I got to watch the game on replay, sort of. The replay geniuses couldn't figure out how to stream the game so that it played all the way through without cycling back --- oh, well, three quarters are better than none.
Muffet is trying like crazy to develop her bench. She has an Offensive Bench which doesn't know how to play defense [Arike and Marina], a Defensive Bench which doesn't know how to play offense [Hannah and Michael] and a BIGS Bench which doesn't know how to play either.
Muffet keeps giving the overweight center opportunities, but she is so far from college-ball-ready that I believe that Coach will give up on her entirely in the tournaments unless everybody has fouled out. Muffet played LOTS of "small ball" vs Miami --- fortunately Miami isn't too physical so we could.
Coach is trying to find out how she can mix her well-rounded stars [Maddy, Lindsay, Brianna] with the generally OK players [Michaela, Kate] with the flawed Offense/Defense pairs in real game pressure situations, and the trial-and-error experiments were/are fascinating.
An example of this, which we may see more of, was due to the fact that we had to play VERY attentive outer-ring defense to thwart Miami's two main scorers. Muffet alternated zones and man-to-man often to confuse them --- and it worked. BUT at one point in the game we began to falter and Miami made a run. Muffet, who is an obvious genius, didn't go more offense, but went defense with Michael Johnson replacing Michaela Mabrey. This happened because Mabrey [surprisingly to me] was incapable of generating enough activity at the two-man top to stop our zone from getting so bent out of shape that forwards [like Maddy even] could guard their whole areas. Michael came in and we strangled them, and ran away again. Michael and Lindsay were a dynamic hustling two-three top, and Miami could do nothing consistently.
What's the relevance of this for us going forward? It could be that when we get into the meat of games vs dangerous offensive personnel [outside personnel], we see a lot more Michael Johnson and Hannah Huffman, and count on our three remaining players to score all the points. Marina and Arike might figure into that when we can hide their defensive deficiencies, but I believe that Muffet knows now who can and who cannot play that end of the court. I note also that we are much less turnover prone with the "defenders" on the floor than the basket-fillers.