Some Complaints About Last Nights Game

Now, there shouldn't be too many complaints about last night's game in which Purdue beat Valpo 86-62; we dominated from the get-go. It was 22-3 about 3 minutes in. But there are a few decisions that I must question Coach Painter about.

First of all, why in the hell did our starters play so damn much? Four of them (Hummel, Kramer, Moore, Johnson) had 25 minutes including JaJuan with 30. We were up by 20 about 7 minutes into the game. We were up by 22 at halftime and went on a 10-0 run to start the second half, putting us up by 32. We need to take advantage of games in which we are dominating to get some playing time for our young guys. I thought I heard that we have one of the youngest benches in at least the Big Ten, if not all of Division I basketball. Bade, Byrd, Smith and Barlow (who did get a decent amount of time) all needed to see the floor a bit more than they got to. It should have been garbage time early on in this one.

When Etwaun had 17 points in the first half I figured he wouldn't see the court for more than 6 minutes in the second half. Jajuan had a great game shooting but he almost got his ankle rolled twice in one minute under the basket. Then Robbie got flipped onto his back with 7 minutes left, which scared the hell out of me after what happened to him last year and seeing replays of what happened to Evan Turner on Saturday. Was it really worth the risk at that point? Apparently so as they played a majority of the second half and didn't get pulled until there were 5 minutes to go.

Another problem I had was our 3-point shooting. Did I have a problem with us going 7/11 in the first half? Hell no, especially not with Etwaun going 5/5. It was great to see us nailing from distance again. What I do have a problem with is that we continued to shoot these shots in the second half. They never pulled within more than 20 points after the break, yet we still jacked up 11 more threes. Obviously they couldn't play solid enough defense on us to stop us from beyond the arc, but why take that shot? Are we the Patriots? Are we rubbing it in? I thought our players had respect for Valpo and their coach (after all, Robbie is from there and Etwaun said he respected their coach because he recruited him). Oh well.

Am I being bitchy about this? Probably. Maybe I was just in a bad mood, but I really like college basketball for the sportsmanship sometimes and I do feel bad for small schools who are getting beat up. If we had done this to Ohio State or West Virginia, I guarantee I wouldn't have a problem with it. But not little Valpo man, not little Valpo.

Barlow's no-look pass to JaJuan off the rebound was just nasty (damnit that guy is good) and I'd never seen the ball go through the hoop the wrong way and go back down. I think those were the only times I was actually in to the game.