While Xavier shoots it at a very impressive clip, their average threes per game is pretty close to ours at 7.4 (we average 7.1, Gonzaga is at 7.7 for example). Doesn’t seem like they live and die by it like Penn State does, who made over 10 per game this season (fucking insane).
Xavier is still a tough team to guard, but I think Penn State’s unique style and movement really wore our guards and Timmy down by the second half until we seemed to regroup after the timeout, although they did miss a couple solid looks still. In the first half we were just flying around like organized madmen and doing so definitely helped us win the game in the end. If you don’t give it everything you have and more, that PSU team in their end of season form will do what they did to ATM all day. May be wishful thinking, but I’m hoping that was part of the reason we missed so many good attempts from deep. What I‘m getting at here is we have definitely seen and done well against Xavier’s style of play this year, while PSU was a tough prep for in two days.
Obviously I want to see that we are still aggressive per usual on defense, because they can be had turnover-wise (they are 216th in the country in turnovers per game at 12.2). If we can limit the TOs again and win the turnover battle, plus maybe just maybe shoot at least our average from three, I think we should be happy with the result.
EDIT: lost track and realized this wasn’t the game thread, don’t mean to derail