A few notes of mine for the desert trip:

On AZ:

- Main takeaway was that they had great energy on defense and really made life difficult for us. But we can dig deeper into that:

- Boogie was completely denied by Ramey for much of the game, he had to work so hard for everything and almost never got open looks in H1. Got one or two good looks in H2 but couldn't not them down.

- They collapsed the lane really well making it really tough to get any sort of layup. Our pick n roll game with Morgan and boogie is elementary and boogie doesn't know what to do when the pass isn't easy. ( To be fair, I don't either).

- AZ collapsed the middle very well against UCLA too, I can't remember UCLA getting any layups. UCLA does their best work off of steals and in transition. UCLA is thoroughly unimpressive in the half court outside of Jacquez. This led to Tyger and Jacquez taking a bunch of mid range 2s - they honestly didn't get awful looks but combined to go 10-35 from the field. Clarks 4-13 and Singletons 0-5 didnt help either.

- interesting to me how nullified singleton is w/o open 3s.

Two Qs:

1. Are you worried at all about UCLA shooting mean regression this week?

2. What's the strategy to beating AZ next time:

- shoot more 3s, make more 3s? Always a nice idea, but...
- forgot about tubelis and just play tight on their guards who may turn it over - press them? They love transition, but they didn't look good against UCLAs press.
- two bigs lineup
- go small with Hornery and try to draw their bigs out to the perim. Make them play defense and put fouls on them.

Regardless: need to come out more ready to play, and get less fouls on our own bigs. Niagu was not ready for that game.

Yes. And I guess that would mean "mean progression," right? Yes. I am worried about that. I do think if we hedge ball screens by the 5 (usually Bona) really hard and otherwise don't over-help or get lazy/distracted, we'll be in a strong position to guard the arc.

Yeah, wish I knew. Definitely two-bigs. I think we need to focus on rebounding and guarding the arc. As much trouble as the offense had, I'm not sure we have the personnel for a fix there.

I agree that the Boogie Morgan pick-and-roll has been underwhelming. I don’t know why we rarely have other guys try to set ball screens.

I agreed with Nick going into the game, let “Tubelis get his, but then murder him on the other end”. We forgot to do the second part. When we had one big in, Tubelis guarded Tre White meaning he got to hide in the corner. He rarely had to guard on ball or defend any actions. I would bring Tre White or whoever Tubelis is guarding to set a ball screen on almost every possession. Make him work on defense.

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I only saw Tre bring Tubelis to the ball once in the scoring highlights (Which you can see above). He fakes like he is going to set a screen, Tubelis switches in anticipation and then has to chase Boogie around. Tubelis is a bad defender, we need to exploit that rather than letting him hide.

I thought the Morgan and Vince two big lineups were effective. But it is hard to get enough minutes at the 5 if you are going to play both of them together for extended periods. I don't think we can afford to play the other bigs in games like this.