NC State - Marquette Preview
December 22, 2008 by admin
Filed under NC State Basketball Blog
Marquette @ NC State
7:00 pm
ESPNU
RBC Center, Raleigh, NC
NC State Basketball Tickets
Tonight provides another good test for Sid Lowe and sons as #24 Marquette makes its way into the RBC Center as we relive the 1974 NCAA Championship game (NCSU 76 – Marquette 64). I haven’t got to see Marquette play much this year, but these are my thoughts on tonight’s game.
*NCSU has a size advantage down low so look for the Wolfpack, like usual, to feed the ball into McCauley/Costner/Smith for most of the games, and hopefully kick a few out to Turd Ferguson so he can keep the D honest on the perimeter.
*Looks like the guards are a little more experienced for Marquette so Sid needs to get Mays, Gonzalez, and Degand into a good rotation to keep fresh legs. With lingering injuries to Degand and Gonzalez, possibly look for Mays to get the start for the second game in a row. After a little bit of a shaky start, Mays produced very stable numbers against Limpscomb – 9 pts, 7 assts, 0 to’s
*There were 3 games in pre-conference play that would help us HEAVILY if we want to even start considering being an NCAA tournament invitee in a few months: Davidson, Marquette, and Florida. Obviously we could not quite put it together against Davidson with Curry’s 40 ft prayers and all. This would give us a very good OOC win for the resume come tourney time, as would Florida.
Blog Courtesy of dubpack
Photo Couresy of Flickr, themarquettewarrior
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Pack_Attack_3000 on Mon, 22nd Dec 2008 11:24 am
It was very comforting to see the stats on Mays from the last game, but in retrospect, it was Lipscomb : / Marquette has a slew of ‘Fells-esque’ guards that can carry the team, but I was fortunate enough to see them play against Tennessee and it wasn’t pretty, the couldn’t hit the ocean if they fell out of the boat that night, and their bigs just couldn’t bang like ours do – that night anyway. I think we can take this game and I think our high percentage shots inside will outweigh their low percentage shots from beyond the arc. Calling captain obvious, but it appears that we will only get as far as our point guard (offensively and defensively) will take us. Our defense (save degand and javi) has been quite impressive - in the ECU game, Ferg, CJ Williams and Johnny Thomas were given the task at halftime to shut down their top two Senior scorers in Hinnant and Legan, and they did just that in almost shutting them out combined in the second half. I’d say the team defense (again save their fast pg’s running past ours) is coming along very nicely and it will be interesting to see our D tonight of Williams, Thomas, and Ferg match up against their offense. Lets just hope our pg’s can limit the turnovers and stay in front of their man on fast breaks and we can make smart decisions on the offensive end.
admin on Mon, 22nd Dec 2008 11:45 am
Agreed, I am looking forward to seeing the continuous development of Tracy Smith as well. I think Sid really found something in the Ben/Tracy rotation.