This game scares the crap out of me. Rutgers play hard and have nothing to lose.
Looks like RU Tomorrow
- Thread starter NJCat
- Start date
So very good to watch OSU lose at anything but I agree with you. And I do hope that this Rutgers lead holds. RU will be tough tomorrow. NU has limped to the finish of the regular season this year but (weirdly) I feel that NU is about to go on a nice run of its best basketball of the season. Some very good signs the last couple of games and some of our shooters are going to get hot.
No secret as to how Rutgers will try to win, they outboarded OSU 47-31 (!!!) tonight including 19 (!!!) on the offensive glass. One plus for us is that Rutgers hasn't played back to back nights and hasn't beaten D1 opponents with less than a 48 hours in between games this year. Hopefully that takes a bit of the edge off their ferocious board work. But tbh who knows at this time of year.
Beat Rutgers by playing physical defense and banging on the boards. They're not going to outshoot us, but if they get all those opportunities for offensive rebounds and second chance points like they did tonight, it'll be trouble.
They're a terrible shooting team, but they have lots of heart and play hard. Can't let them out hustle us.
Well yeah, but have they even PLAYED anyone with less than 48 hours in between games? If so, it can't have been many.
Terrible shooting team? Haven you seen us play? We're more like horrendous. I mean, I get giving us the benefit of the doubt, but you midwestern folks sure are nice.
Looking forward to tomorrow!
Terrible shooting team? Haven you seen us play? We're more like horrendous. I mean, I get giving us the benefit of the doubt, but you midwestern folks sure are nice.
Looking forward to tomorrow!
Credit to the Piscataway men for finishing the season strong.
Terrible shooting team? Haven you seen us play? We're more like horrendous. I mean, I get giving us the benefit of the doubt, but you midwestern folks sure are nice.
Looking forward to tomorrow!
Perhaps the horrendous shooting team is why they get so many offensive rebounds. I'd be more curious to see where their offensive rebounding percentage ranks, though I'd imagine they're still very good in that category, just not top five in the country like they are in raw offensive rebounds.
Looking forward to the game Sir. Should be a close one. NU doesn't play in many blowouts.
Edit: Looks like Rutgers' OR% is 16th in the country, which is still excellent.
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Sleep on Rutgers all you want cuz we're going to the big dance sleep on truckers all you want cuz we're going to the big dance sleep on Rutgers All-U-Want cuz we're going to the big dance sleeping Rutgers all you want cuz we're going to the big dance slip-on Rutgers all you want cuz we're going to the big dance
LOL. I'm not midwestern, but I'm still nice.Terrible shooting team? Haven you seen us play? We're more like horrendous. I mean, I get giving us the benefit of the doubt, but you midwestern folks sure are nice.
Looking forward to tomorrow!
You've got a good coach who has his team playing hard. There's a lot to be said for that.
This Rutgers/OSU game was terrible though. One of the BTN announcers said it best-- looked like two teams that didn't want to win. We keep Rutgers off the boards as well as we did Purdue, we win by 10+ imo.
Get a good night's sleep, man. Late game and tons of hyperposting for you to do tomorrow night!
Rutgers is the best "bad" team in the country. If there was a most improved award over the course of a season, they would own it.
Agreed.
Rutgers is probably our best bet to notch a win in DC, but the Scarlet Knights always come to play (Steve Pikiell will get them turned around and probably soon). Tomorrow night will be a battle. Additionally, RU is the only team in the conference tournament capable of inflicting sizable damage to the resume.
I think NU will still be OK even if they take the loss tomorrow, but it would leave me feeling uneasy in the days leading up to Sunday.
Collins and Co. cannot sleep on this team.
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If OSU won, this thread would be talking about how scary OSU is.
Whatever. Just win. Both would-be opponents are inferior. If we lose, it sucks.
Whatever. Just win. Both would-be opponents are inferior. If we lose, it sucks.
I would be giving respect, sure. But I was saying before their game that I hoped OSU won because Rutgers has been playing very hard the last few games.
Rutgers played hard last night, but make no mistake.... that was a bad game. OSU looked HORRIBLE. I am kind of glad Rutgers won because my sense is that OSU has a more skilled, athletic team, but just wasn't interested last night. My nightmare vision watching that game was that OSU would find a way to squeak out a win and then decide tonight to actually play hard. Their effort against RU was pitiful. As my OSU-rooting family says, they are bad but they also play lazy. And you could see it in that game last night.
How is Northwestern going to stop Rutgers from pulling down those offensive rebounds? The last time they played, whatever adjustments Rutgers made around the 10 minute mark, NU had absolutely no answer for. Pardon pulled something like 7 rebounds in the first 10 minutes, then only pulled one more rebound for the entire rest of the game. Does NU have answers? Somebody needs to catch on fire.
I don't know for sure, but I'd think that a team that crashes the offensive glass as hard as they do would be susceptible to giving up some fast break points going the other way. Maybe we can make them pay for selling out on their own glass.
They absolutely are, but we still need to grab some defensive rebounds to make them pay for it. In our last game, we couldn't.
The thing is, there have been a TON of RU games this year in which it looked like the opposing team looked bad for long stretches or didn't have their best game, or that they lacked "effort," and of course the natural inclination was to think that they "took Rutgers lightly." With our history and record, it's an understandable reaction.
But this happened so often -- including after it was pretty clear by mid-year that Rutgers' defense, rebounding and effort were for real -- that you have to start to wonder whether it's just that our style of play and defensive tenacity just CAUSES the other team to look that way. It's no coincidence that our defensive ppg numbers went from 80+ last year to about 66+ this year, which is in the top third of the B1G I think. Whatever you might think about Rutgers as a program -- and such negative ideas are well deserved because of our recent and not-so-recent futility on the court -- we're actually a "good" defensive team.
So if you find yourselves tonight thinking that the game is looking "ugly," that probably means that you're in for a tough game that will go down to the wire.
Yeah, they play "ugly" games, but that's by design. I'm expecting an NU win, but certainly not a blowout or high-scoring game. Rutgers hasn't seemed like a last-place team for quite a while.
Playing Rutgers is like playing poker against someone who doesn't know what they're doing. When the other side is so unpredictable, it can make it hard to compete against. Part of why Rutgers is so effective on the offensive glass (behind hustle and good positioning) is that they throw up so many wild shots that are unlike anything other teams do. Chaos always accrues to the underdog, especially when it's something so frustrating as easy putbacks after offensive rebounds on bad shots.
This isn't to say Rutgers doesn't know what they're doing. This is their plan and they do it well. But they struggle to score big time if they don't get the boards. I think they had something like 23 field goals last night and 19 offensive rebounds. Not to mention playing back to back days on that kind of effort is a challenge too.
Of course we can lose this game, but it would be a major disappointment.
This isn't to say Rutgers doesn't know what they're doing. This is their plan and they do it well. But they struggle to score big time if they don't get the boards. I think they had something like 23 field goals last night and 19 offensive rebounds. Not to mention playing back to back days on that kind of effort is a challenge too.
Of course we can lose this game, but it would be a major disappointment.
I'm not disputing anything you said. Good effort (especially on the Defensive end) can make the other team look bad. However, OSU has had a pattern of playing lazy all year (according to my OSU family). It sure looked like it last night. They weren't always closing out on shooters. They didn't seem to cut hard without the ball. They certainly weren't playing in-your-face on ball defense. And Rutgers owned the boards even more than they normally do.
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