Nice to get to watch a game on regular TV for a change. Some opinions:
A). Once in a while you meet a team who is just crazy hot.
B). To slow such a team down, all five must attend to business.
C). Once they're hot, cooling them off takes time even if you're in their shirt --- I hated getting shifted to a guy who a teammate had let get on fire.
D). This happened tonight. And you could tell who was the primary culprit by whom Muffet first pulled and sat the majority of the first quarter and the beginning of the second. When Jackie Young entered the game, the Syracuse blazing guns didn't immediately cease, but they slowly cooled off.
E). Other than replacing Arike, what did Muffet do? Syracuse ran mainly highpost picking all game, and mainly "horns" (both posts up and split.) To stop that, the big needs to show strongly possibly even switching. If it's "horns" the second big needs to follow the guard with the ball until someone else catches up. I watched Arike as the second big just blanking stare at the picking mess thereby forming part of that mess herself, making our guard defender totally swallowed by the ruck. Muffet pulled her --- this, folks is just horrible absent defense. You can't have it.
F). We came back with Jackie because now everyone understood the system and guards weren't walking to the rim. It took a while. Marina's preternatural bombing was slowed by their own attention to high screens etc, but we still had the penetrate-and-find-Brianna game. We also went zone for some significant time --- why didn't we stick with it since it was so effective? We're not a zone team, and I bet that we don't spend loads of time working at it --- good zones are WAY cleverer than they look. Good teams figure out a single zone after a while, and if you haven't practiced several, you're not going to be able to smoothly change the looks. At least this is how I interpreted Muffet's strategy.
G). They altered their "horns" subtly and still got some key invasion. Muffet at halftime (brilliant as usual) ordered the bigs to show and maintain chase even longer, finally this strategy almost ended this running loose in the key, dishing off, and getting fouled.
H). The game didn't show Notre Dame as a bad team at all. It showed Syracuse as a very dangerous team, whose guard play really made Lindsay play extra hard and sacrificing some of her zip on the Offensive end. It showed Notre Dame as a team with several ways to beat even a good hot team in front of a record crowd, and a coach smart enough to find them.
I). Several big stories for me tonight. Lindsay is tough as nails but so is Marina. Kat is quietly the same as them. Jackie is a Warrior. What an unsung player. She, in a different way, is this year's Hannah Huffman --- energy and power off the bench, and full-team play. Erin played stronger in her minutes. Both frosh need to offense more with the ball, but they're going to be OK. Brianna should buy all those folks, and Arike, a valentine's day present. Brianna played well, but her buddies made her look like an MVP.
J). Watch the next game closely folks. What we've seen coming happened during this game for good or evil: the Wild Filly got broken. I've never seen Arike receive a pass and immediately begin looking to get rid of it to her teammates. That was all second half. Now, this is not a good thing, but it says that Arike finally gets it that if she's not Team-ND she's on the bench. So, Muffet's gotten to her by the hard way of the bench. Can our great Coach now heal her to get her offensive dynamism back while retaining the Team-first concern? The problem is that Muffet could probably live with the offensive freelancing, she wants Arike to get after it defensively with some idea of what's going on.
Muffet's (fortunately) not asking me, but just to motivate Arike, I'd have full court defense practice with the retreating defenders getting back quickly enough that they'd in unison bend over and drum the floor --- like a Tribe about ready to attack. Maybe it would put some juice into defense and Arike would like it.