Just an infuriating and incredibly painful loss.
We were soft with the ball giving up too many turnovers that last 6-7 minutes. Proctor, Sion, and Kon all drove and either just lost it or let it get blocked. Have to do better.
Got to say, Proctor shot terribly. In some ways, the game was on his shoulders. He just did not come through. He is not good enough for the moment. You can see he doesn't have confidence to nail it. How many open 3s did he miss? Painful. He's been really solid at times but you could see he just was not relaxed as a shooter. He's not really a shooter at this point. And just could not come up big when we needed him. He is also not a good FT shooter. He's missed so many crucial FTs this year and we mostly won in spite of that. Missing the front end of a one and one at that point is a knife in the back. But the bigger mistake, imo was when he got the pass from Kon he had to look get rid of it immediately. Even Sion (who has more ice in his veins than Proctor). Flagg was open. Just can't hold onto it unless you are an 80% guy.
Flagg was awesome. But I have to say, and this is probably the one criticism of him at this point, he tries too many tough shots, those pull up or fade away mid-range umpers are very difficult and not really high percentage shots. He missed a ton of those. I've noticed this challenge for many years now that shows up in a lot of talented, young, usually OAD, college players. Same thing R.J. Barrett would do. They learn the moves that you see from a Kobe or LeBron or Doncic or Jordan that in reality are very tough shots unless you practice them thousands of times. And at this stage, Flagg has just not taken those shots enough, imo. It's one thing to mimic the moves of the pros and develop the same move. Flagg has that. It's another to master those shots at a very high %.
That was not a great shot he took at the end, imo. Would have been an amazing shot if it went in. But he needed to drive for the basket or drive and dish.
Again, love him. We would not be in the FF without him. But that's part of the territory with a freshman.
Really, really sad and so incredibly irritating to be that close and lose, especially given how great a season we had. We had that game and just ****ing gave it away! 64-55. Should have won, no doubt.
Haven't been this sad probably since 1999. There were other tough losses (2004. We were just robbed. 2006 tough - but that team was flawed. 2022 hurt but it seemed the case we just were not good enough). This hurts so bad because we had the game in our pocket and could not execute down the stretch. Houston has a great D but still, we are better than we played. Could be and needed to be. We just had to play tough down the stretch and have more poise getting the ball in, being strong with the ball.
The other frustration was when our defense broke down. Usually from an attempted steal or double team in the 2nd half. You just could not leave one of their 3-point shooters open. That one where Flagg tried to jump the double and left his guy wide open. Ugh. Happened 3-4 times in the second half. No reason for the D to do that. You have to stick to their guards.
