This Thoughts from the Road: Home Command Center Edition is brought to you by Jamie Luckie’s whistles and is fueled by Gatorade and some Pepperidge Farms Goldfish.
This game was a Big East battle. Not exactly a “classic” Big East battle in the sense that the stops weren’t as frequent as they would have been in the slug it out Big East. But I would argue this is the new kind of classic. A game where the lead see-saws back and forth and big time players make big time plays. The last 10 minutes of game action had the Dunk rocking and each team’s key players rose to the occasion at different times. Roosevelt ones made a layup at the 12:54 mark to put Butler up by 6 — the largest lead of the game by either team. From there, Providence went on an 8-0 run and the final 11:22 featured 4 ties and 5 lead changes. Ben Bentil scored 8 of Providence’s 21 points in the final 12 minutes, Dunn handed out some key assists and banked in the game-winning 3-pointer and Kellen Dunham and Jones were heavily involved in Butler’s side of things. In short, it was a fun game to watch, despite all the whistles.
This Thoughts from the Road is brought to you by Ed Cooley’s postgame disgust and is fueled by pre-game chicken parm at Anthony’s and postgame buffalo chicken pocket at East Side Pocket.
This is a pretty simple game to sum up. Providence got killed on the glass, got beat too often for dribble penetration, gave up too many points in the paint and shot the ball horrifically for a third straight game. Pretty easy to figure out this loss. What isn’t so easy to figure out is: how does Ed Cooley fix it?
This Thoughts from the Road: Home Command Center Edition is brought to you by my shiny new home office and is fueled by the bacon and eggs I cooked up for dinner.
While the headline doesn’t tell the entire story, it gets across the true takeaway from this game. Yes, it was ugly. Yes, Providence played poorly. But when the NCAA Selection Committee looks at Providence at the end of the year, this game at Creighton will be a road win. That’s it. A road win that helps Providence’s RPI because it counts as 1.4 wins. It’s really as simple as that.
This Thoughts from the Road: Standing Around in a Bar Edition is brought to you by Vince asking for the foul situation every few minutes and is fueled by boneless wings at Croxley’s Ale House in Farmingdale.
Providence started slow, clawed back into the game, went on a second half run to open up an 8-point lead and then went cold and allowed Marquette back into the game. That’s a pretty simple summary of the action in Providence’s game against Marquette on January 5th. It was another slow start for Ed Cooley’s group, as the Friars trailed, 7-0, 4+ minutes into the game before they scored their first basket at the 15:40 mark of the first half on a Kris Dunn layup. Prior to that, there were 4 turnovers and 5 missed field goals. Slow starts are going to be a lot harder to overcome in Big East play and with a fairly short rotation it will be asking a lot for Providence’s core players to expend energy every night coming back from early deficits.
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