Wake Forest beat Billy Gillispie's Texas Tech team Sunday, 70-61. Travis McKie is building on his solid freshman year and is averaging 19 so far this season. He hit 20 against The Red Raiders.
Tony Chennault, who had no assists in his last two games, got three this time out. He scored 14; CJ Harris added 20.
Wake Forest still has issues, including Carson Desrosiers, who is not doing much so far at center, but they're light years ahead of where they were last year, when even the radio crew was bewildered.
Virginia Tech got a nice performance out of Victor Davila on the defensive end, where he did a number on St. Bonnie big man Andrew Nicholson. He also scored 13.
Dorian Finney-Smith tossed in 11 and grabbed eight boards. Erick Green and Jarrell Eddie tossed in 19 and 11 respectively.
Boston College lost to New Mexico, but they showed some heart with a 10-0 run in the second half. Matt Humphrey is going to be asked to score, but he shot just 3-18, which is pretty weak.
Boston College is getting hammered, but they seem to be getting better. It's a relative term, but they are improving.
Our computer problems Saturday did not allow us to look closely at UNC's loss to UNLV, but a couple of notes: in a long-standing tradition, UNC failed to adequately defend the three. Our take on this over the years has been this: Dean Smith, a math whiz, ran the numbers and decided that it was better to defend the inside than the three.
You do have to have priorities.
Whatever the case, going back at least to Randolph Childress, UNC has periodically just been torched by threes. Remember the Kentucky game, when Tayshaun Prince just lit UNC up like a Christmas tree? Duke has done it to them on occasion as well.
After the game, Fran Fraschilla tweeted that Kendall Marshall's lack of resounding athleticism made him uneasy but that his near-genius passing skills made it impossible not to play him.
Against UNLV, Marshall had eight assists, which is normally pretty good - Jeff Bzdelik would love to see that from Tony Chennault - but Marshall has been on a tear lately. UNLV defended him well and at least partly as a result, Tyler Zeller was 1-6, John Henson was 4-12, and Harrison Barnes was 6-16, and five of those attempts were three pointers.
If we assume for argument's sake that the three point shots were generally unassisted, then consider: UNC shot higher from three point range than from two.
That doesn't happen very often, and that's why UNC suddenly got better with Marshall in the lineup. But they do give up some things, namely on defense. A lot of people are going to be watching that game to see what Vegas did.
| DBR Auctions! |
| New T-Shirts! |
 |
| The DBR App! |
| DBR Is On Twitter!(DBRTweetz) |