Monday, November 22, 2010

Turnovers & Hokies Bury the Spartans

UNCG 70 - Virginia Tech 92

News & Record
Roanoke Times
UNCG Athletics
Va Tech Athletics

Positives
Shooting - UNCG shot 56% from the field and 60% from behind the arc. That's a wonderful shooting percentage against a traditionally stingy ACC opponent. If the Spartans can put that shooting percentage together with a much lower turnover number, they will be very successful in the coming games.

Trevis Simpson - The talented freshman made his debut and almost instantly went on an 8-0 run by himself. While Trevis will have to sustain that kind of effort throughout out the game (he went scoreless after his initial 8 points) moving forward, it was a very nice start.

Negatives
Turnovers - I said before the game that UNCG would have to limit its mistakes to compete with a ranked opponent. Instead the Spartans went out gave the ball away 29 times! It is impossible to turn the ball over that many times and win games.

Live ball turnovers - Virginia Tech totalled 20 steals. Thus, 20 times Virginia Tech had the opportunity to have run outs and make easy baskets. This has been a problem through the first few games this season and it needs to get fixed very quickly.

Wrap up
Well, it's a broken record through the first 3 games. There are good things to point out and bad things to point out. Unfortunately, the bad things have outweighed the good ones enough to make sure UNCG came up on the losing side of things.

The Spartans have played some very tough competition up until this point. While the competition will continue to be strong, the next 4 games will be against teams from outside the power 6 conferences. Hopefully, the team has learned some lessons from those first games that will allow them to be successful in the coming ones.

There is definitely time to right the ship. It's early. I'm expecting UNCG the come back strong after Thanksgiving.

Go Spartans !!!

0 comments: