The Ags have a great chance to even up their season record today as the winless Seattle Redhawks come to Davis for a 1 pm game in the Pavilion. The Aggies are coming off their best performance of the year as several records fell in their 109-60 trouncing of Sac State in the Hornets Nest last Friday and lead the all-time series record versus the Redhawks 4-1.
Aggies with 7 steals already. A couple monster blocks, too. Still shooting poorly, but playing great defense to make up for it. 26-14 at the 2nd Q media timeout.
Ags shooting 40% (18% from 3--good grief). Team is missing point blank layups and 4-footers from the paint, which is the only reason the score isn't SUPER lopsided. Only 3 TO, which coach will be happy about.
The Ags' offensive numbers were hugely inflated in the Sac game since 72 points were scored in the paint as the Ags repeatedly burned the Hornets' shabby, pressing defense. We haven't shot the 3 well all year though and, ironically, Morgan Bertsch could be our best 3 point shooter if she just launched a few more. She's 7-12 for the year.
The misses in the paint are really frustrating to watch--it's hard to successfully run a cutting "Princeton" offense if the players can't finish the play!
Coach has cleared the bench, so the final margin won't reflect the actual balance in the game. In particular, Seattle just scored three or four buckets in the paint over Gibb.
Davis ended up shooting 56% in the 2nd half which improved their game percentage to 47%. 30 points off the bench, including 8 from Song and 6 each from Toole and Stobbart.
It looks like Jen Gross has made some adjustments with this team on both offense and defense. The Ags have shot poorly from 3 all season long and today we were only 3-14. Instead of letting he troops fire away freely from downtown, like the 8-40 at Montana, she had the team pounding the ball inside and driving the lane along with pushing the ball in transition whenever we got a chance. The result was 18 assists and 46 points in the paint and lots of trips to the foul line.
The Ags are pressing more on defense too and creating TO's. I think this team responds better to aggressive defense and it, in turn, spurs the offensive flow. We were more active going to the boards today and had 12 offensive boards and 13 second chance points as well.
I like the changes and the energy I saw today. We haven't shown that we are a team that light up the nets from 3 and the changes we saw today paid off.