A Night for the Bigs
11/21/07
Jeff Adrien and Hasheem Thabeet both had solid nights as the Huskies beat Gardner-Webb 89-72 on Tuesday night at a sparsely populated Hartford Civic Center. The Runnin' Bulldog portion of the schedule is now officially over and the Huskies look ahead to Florida A&M on Monday and a tough Gonzaga test in Boston a week from Saturday.
Adrien had a career-high 24 points to go along with 14 rebounds and Thabeet set career highs with 22 points and 14 boards. Nate Blank kept G-W in the game hitting four consecutive 3's to cut a 32-17 deficit to 38-29, he had 17 points at halftime and finished the game with 25. After going into the locker room up 48-33, Uconn opened the second half on a 16-7 run to put the game away.
After a poor showing in the paint against Memphis on Friday, Jim Calhoun seemed pleased with the effort of his big guys, "I don't think you could have given Jeff any better tonic than for him to have a game like this." Calhoun added, "It was Hasheem's best offensive game. You're seeing the evolution of a kid." Whether the coach actually believes that or is using his famous media quote motivation technique remains to be seen. One thing is for sure, the 4-1 Huskies are not going to lean on one guy as they did with Dyson last year and that can't be bad. box
Happy Thanksgiving.
2 comments:
greyCat
said...
November 21, 2007 at 7:58 PM
thanks for stopping by grey. we'll see what hasheem does against larger schools and more talented bigs. uconn was tied with memphis with about 9 to play, so it was a good game for 30 minutes -- which was encouraging. good luck against mason tonight.
Brendan
said...
November 23, 2007 at 4:06 PM
Good to see that kind of performance from Thabeet. Statistically he has looked a lot better this season (even though the season is about 5 games old). He took 29% of the shots when he was on the court during the second Gardner-Webb game, -- he is becoming assertive offensively. And he has been relatively efficient when scoring this season (if not prolific). Last season (as you know) he was a minor presence in the offense (his year-end Shot% was about 11.0%), so it is unlikely he will turn in 29% shot performances in every game. But having his role grow to 17%+ is reasonable. And any help scoring he can give in the frontcourt will take attention away from Adrien. Frankly the score of the Memphis game was a little disappointing; I thought the Huskies would do a bit better. As observed by Coach Calhoun, they did not control the boards and did not have a reliable scorer beyond Price and Dyson. I doubt they will run into many (any?) other teams that control the boards like Memphis, but finding that third reliable scoring option from Robinson, Adrien and Thabeet should be do-able. Have a great Thanksgiving.