However, must note: the Pac-12 is in a three-year cycle of suck. This was a winnable game with even the early post-Dominguez teams IMO.

The OSU fans started out quiet, too. About half and half, I'd say. If Stott didn't have a negative effect on recruiting, it'd be more interesting in testing the opponent's collective claustrophobia. I've seen that more than once by now (something odd for me to say given the sample size, as men's basketball wasn't available when I attended). However, maybe the biggest game in there and, since the kids are away, there wasn't much PSU noise at all.

BTW, they really had finals LAST week? Curious.

The refs were intent on letting them play. They called it bad both ways 35 minutes, often let OSU push PSU around. You know, I checked at half and realized 11 PSU players are transfers. With a short time here, it's hard to have a good weight-room program against teams who can keep their kids, and that really was the game in a nutshell. It's good practice, though... you know Montana will try the same crap, just with much less skilled bigs. (Never mind OSU's poor outside shooting; even in a mediocre Pac-12, those guards are not going to cut it)

On the business end, do I need to state the obvious? If the community gave anywhere near a damn, PSU would sell out the building on season tickets alone. It's not like the "product" or effort on the floor has been rancid over the last 5-10 years. You want to accuse the AD of doing it wrong, I see chicken-and-egg issues; whatever the problem is, it isn't going to get solved by throwing spears around.

 

[DustRunner]

The student section was actually rather large last night compared to other games. Check that, any other game. Except that they didn't really care, which is the whole point: you can't sell out the Stott when the students don't care and the alumni are skittish about coming back. Add in the ridiculous number of OSU tickets sold, and you have a disaster.

But we played wlel last night. Finally saw Lateef play some solid basketball on both ends of the court, and Renado is a beast down low. Burton was a top-150 player in the nation as an incoming freshman, so to push him around a little bit was quite the job. And Moore looked good with his shot, which means that he can hopefully pick up some of the scoring slack.

But when the Beavs dropped into the zone press, our problem was that we kept backing up. That just makes it worse. I know it sounds easier than it is to do, but so many times someone was open, and had our guys been a little more prepared and thrown less rainbow passes, we might have kept it interesting down the stretch in the first half. That makes me wonder why OSU didn't just default to that in the second half, frankly, because the Vikes weren't beating it.

 

[scooter1]

My take on the Viks inability to break the Beav's halfcourt press is not that they kept backing up, but that the guards kept trying to split the defenders, and then passed back out to the other guard or wing, setting up another trap by OSU's lengthy defenders. In my opinion the best way to attack any press is to have a great deal of motion, having players cutting at angles toward the ball or the basket, moving the ball with passes, and constantly attacking by getting the ball to the baseline. Geving needs to call a timeout early in the process before theses presses become momentum changers, which it did last night.

 

[martymoose]

My take on the Viks inability to break the Beav's halfcourt press is not that they kept backing up, but that the guards kept trying to split the defenders, and then passed back out to the other guard or wing, setting up another trap by OSU's lengthy defenders. In my opinion the best way to attack any press is to have a great deal of motion, having players cutting at angles toward the ball or the basket, moving the ball with passes, and constantly attacking by getting the ball to the baseline. Geving needs to call a timeout early in the process before theses presses become momentum changers, which it did last night.

It seemed to me that in the first half our guards were getting across the line and getting trapped immediately. In the second half they would wait a bit to cross half court to avoid getting trapped.

Why it took ten minutes and a halftime to convey that message is beyond me. :-\

 

[xxOps]

It was realy hard to sit thru the last 6 min of the game. And next time they say its sold out dont count on having it be all viks.

 

[BroadwayVik]

What the AD needs to do is to incentivize Portland State attendance. Whatever reasonable investment is needed to do this needs to be done at least once. They need to do it to show them what having a home court advantage (in an electrically-charged atmosphere) feels like (sharply increased utility spike). Once they get a taste for it, they will likely want to get the feeling back ... again and again. It would become, in a sense, a very satisfying "fix."

So like all Athletic Departments, they need to act not as drug pushers, but as "pushers" of something good and satisfying ... for the students' own good. A good way to blow off steam after midterms, for instance. The AD should start with natural social groups, subsets of the student body, like Greek houses and campus clubs. The idea of organizing a flash mob performance during a game is always viable, charming and positively stimulating.