February 23rd, 2018: DePaul at St. John's

Just the Facts, Ma'am: DePaul used a scoring flurry at the beginning of the fourth quarter to put away a 67-54 win over St. John's. Kelly Campbell and Mart'e Grays each notched a double-double to power the Blue Demons, with Grays's 17 points and 10 rebounds leading the way. Tiana England had 21 points for St. John's to lead all scorers, with Maya Singleton adding a double-double of her own.

For frustration, very large numbers, shivering with anticipation, foul trouble, indecisive weather, music appreciation, and playing the wrong game, join your intrepid and mystical blogger after the jump.

Hello, everyone! It's a misty, drizzly, gray sort of day in New York City, as St. John's goes into the final weekend of the regular season. We end the conference season the same way we started it: against the top two teams in the conference. First up, DePaul.

Sky Lindsay is very sparkly tonight, possibly to the point where there are going to be refractions off her shirt. I know I'm getting distracted by the shiny object whenever I look down towards the court. So sparkly.

Would someone please explain to folks that you don't sit behind the visiting bench? Leave that for visiting fans. That way, they're with their people, and they're not pushed out into the main mass of fans. Well, such as both groups are. There's a knot of about ten DePaul fans and that's about twenty percent of the crowd. Okay, maybe ten percent. It's filling ever so slightly. And it's dreary weather and a work night. But still. It's DePaul. If any team in this conference has a women's basketball pedigree- at least one that outshines its men's basketball pedigree- it's DePaul.

Place has filled up a bit, but still not to my satisfaction.

At halftime, it's 29-25 DePaul. I don't think we're going to keep shooting this badly, but I also don't think we're going to keep turning over DePaul like this. Tiana England has 11 points to lead St. John's; Mart'e Grays has 10 to lead a very balanced DePaul attack.

Well, that could have ended better. We were actually doing pretty well, defensively, until the fourth quarter, but we couldn't buy enough buckets. Shooting 1-for-googol from beyond the arc doesn't help. (Yes, I know that's an exaggeration, but 1-20 gets to feel like like that eventually.) Neither does barely squeaking across 50% from the line, though I realize 5-9 from the line isn't going to make up a 13-point deficit. It's fascinating and frustrating to so visibly watch a team's give-a-damn-o-meter hit empty so quickly. It was like we decided that we knew it was coming and when it came we rolled under it.

Vinisha Sherrod is so adorably freshman that Doug Bruno had to yell at her to get her to check in at the scorer's table before subbing into the game. I get the feeling she's even newer at this than the rest of her classmates. Rachel McLimore is carrying around an enormous shoulder brace, and if that's the reason why she doesn't get a lot of minutes, I completely understand. Deja Cage actually got a couple of minutes in the first half, before joining the rest of the deep subs at the very end of the game (Bruno took his time going deep into the bench, and ended up burning two timeouts just for subs, but I guess you don't get to take them home with you, so you might as well). Dee Bekelja looks the most like she needs to hit the weight room for conditioning out of her class, though I don't know enough about her to know whether she's stocky or if she's in fact carrying extra weight. (I am, however, petty enough to observe that she's probably not going to be FOY the way she was predicted to be.)

There's a toughness about the way Tanita Allen carries herself that's a little scary. She makes it clear that you don't really want to mess with her. She matched up surprisingly well with Maya Singleton in her minutes. She draws the defense out to the perimeter, though that's a thing you can say about most DePaul players. Lauren Prochaska did a good job of boxing out and getting position on the boards. She uses her lower center of gravity well. I still wonder if she's related to the Lauren Prochaska who played at Bowling Green.

Remind me never to play pinball with Chante Stonewall. She had a knack for picking up loose change (or for flicking it to St. John's). She has a fantastic name for defense, and there were times when her long arms were definitely disruptive out on the perimeter. She and Maya Singleton are not in the same weight class, and I think she needs to figure that out before the BE tournament, if only for the sake of self-preservation. Maya took her two falls out of three. Mart'e Grays seemed to be throwing shots at the basket with no regard as to whether they went in or not. Her penetration skills were very impressive. She brings them a lot of toughness, as well as fantastic hair. The way she wears those two braids like a crown looks really nice.

Ashton Millender started to annoy me in the fourth quarter when her threes started dropping from the left wing. We get it, that's your spot. Well, at least I got it. Somehow our defense didn't seem to get it. DePaul is very good at shooting threes, and while Millender has evolved from the three-and-D player she was early in her career, that's still one of her strengths. Amarah Coleman seems to have migrated further and further outside the longer she's been at DePaul. I guess that makes sense, and it certainly drove our defense mad trying to stay with her on the perimeter. On the other hand, she had trouble staying with us on inside. She's long, but she's slim, and I don't know if she has the strength to bang with a true interior post player. Kelly Campbell's threes always seemed to be backbreakers, momentum-killers, tide-turners. She was brutal. She boxed out, and took advantage of her teammates' boxouts, to help force us into one-and-done situations.

What surprised me about DePaul was their lack of shot clock awareness. It was if everyone on the floor had completely forgotten that the clock doesn't reset if the shot doesn't hit the rim. We were able to force three shot clock violations, and nearly a fourth, from a team that's normally very disciplined in that regard. This is a younger team than DePaul usually has, but still.

Shamachya Duncan saw time far earlier in the game than we're used to. I hope it didn't actually have to do with today being her birthday, because giving out playing time as a birthday gift against the top team in the conference is a terrible idea. She brought a little bit of defense, but I think using her early in the game played into the concept that we were the three-point shooting team, and we're really not. I don't know if it was our own stupidity or DePaul's defense that forced us into it, but I don't like it. Tamesha Alexander continues to be small and adorable. Not as small as Machi, but adorable anyway. I might have given Kayla Charles a little more run instead of going with guard-heavy sets when our posts were in foul trouble, but given that she was battling her own teammates for rebounds, I might understand why Joe was reluctant to go to her. She got her lunch eaten by Coleman late in the game.

I don't know what was up with Andrayah Adams tonight, but it's not okay. She was a mess on defense and way in love with her jump shot. She looked like she didn't know what she was doing on the floor or where she was supposed to be. And that's still better on offense than Qadashah Hoppie managed. Now, I'll grant that she had a hell of a time in the first half, with shots rolling out all over the place, to the point where I directed some pointed questions Upstairs. (Yes, I argue with what I believe to be imaginary beings when one of my Catholic schools is playing.) But there comes a point when you just have to stop and realize things are not working. And Q just kept jacking shots. Eventually that erodes your teammates' confidence in you- there was a sequence where Q was wide open on the wing and I think it was Akina who missed her (though it might have been Tiana).

Akina Wellere looks very strange without her headband- it disappeared at some point in the second half, as if she were trying to channel the Skylar Diggins superstition. She got good looks from beyond the arc, and they didn't go down. She kept taking them. I'd have liked to see her penetrate more and try to create offense that way instead of continuing to do the same thing over and over. It gets frustrating after a while. Alisha Kebbe hustled on the glass, but couldn't get her offense going until the fourth quarter. Even then, she was mostly looking at corner threes instead of going with what was working for her. The only one in the backcourt who really seemed to come to play was Tiana England, who drove relentlessly into the lane for buckets. One of the support staff was yelling, "All day, T, all day!" at her, and he was right. . I don't know if DePaul overlooked her in the scouting report, or if she was just that good at cutting through their defense, but this was her night and it was glorious. And of course I was left wondering why she couldn't be this assertive all the time, instead of constantly backing out and running clock.

Maya Singleton started the game off like she was the one who wanted to win it single-handedly, but she started picking up fouls, and that took her out of the game, both in the sense of her being stuck on the bench and in the sense of taking away some of her defensive aggressiveness. We need her too much to be picking up cheap fouls, though I suppose we're also lucky she didn't face any consequences for Stonewall trying to go three falls out of five with her. Bruno certainly wanted a review on the first play. (I still can't believe Stonewall managed to pass concussion protocol after a hit that heavy. She went down hard.) Imani Littleton's mobility continues to be sporatic. I like her defensive instincts, but sometimes she just can't move the way she wants to, and it means she can't get to the spot and ends up fouling.

Three-point shooting is not our strength. I don't know why we played like it was. I don't know if that was DePaul's defense or our own idiocy. There were lanes, though not all the time, and DePaul did an okay job collapsing on them.

I think we actually got the benefit of more no-calls than DePaul did. And Bonita Spence was watching over us tonight, with the number of travels that were being called. There was a stretch of three or four possessions where three of them ended in travels. It was a little ridiculous.

Band was really off their game. I love the crew, but they need to get their act together in a hurry.

Why do people act like ravening savages for t-shirts?

We had to know going into this game it wouldn't be easy. And I think we were able to take advantage of DePaul's turnovers. But our passing needs to be crisper, and we need to play our own game, not the other team's game. And the road doesn't get easier, with Marquette to finish the regular season, with Marquette playing for the top seed and a regular season title. Marquette matches up even better with us. We have to be ready.