When a good team with aspirations of being great plays a vastly overmatched opponent, the game should never be close. Tonight’s matchup between the No. 11 Longhorns (6-1) and Sam Houston State (3-5) was never close. The Longhorns took the floor focused, energetic, and beat Sam Houston State, 79-63. However, Shaka Smart wasn’t thrilled with his team's finish and rightfully so.
Here are 10 postgame thoughts:
1) The Longhorns began the game with an 11-0 run and never looked back. Until they looked up and saw a comfortable 20-point lead, there were no signs of taking an inferior opponent lightly.However, the game’s final 10 minutes were surprisingly chippy, included a lot of fouls, and didn’t reflect UT’s strong first 30 minutes when it lead by 27 points with 11 minutes remaining. Sam Houston State became extremely aggressive chasing the game, received the benefit from some terrible officiating, and UT’s response was missing the maturity it showed the begin the contest. Frankly, the Longhorns showed some of the bad habits that have plagued them in the past.
“I thought our guys started the game with really good energy. I thought I got started the second half with really good energy, that was a point of emphasis the last couple of days in practice was to start the half the second half in a good way on the defensive end. I thought we did that. But there was a significant part of the second half where we were obviously a step off, a step behind,” said Smart. “You know, trying to get some different guys some minutes some opportunities. But need to be better than we were in a second half.
“I think there was certainly some good things that a lot of our guys did that we can build on and improve. There's a lot of different things that we need to do better. So, we'll look at that tape. And certainly, I think for our individual guys, there's a ton of stuff that we can show guys and improve on.”
2) The Longhorns went from moving the ball around beautifully to begin the second half to being a little too stagnant and forced the issue on offense. What’s frustrating is Texas began the game with a half-court action we don’t often see, and it immediately led to a layup for Matt Coleman on a backdoor cut off a feed from Courtney Ramey facilitating offense at the perimeter. Later, Texas ran a set to get Kai Jones running across the paint to the low block for a post touch.
These are the types of things I’d like to see Texas do more often. Texas did do more guard-guard ball-screen action instead of the traditional guard-big look, which led to some pick-and-pop opportunities. But this team still lives and dies with perimeter ball-screen action and guard freedom when it’s in the half-court, and down the stretch it was pretty ugly when the team wasn’t in transition.
3) This was supposed to be the type of game Texas racked up an impressive points per possession number and showed some offensive efficiency. Instead, it managed a poor 1.1 points per possession against a horrible defense. Simply, when Texas doesn’t get stagnant on offense, and the way SHSU tried to play ball scerens in the first half forced Texas to move the ball, it often creates quality looks; when it gets stagnant, it can go into scoring droughts like it did tonight because besides transition chances there isn’t anything different used to immediately pull Texas out of it.
“I thought the ball movement in the first half was pretty good. You know, just had too many turnovers overall in both halves. But I thought one of the reasons that we got stagnant offensively in the second half is the ball was sticking too much the guys didn't move the ball as well,” said Smart.
4) Turnovers were the thing that prevented Texas from winning by a much bigger margin. The Longhorns committed 18 of them, a grossly unacceptable number. Well, turnovers and a really bad three-point shooting team connecting on 8-of-16 three-pointers...
READ THE REST OF OUR POSTGAME COLUMN AND DISCUSS TEXAS BASKETBALL INSIDE THE 40 ACRES (PREMIUM SUBSCRIBERS)
Not an Orangebloods.com member? Take advantage of our special promo above and receive 50% off the first year of a new subscription and get some FREE gear.
