February 2nd, 2018: Butler at St. John's

Just the Facts, Ma'am: St. John's raced out to an early lead and never looked back in their 76-38 trouncing of Butler. Qadashah Hoppie had 16 points off the bench to lead a balanced St. John's attack in which every active player scored at least two points. Kristen Spolyar had 12 points to lead Butler.

For reimagined pronunciations, bitter cold, the Union Turnpike Block Party, baby guards, calling glass, free pretzels, and getting off the schneid, join your intrepid and slightly insomniac blogger after the jump.

Good evening, ladies, gentlemen, and well-mannered non-binary folk! It's game day! Are you ready? Please be ready if you're St. John's. Losing to Providence was humiliating enough. Butler's good this year, and Tori Schickel seems to be on a mission, but we should still be beating Butler.

I wish to inform you that it is excruciatingly cold outside, and the wind is biting. This is probably not the night to be persnickety about opening an hour before, and no earlier. My knuckles are starting to look weird, and I haven't even had any interesting drugs.

Either Butler is really short-handed, or they've got half the team in bubble wrap back in the locker room. Neither would surprise me.

I swear, a woman could live a very happy life solo with a couple of massagers, one of them being the one that looks like a mini buffing machine that the trainer has been using on half the squad. I don't think I should describe the other one here. This is a family show!

I think there's some kind of giveaway for the students. They're coming out of the room with food and shirts. The shirts look moderately interesting, but they probably don't come in my size.

Alisha Kebbe's trying to make a break for it! Well, no, she's stretching herself up against the side wall that holds up the "student section", but it looks like she's trying to go over the wall.

Someone on Butler is wearing extremely pink sneakers. You're a little early, hon.

Well, that escalated quickly. It's 45-15 St. John's at the half. We were one shot and 1.5 seconds away from holding Butler without a field goal in the first quarter. I don't think we're going to keep shooting 56% from the field, but I'm not sure Butler's not going to keep shooting 23%. Alisha Kebbe has 12 to lead St. John's. Tori Schickel has six for Butler, which is actually fairly impressive, given the defense she's been facing.

Well. That escalated even more quickly. I honestly wasn't expecting this, though I also didn't realize that Butler was quite so short-handed. I think everyone realized that the slide could not continue, and boy howdy did we bring it to a crashing halt. It was ridiculous by the end.

I don't know the story with Iman Lathan- didn't play the entire first half, then started the second half. She was the one with the pink sneakers. I don't know if she's a point guard or a shooting guard. There were times when I wasn't entirely sure she knew what position she was supposed to be playing and where she was supposed to be on the floor. She has a high-arcing shot, but like many players with high-arcing shots, she doesn’t always know where it's going to land. Sydney Buck gave good effort, scrapping on the floor.

I keep wanting to pronounce Kristen Spolyar's last name like "spoiler", because it would be interesting and open up lots of puns, but it's "spol-yar" and so all you get are a lot of contested shots. Butler looks to her to shoot, or at least she thinks Butler looks to her to shoot, and she put it up often. She was able to draw free throws on contact in the lane (but more on that later). Whitney Jennings is very tiny and very blonde, and if she were just a little bit taller, she could probably have stayed at Iowa without a problem. But her drives in the lane had bad angles and were easily blocked, both from in front and behind. She's got to realize she isn't going to get the call all the time. Michelle Weaver is impressively tenacious on defense- there was a sequence where Maya Singleton had a fast break opportunity and Weaver got back and shut it down hard. She never gives up, and I think that says a lot about both her and her team. (Also, if she and Kaela Hilaire match up on Sunday, there will be scrums, or hair-pulling. They have very similar philosophies.)

I keep wanting to pronounce Shae Brey's last name like it rhymes with her first name, because that would sound really cool, but it sounds like the first half of Breyers instead. I think she was the one benched for Lathan in the second half, but given how few players Butler had on hand, everyone played a big chunk of minutes. She's tall, I guess? I'm trying to remember if she's the one with the funky free throw wind-up, or if that was Spolyar. Tori Schickel, once she has a little bit of space to operate, is money down low. But if you take away her space and deny her the ball, either she's going to push off to get that space or she's going to be completely neutralized. We keyed on her, and Butler's response was to have everyone else on the floor shoot contested shots and get blocked. It would be interesting to see her against a team that doesn't have defensive specialists holding down the fort in the middle. Oh, dear. Seton Hall's defensive strength isn't in the post, is it?

I'll say this for Butler- they never gave up. Even down at the end, Weaver was still hunting down loose balls and everyone was still rebounding hard. They're a good team that got a bad hand. If they get healthy, they're dangerous.

Our mascot is Johnny Thunderbird. This is known. But I'm pretty sure the actual chosen mascot of the squad is Shamachya Duncan. She's adorable, and the team's reaction whenever she makes a shot is even more adorable- they go off. And when she hit the three at the shot clock buzzer, off the window, I thought we were going to get a bench warning for players coming onto the court. (For the record, Machi said that she did call glass on that shot.) We kept yelling for Tamesha Alexander to shoot whenever she got the ball, because while she had her two free throws, she didn't hit a shot. But she kept passing off. I think she values the assist more than the bucket, and that's a good mindset to have when you're at the back of the rotation. (But at the same time, we wanted to give her the big call the way everyone else got the big call.)

Big game today for Kayla Charles, who looks like she's been improving with every game she plays. She's got to do a better job of holding on to the rebound instead of trying to bat it around, but I love her aggression on the glass. I think she's been learning from Maya, and there are definitely worse people she could be learning how to rebound from. She's a little over-ambitious on defense, but she's also a freshman. Andrayah Adams has really cranked up the defense down low, though I'm still leery about lineups that have her in the frontcourt for any length of time. She was sinking threes and hitting from the elbow. I love how well-rounded her game is becoming. (I'm also easily amused by her reactions after foul calls. Andrayah is one of those people who believes that every call against her is a scurrilous lie, if I'm reading her body language correctly.) Qadashah Hoppie seems a little too willing to call her own number sometimes, though that does make a nice contrast to our other point guard. Lead guard. Whatever. We were starting to run clock in the second quarter, and usually the ball ended up in her hands at the end of the clock. I don't know how much of that was by her design and how much of it was from the playbook. She digs the long ball, almost to a fault. She's got to do a little bit of a better job of sticking to her man, especially when the defensive assignment in question is the other team's top scorer (who has an even more blatant dye job than Q does, which is pretty impressive considering Q has red hair).

Oh my gosh, I cannot say enough about the work Maya Singleton did defensively on Tori Schickel. She took away every inch of the space that Schickel wanted to use down low. She forced her into bad shots, into bad passes, into travels- it was amazing to watch. She hit a couple of shots herself, usually from around the free throw line, but for the most part, her energy was devoted to shutting down Schickel. I'm okay with that. Imani Littleton also played a key role in the defensive scheme- I saw her slide over to help a couple of times, especially in the first half; with Butler's personnel, that was a risk that we could take. Statistically she was quiet, but she helped out in all the little ways, and there were a couple of plays that might have been given to her as rebounds by other scorers. As I'll get into later, I have my reasons to doubt this scorer's abilities.

Alisha Kebbe made so many possessions happen, or continue, by diving for loose balls on the baseline and sideline. Full body sacrifice is the best sacrifice. She got hot early, and that was a big help in building that insurmountable lead. When she's on, she brings so much on both ends of the floor. Tiana England showed commendable poise today, and did a good job of running the slow-down offense we needed to run somewhere around the 25-point margin. At times it was too slow, which was usually when Q ended up chucking something right at the end of the clock. She had some slick passes on the break, and to set up those shots at the end of the shot clock. I worry about her ability to change gears, though. She still hasn't mastered that, though I should recognize that she's only a freshman and these things take time. (I keep thinking of Tiana as more experienced because she's a redshirt, but that doesn't mean a thing when it comes to actual game experience.) Akina Wellere was efficient, which was pretty much all we needed anyone to be in this game. She seemed looser and more relaxed than she's been most of the season. I keep saying she's better as a sidekick than as the star of the show, but no one ever listens to me.

The block party was on in full effect tonight, and pretty much everyone was invited. Thanks to tiny Whitney Jennings, even the guards got in on the action. Butler took too much time to get their shots off, and our defense was ready to pounce. It was glorious.

There were times when it felt like the officials were making mercy calls just to keep Butler in the game. I know that's petty, since we did kind of beat them to the point of abuse, but there were times Imani Littleton couldn't possibly have been any straighter up and they called the foul on her. By the end, the refs were letting a lot of things slide. I think they wanted to go home too.

My biggest issue with the game officials in this one was actually with the official scorer. For those of you who've seen me at games, I bring my own score cards to track points, fouls, and other stats. During the fourth quarter, I noticed my numbers didn't match up with the ones on the scoreboard. I thought that was strange, but I've been wrong before. I didn't think I'd been so wrapped up in the game that I'd missed fouls, but again, I could be wrong. It's been known to happen. But I got home, and I looked at the play by play, and I realized that the official scorer never reset the team foul count after the third quarter, which meant that on the scoreboard, and in the play by play, St. John's started the fourth quarter with two team fouls and Butler started with three. I think that might have given Butler two extra free throws, but I'm not sure- I don't remember if that foul was in the act of shooting or not. Going back into the play by play, I saw that the same thing happened after the first quarter, but it looks like the foul count never got to the point where it would have become relevant. Either that, or the refs had it right the whole time... why do I have my doubts about that?

Dance team showed why they're national champions in one discipline and came second in another. Whoo-ee, they're bringing the fire this year.

All in all, a very satisfying win. If we can do half as well against Xavier, we should be fine. Famous last words, I know, given how much of a fight Xavier put up at Seton Hall, but I think we've got things back on track here.