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Worthy on UCR is good plays bully ball had his way with Sykes early.

Petar bully ball inside early, he backs his guy in, gets doubled, takes a step back out, double leaves, backs his guy in again and swirls for a floater. He often owns his defender down low. They have to respect his 3 as well.

7-11, 3-3 in conference but 4-1 their last 5 games.

Why? Offense is becoming very good...defense is passable at times, weak at times, strong sometimes. I feel like the offense is a given now, if they can maintain a strong defense 30+ mpg, and learn how to break the press (slightly better tonight) they will give everyone problems.

Assists and Turnovers: 15:8. I can't remember a better passing team overall anytime the last decade, and the offense is showing signs of being a real honest to goodness division 1 offense good movement, good passing, good spacing, multiple weapons. Room for improvement too. Isaiah Lewis had his best game as a 49er. Diaz only 2 pts but 6 assists 0 TOs is awesome.

Petar is looking like a possible 1st team all BW, 2nd team for sure.

Sykes kind of got owned by Worthy for the first half, evened it up second half, overall his least effective game (he looked tired...maybe fighting off something?) yet he still bangs in 16 pts, 6 rebounds, 2 assists. Sure sign of a great player he quietly gets his #s. Worthy led UCR with 23 pts 9 rebounds but he's a ball hog too often.

Dallas Washington looks very healthy and with DMX out with the mystery ear situation (also looking fine physically other than WTF happened last game) he is contributing, after UCR hits a deep 3 with 15 seconds to go in the 1st half, Washington calmly drains a corner 3 after bobbling the pass...buzzer sounds great to see.

Works In Progress
Shay two more offensive fouls he sets an outside pick and gets too excited to roll to the basket for an alley oop, it must happen a lot in practice but in games, refs call that if you even sneeze on the guard you picked.

Team Rebounding: its good, should be better but we gave away 4-5 rebounds just battling each other and bouncing ones off our feet.

Handling Full Court Press: UCR wasn't decent at it, we looked slightly better even finally did a smart thing, everyone in the backcourt 4 guys run towards the baseline to 'take the pass' and Lewis takes one step that way then bursts towards the frontcourt, he barely got the pass and it didn't lead to anything but to break a press you have to get aggressive sometimes and go home run, even if it is a TO you send the message to the opposition. Overall they had to deal with it about 10 times and only looked really bad 2x.

Team Defense: a little something is missing too often and aggressive teams that move a lot can easily find lanes and gaps. Good news is we usually plug leaks after getting burned about 4-5 times.

Acker Barking: Tonight he really got on Devillian once who handled it well, but once Bender had the ball coming up court and Acker blasted at him to get it to the point guard and Shaq looked like he said f''' this and yeah did hand the ball to Lewis, but Acker you gotta chill that out live man, save some of it for the locker room...admittedly he's chilled out a lot, and at least half the time I notice the players respond o.k. to it, but you could tell Shaq had enough that time.


Other Good
Shaq had a really solid game. He and Farrell are pretty good on offense and defense, both are bull dogs at times. 5 guys in double digits is top notch, plus Farrell with 7.

Were behind the rebounding battle all night, even by as much as 10, but won it by 1 33-32. Devillian is a freaking warrior, got pounded above his left eye but got it stitched up and was right back in the game 5 minutes later. Another double double...one alley oop and one put back dunk. He's 'live' around the basket, getting more and more physical, and getting less dumb fouls the more minutes he gets. Has deceptively quick feet and long arms, and is a lefty...with development could cause nightmares but I don't see that until at least next year.

Guys are mostly developing so far, something we rarely saw this quickly under the last HC.

Best passing team in years, and getting plenty of dunks. Fun stuff too bad last year and the last 7-10 years of last HC killed attendance...hopefully we keep getting home wins so the students come out in droves, if they are back next Saturday I hope we have hundreds in the stands to yell at the Nachos.

Christan Jones out still same w Emmanuel Lewis.

VERY HORRIBLE
Who else but the refs, overall this year I think they've been decent, even this crew, but tonight they sucked with too many ticky tacks, uneven calls, missing calls, one time they called a stop to a LB offensive set 12 seconds after something occurred that they wanted to review...really bad performance, Big Worst Refs at their worst. Phantom calls, letting guys get brutalized down low then calling another ticky tack. Kills the flow sometimes. They did reverse a couple dumb calls but sheesh, this crew was half asleep and looked even disinterested at times.

Gotta go beat some road teams now, at CSUN and CSUF could be anything, but I'll hope for 1-1 at least. Then lets get a big home win vs the Nachos. GO BEACH!!!