I think we were just gassed either way. Purely basketball wise, nobody on the team is a 20 point swing… except maybe Pullin since he’s so solid with the ball at the point and everyone else is incredibly loose with it (can also argue Clayton, since Riley is DNP we really need Clayton to bring it every night and get his scoring). But as we have 4 bigs to rotate, the big guys I think are kept more fresh and ready to step in. You could argue the emotional shock set the guys back, but remember we actually cut the game to 1 point then went ice cold. I know some don’t buy the tired legs argument, but Clayton was looking gassed even in the previous game. That guy plays particularly aggressive and gets beat up too, so you have to factor that in.
He was a key rebounder I think it would have helped a lot. Would we have won? Not convinced, but I think it would have been more of a game. The players I'm sure had trouble concentrating after his injury. I was hoping they would kick into a higher gear, for Michah, regardless of how many games they played. Adding that he had 3 rebounds already and was going for the fourth just 2 minutes in. We needed his rebounding.
The semantics of the thread title aside…. No, I don’t think we beat AU, even if a healthy Micah. No disrespect to him, but I don’t think he would’ve made a big enough difference to overcome how tired we appeared to be. That said, there’s no calculating emotional impact of seeing a teammate severely hurt and how that might’ve played into our performance.
They purge tons of posts on this forum. Someone could have been active at some point, but not recently and show to have zero posts even if they posted a lot years ago. It’s weird how people place value in this, as if a high post count makes you more credible.
I would say there was a darn good chance of beating them given we smacked them around last time we played.
That's what I'm saying. It would take an extraordinary energy to win. Auburn played well. The injury killed the energy but still amazed at how well we still did. To get within 1 was heroic. It took about all we had to get there.
Auburn played 10 guys all between 10-24 minutes. With Kugel and Micah contributing 20 minutes each, I think we could have beat them.
Kugel was not available, so he can't enter into the discussion. We may stay within 10 with Handles, but I don't see us winning, ZP and WC too tired.