Solid win. Some obnoxious fan complaints (and exempting last week's game of course):
(1) Is it just me or does every face-off guy and goalie have their best game of the year against us? Who is to blame for that?
(2) The defense has been as advertised pretty much all year, at least in terms of goals against in the game vs. season average for opponents. The offense seems to have only really clicked last week, and that is looking more like the exception. This game felt more like the UVA game.
UPDATE: I'm glad to hear IrishLax is not as worried about the offense. I am not a lacrosse guy but I like to complain about games.
I don't think your observations are bad, but one thing to remember with faceoffs is that Finley is going up against some pretty A+ guys. Kyle Rowe for Duke is literally the best in the nation. PJ Finley ranks 20th, which isn't great, but also doesn't suck. I was happy with how he battled, especially in the second half.
As for the offense, the best analogy I can give is that it would be like watching a football game where Kizer throws a perfect ball to an open receiver and instead of walking in for a TD he drops it. Or a play is blocked perfectly and when the RB hits the hole he trips on his shoelace. The initial reaction might be to look at the final score and say "8 goals! That's terrible! What's wrong with the offense?" which is completely valid, the same way looking at a football game and going "21 points! That's terrible! What's wrong with the offense?" is valid. At the end of the day, they didn't get the job done. BUT!
It's important to realize the weather conditions are about as bad as you can get for lacrosse, and that the offense we've seen the past two weeks has been MUCH better in design than we saw earlier in the year. Instead of the offense failing to score TDs because Brian Kelly keeps calling the same bad play or the QB sucks or something like that, it's just a lack of finishing on good design.
We'll learn a lot more next week against Marquette who has a truly elite defense.
That weather was just damn miserable. Still a great game though. I'm amazed we held Myles Jones to zero goals today. Thought it was incredible how loose the refs were with wards, I saw three pretty blatant wards right in front of the refs that got missed from Duke and one or two from us.
Yeah, Kav got away with a couple wards for sure. Alternatively, Duke got away with murder. All in all I thought the refs did a good job or letting them play... except for that call on Perkovic where he held back on a hit where he could've absolutely DESTROYED a kid... and they still gave the Duke player a pity call. They've basically legislated any kind of big hit out of the game.