Doggydaddy's Den: Doggy's Doghouse 11/22/2022

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GO UCONN!!!!!

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I've always been an Aubrey fan. And it's so good to see her feeling 100% and playing the way she is capable of playing.

I followed her HS career closely and we have only seen maybe 80% of her skills at UConn. At Ossining, she had a complete offensive game, including a pretty darn good three point shot. She just lost confidence in that part of her game at UConn. I think she missed them early and lost all confidence in that shot. Her time off has allowed her to work on that part of the game while rehabbing. And it shows. She has only taken 3 of them but has hit 2. She looked really good taking them.

She is also a smarter player, which plays right into her amazing physical skills. Defensively, Nika said it all at the press conference yesterday. Aubrey is the best defender on the team. That coming from the reigning BE defensive player of the year.

Aubrey was clearly the sparkplug against North Carolina State with her amazing defensive skills. Look for that and more in future games. What she brings to the table is more than more prognosticators thought would be there. Yes, she is a difference maker.

GAMES

Upsets in Red

Monday

No. 10 Louisville 55 South Dakota State 65

No. 11 Virginia Tech 82 Kentucky 74

No. 17 Utah 93 Alabama 86

No. 18 Oregon 66 Southern Utah 54

No. 19 Texas 82 Rutgers 44

No. 20 UCLA 66 Marquette 58 OT

No. 23 Tennessee 72 Gonzaga 73

Tuesday

No. 1 South Carolina at Poly Cal

No. 16 Creighton at Omaha

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Straight from the Dog

What a great weekend and Monday for women's college basketball. The Top 25 that came out Monday looks like something I've never seen before.

25 teams. The top 2 stayed the same even thought Stanford lost to South Carolina. I suppose if you believe that South Carolina is No. 1 then you can't really punish Stanford for losing in overtime.

After those two? Not one of the next 23 teams were in the same position as the week before. I believe I have never seen that before. And it was an OT win by SC that kept it from all 25 teams moving.

Two teams had a horrible week and dropped a ton in the rankings. Formerly No. 4 Tennessee is now tied for No. 23 with Big East team Villanova. They dropped 12 places with their 2 losses after losing a game last week as well. It does look weird that Tennessee is 2-3 and Villanova is 4-0 and tied. But rankings are weird in general.

Texas lost three, yes three games in one week. Now 1-3 on the season, they dropped 16 spots from No. 3 to No. 19.

Four other Top 25 teams lost, Iowa, Louisville, NCST and Baylor. Those teams dropped 3-5 places.

Everyone else went up, with Utah leading the way moving 8 spots up to No. 17.

And a late addition to this blog....Tennessee lost again this time to Gonzaga to drop to 2-4. Wow....what a bad start for the Lady Vols. Tied for 23rd in this weeks poll and probably out of the top 25 next Monday. Did I mention they started at No. 4?

Last thought. Has there ever been a poll in the third week that had two Top 4 teams had 3 losses and dropped so much?

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More has to be said about Tennessee. First of all, their fans have gone completely crazy. Too much info to post here, but some want to fire the coach, some want to believe it's the coaches plan to play as many players as possible. Plenty of infighting and total snarkyness. Fun to read...lol.

I love how many blame the refs for the loss. The enigmatic Jordan Horston once again was in the middle of it. Tennessee had a 1 point lead with 14 seconds left and was inbounding the ball. She received the pass and the ref called her for traveling. Tennessee fans called bogus!! However, if you watched the replay, she took three steps before dribbling the ball. Travel!

Gonzaga then hit a baseline jumper with Horston trying to draw a foul instead of playing good defense. Her flop was a flop. Tennessee still had a chance to win, having the ball with 12 seconds remaining. They took a shot, missed, grabbed the rebound, missed and grabbed the rebound and missed one more time. Game over. They got three shots, but none of them were good shots. Maybe take your time (12 seconds is plenty of time) and get one good shot? Nahhhh......

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By PHIL

Assists and a Trivia Question

Without looking, guess who led UConn in assists per game last year?

Caution, I'm basing this on the NCAA site, which has some sort of minimum, so I'll tell you in advance that Paige did not qualify. Read on for the answer.

I was at the game against NC State. Near the end of the game, Nika had 15 assists. Someone behind me remarked on the number of assists and wondered if it was a record. I said I didn't think it was although it was an impressive number, but, of course, I was wrong, it was a single game UConn record. I should've remembered because I remember when Paige hit 14 which was the previous record.

I don't think my thought process was all that bad — UConn highly values assists and is typically one of the nation's leaders in assists. We have a rich history of great point guards, and it seems likely that someone would've had a breakout game. I looked up the NCAA records, and Michelle Burden of Kent State holds the Division I record with 23 in a single game. It's not like that game was a statistical outlier, three people are tied for second place with 22 in a game. It would take 20 in a game to crack into the top 16, so 15 in a game is not close to an NCAA record.

UConn's name is all over the record books. But, not surprisingly, they are usually near the top of the list for team stats, and much less often for individual stats. For example, in 2021 – 22, UConn was in the top 10 in six different team categories (including third place in assists), but not in the top 25 for any individual stat. As we all know this is because Auriemma values team over the individual and it shows.

Despite that, I thought that the emphasis on assists means that we might've had some stellar players with some spectacular numbers. I won't be surprised if many of you reading already know the answer — while UConn values assists, the style of game they play emphasizes multi-talented players in the assists are spread out more than they are for some teams who might have a traditional point guard with the lion share of the assists.

This can be easily measured, by looking at assist leaders for teams and seeing what proportion of the total assessed were accrued by the top player.

Let's look at 2021 – 22 so we can look at a full year of data.

Iowa's Clark led the nation with eight assists per game which accounted for 41% of the team assists.

Miles of Notre Dame at 7.4 per game accounting for 43% of the team assists.

Ryan at Iowa State had 7.1 accounting for 51% of the team assists.

Park – Lane (Seton Hall) and Hofschild (Colorado State) closed out the top five, each of whom accounted for 45% of the teams assists.

In contrast, Olivia Nelson-Odota led UConn with 3.5 assists per game (Who got that right?), but that only accounted for 20% of the team’s total, so the assists were spread around quite a bit.

If you go back to 2020 – 21, Bueckers led the team with 5.8 assists per game, but that was still only 28% of the total.

In 2019 – 20 Dangerfield led the team with 3.9 per game accounting for 21% of the total.

I haven't checked all of the years, but in typical years, the top players in terms of assists had between 40 and 50% of the team's total.

This year, Mühl is leading the team with 10.3 per game which accounts for 52% of the team’s total. Congratulations to Niko for her impressive performance, but I wonder how healthy it is to have this distribution. If you look back at the teams with the leading assist getter, you'll note an absence of any national champions. Maybe not a coincidence.

That said, we are only three games in. I think we'll see more assist for Fudd (currently in second place), Sénéchal and Ducharme. I'm confident Nika's production will remain high, but I doubt she will be recording over half the assists by the end of the season.

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By David in Naples

UConn starts the season 3-0 and the early stats are interesting.

Consider:

1. Azzi averaging 30.0 points per game.
2. Nika averaging 10+ assists per game. (31 total)
3. Both Aaliyah and Dorka averaging 10 rebounds per game.
4. Five players averaging double figures in scoring per game. In addition to Azzi, Lou = 16.3, Aaliyah = 15, Aubrey = 14.3 and Dorka at 10.
5. UConn scoring 90.7 pts per game so far.
6. Leading three point % = Aubrey at 66% (2-3). Nika 2nd at 3-6, 50%.
7. Azzi not missed a free throw yet (11-11).
8. UConn with 60 assists on 101 baskets.
9. Ayanna with 16 rebounds in 31 minutes. Also, 10 fouls.
10. Fudd with 90 points out of UConn's 272.

Bring on Duke this Friday..!

Go Huskies..!!

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