Free throw & foul concerns
Posted: Mon Jan 01, 2007 10:51 pm
This isn’t a complaint thread, just a post of concern. Obviously, we’re off to a pretty nice start to the year. While we haven’t exactly played a brutal schedule thus far, more importantly we’ve found ways to win and I’ll take that any time no matter who we play. But with that said, one area of concern that seems to jump out at me in almost every game we play is our free throw attempts, or more so, our opponents’ free throw attempts. Our opponents have shot 100 more free throws (326-326) than we have this year. What’s more, our opponents have also made more free throws (238) than we have even attempted (226) and our opponents have made 83 more free throws than we have (238-155) this season. We have also committed 285 fouls to our opponents 217. Both these areas were very costly in our last game at Wisconsin-Green Bay. With all of that said, those are figures against teams that we went 9-4 against. But with the MAC season now upon us, these are certainly areas we can’t continue to lag in. We’re not good enough (yet) to give teams that many free trips to the line to score points. We’re playing much better defense (when we’re not fouling) and we’re shooting the ball well at times, but we’ve got to stop sending teams to the line at this rate. We’re aggressive on defense and finally have some depth for a change that used to cost us in the recent past when players got in foul trouble. But if we continue along this trend in MAC play, we’re going to get burned.