Trying to move on

09-10 Basketball20

This Florida loss was hard on me. Very hard on me. Thanks to everyone who dropped me notes and checked in to see if I was ok.

I didn’t allow myself to watch any news or any highlights. I haven’t even surfed the internet today until this evening. And tonight – right when I started to feel like I cold move on from the pain – I noticed that friggin Bill O’Reilly highlighted the Gators’ final shot on his show tonight. Unbelievable.

I promise there will be absolutely no highlights of the State-Florida game in this entry. I’ve got start turning the page…so, I clicked over to our Message Boards and clicked on as many threads as I could that didn’t look as though they had anything to do with Florida.

So, in an effort to start imprinting other images on my mind I share the following video with you from last week. Of course, in the world where officiating has not been comprised and decomposed into NBA-like looseness, this offense would have been one of the easiest technical fouls ever whistled on a basketball court.

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09-10 Basketball

20 Responses to Trying to move on

  1. Clarksa 01/04/2010 at 11:04 PM #

    How about some video of College of Charleston fans rushing the court?

  2. WolftownVA81 01/04/2010 at 11:07 PM #

    Hey, UNC lost tonight to the College of Charleston by three in OT after leading most of the 1st half and being down by 11 with three minutes to go. Thank God we will not be the news highlight any longer this week. It was a great game and C of C really deserved the win. Congrats to Bobby C. and the Cougers. This doesn’t make up for our bad break against FL but it does take away some of the sting and made me smile, no, shout for joy.

  3. dwm77 01/04/2010 at 11:24 PM #

    Haha. Love it! Big man needs to let go if he’s not dunking. Technical foul?

  4. wolfpackattack89 01/05/2010 at 3:46 AM #

    we’ve lost so many close non conference games in the sid era. who really cares? i don’t think we’ll make the ncaa or nit this year. Next year, we might make the nit. I just don’t have any faith in our bball team. Howell, who i supposed to be our best recruit this year sucks. We need somebody to complement t smith and all howell can do is shoot outside shots. AS big as he is, he should be dominating on the inside with tracy, but ofcourse sid let’s him do whatever. what a joke. And for some more of my pity party, i’ll give a prediction of our record for football next year. I think we’ll be 4-8. there it is, maybe we’ll be good some day, in something

  5. imawolf 01/05/2010 at 6:46 AM #

    A tremendous shot, Period…. Only thing I have questions about was why our best free throw shooter was inbounding the ball….but hey, they played well together… One of our best all around games… Top class coming in and I see reasons to be optimistic…. And yes, watching Ole Roy getting it handed to him by Cremmin’s squad made for a great evening…. Call it Karma,,,,, he shouldn’t have been such an Ass towards the Princton Fan…………not taking anything from C of C. I was smiling as I drifted off to sleep last night…

  6. PoppaJohn 01/05/2010 at 7:52 AM #

    Thank you Bobby Cremins for getting us off the front of the Sport Pages!
    Go CofC!

  7. packfan03 01/05/2010 at 8:55 AM #

    wolfpackattack89, that is some pretty harsh criticism for a freshman who is coming off of knee surgery. Although he was our best recruit, he was never billed as the next dominant force in the ACC. I think he is coming along well, as he impressed against Arizona. Being disappointed in Sidney and his program (which I still disagree with) is one thing, but to take it out on a freshman is completely different. Tracy Smith was ranked similarly in his class as Howell was last year – and it took Tracy time too.

  8. RSP123 01/05/2010 at 9:31 AM #

    Being a longtime fan of the Pack, this ranked right up there with the Dudley Bradley steal to beat the Pack in Reynolds. As for Florida at the end, no one seems to be mentioning that the Florida guard was intentiionally trying to miss the last free throw and still made it! What a kick in the teeth. He misses, we rebound, more time goes off the clock. Being a high school basketball coach; overall, I have been pleased but the “little things” are separating us from average to being good. As we know, free throws but more then once we allowed Florida to roll the ball up the floor to save time. We need to put more pressure to make them pick the ball up and hurry and run the clock. Also, on the Degand’s last free throw, substitute Vandy and Howell for rebounding and/or big guy to throw over if Fla has to take ball out of bounds. Finally, Howell had a bad game. Lowe took him out. He will only get better. Also, last observation, Gonzales should play more – especially in the second half. We are much more potent offensively when he and Smith are on the floor together. Finally, success is failure turned inside out. We will see what this coach and team are made out of beginning against Holy Cross. Go Pack!

  9. newt 01/05/2010 at 10:03 AM #

    That’s a technical foul for hanging on the rim – as if a player had done a pull-up on the rim. Of course, it’s not so obvious as a pull-up that he hung on the rim, because the rim didn’t stay up there for very long – not for very long at all.

    Funny that in a message board post the other day, I made a sarcastic crack about Bobby Cremmins being a great basketball mind, and then he turns around and beats UNC with his upstarts.

    A couple of things on that one…

    1 – First and foremost, UNC isn’t that good right now relative to the talented and experienced teams of recent years. The door is slightly open.

    2 – You think Tech would have been better off keeping Cremmins? Haven’t they declined overall?

  10. wolfpackdawg 01/05/2010 at 10:17 AM #

    Tudor dead on as usual before the game.

    “They won’t win tonight, but their coach will see to it that they appreciate the experience” Retard.

  11. Alpha Wolf 01/05/2010 at 12:03 PM #

    It’s been a long time since NC State hoops sent me on such a wild mood swing. It wasn’t anger, it was happiness to depression.

    Damnit all to Hades, why couldn’t the guys hit their free throws the last minute?

  12. rtpack24 01/05/2010 at 2:52 PM #

    That one hurt. Javi sat way too long in the second half and Degand needs more minutes. He compliments Javi,and I believe he should start. Williams is a heck of an athlete but still has away to go to be a solid 2 guard in D-1. We will see if these guys can bounce back. Once Howell gets in shape I believe he has alot of talent and should play well.

  13. Cardiff Giant 01/05/2010 at 3:07 PM #

    Well, Alpha – think of it as French farce. That’s what I do.

  14. bradleyb123 01/05/2010 at 3:45 PM #

    I’m going to get yelled at for saying this, but FWIW, State is good enough to be 12-2 right now. If there was any justice in this world, Florida would have missed that 75 footer and Tracy Smith would not have mouthed off about the officiating and sat out the Arizona game.

    I’m not calling anything a moral victory. We were SUPPOSED to win that Florida game. We played a good strategy and put ourselves in a very high percentage chance of winning the game, probably approaching 100%. And no one will convince me that Tracy Smith wouldn’t have been worth three additional points for us against Arizona.

    I guess my point is this team is a lot better than many of us expected them to be at this point. I think this team would beat last year’s team at this same point in the season. I also think it’s reasonable to hope for an NIT or maybe even an NCAA bid this year. Javi has become a beast. He’s played like a man possessed at the end of some of these games. There’s plenty to be optimistic about, and not just NEXT year but THIS year. And I only imagine how much better we’ll be NEXT year, too. We have some solid players right now, and when the big-time recruits join them next year, I almost get goosebumps thinking about how good we can be. But the best part is, we still have THIS year. Forget WTNY. WTTY (Wait til THIS year!)

    Don’t be so down on us. Hey, at least we haven’t lost to a team like C of C!

  15. Wulfpack 01/05/2010 at 6:10 PM #

    ^A lot better? Really?

    Javi had six turnovers and just one assist against Florida. He had had six turnovers against Arizona. He was also thoroughly outplayed by Ish Smith in the loss to Wake. Sorry, but I’m not quite ready to call him a beast.

    The thing that gets me with a lot of Wolfpack fans is that it’s always we *should* have won, or we played well enough to win, etc. etc. Yet, we don’t win. At some point, a team has to begin winning games for me to feel good about things, and not all of these “well if it wasn’t for that turnover, or that missed FT, or whatever else, we would have won.”

  16. Rick 01/06/2010 at 9:42 AM #

    “I’m going to get yelled at for saying this, but FWIW, State is good enough to be 12-2 right now”

    This train of thought makes me laugh every time because it is just plain wrong. We are not “good enough to be 12-2” right now. We are good enough to be 10-4 because we ARE 10-4.

    You want to claim the last shot was “unlucky”. Well them shooting 2 for 23 from three was extremely “lucky” for us and what did we do with it?

    We deserved to lose that game because we missed FTs and did not capitalize on their Sendekian shooting performance.

  17. newt 01/06/2010 at 9:46 AM #

    I’ve seen two games this year where we seemed to think the game was over before the clock had expired – one was this Florida loss and the other was the loss at Wake Forest, in which I think we quit playing while the game was still in reach, unlikely but in reach. We learned Sunday that unlikely is still a possibility. I think we shouldn’t quit playing until the clock has expired.

    On the good side Sid has talked about defending that shooter and making free throws; he has not said anything that could be read as “just bad luck” that I have seen. And he called out the coaches in the postgame for not having players in defensive position.

  18. GoldenChain 01/06/2010 at 10:37 AM #

    Seems like I remember someone saying “Never, ever, give up!”

  19. bradleyb123 01/06/2010 at 12:20 PM #

    ^^^ “You want to claim the last shot was “unlucky”.”

    No, I claim it was lucky (but I know that’s what you meant). But if you want to pretend a 75-footer that swishes the net wasn’t about 95% luck and 5% skill, that’s your issue. The rest of us that saw it knows the truth.

    ^^^ “Well them shooting 2 for 23 from three was extremely “lucky” for us”

    I’m sure that had NOTHING to do with our defense.

    ^^^ “and what did we do with it?””

    Put ourselves in a position to win, and by all rights SHOULD have won. It’s one thing to say “shoulda won” when you just didn’t quite play as well as you would have liked. It’s another to say “shoulda won” when the opponent nails a 75-footer for the win. The former is sour grapes. The latter is the truth.

    This is funny. You anti-Sid folks will do ANYTHING to oppose Sidney at every turn. You can’t even call a 75-foot basket “lucky”. LOL It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.

  20. coach13 01/06/2010 at 1:49 PM #

    Lotta shoulda woulda coulda. We screwed ourselves, luck and skill aside. However correctible offenses hopefully. Seems like we are always behind the learning curve on things…coaches and players. Some good posts on what we should have done to prevent the clear (albeit long) shot. Also on Javi, he has gotten better each year, still not great. But on the turnover thing, at least the majority of them were forced. Coaches/players did not react well to the press.

    Heck, I was not optimistic we would win going in. I was puling for’em, just not optimistic. Kept telling my son “just wait, they’ll find a way to blow it”, be it by stupidity, bad luck or curse. Still, good game. We are getting better.

    Hope we can make 500 in ACC (ACC not being that strong this year ONLY reason I would think possible at this point). We could though not likely flirt with NCAA but NIT more realistic.

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