The "Tired Legs" excuse

[Highsmith]

I really have to question the "tired legs syndrome" excuse I keep seeing pop up on many threads regarding the Pitt game--if we can't play 2 games with a day's rest in between, we might as well not even show up to the BE tourney or the NCAAs. For that matter, we might as well give up a number of our other games, as we will have a few more (I think) that will involve short rest.

I hate this whole comparison, as it involves Syracuse, but I find it hard to believe that Gerry McNamara has the legs of a god compared to every one of our 3-point shooters. I seem to remember him almost single-handedly leading SU to a BE tournament championship "the hard way" a couple of years ago and his whole game was 3's. Either "The Rat" is Superman or we really need to hit the gym and the leg weights.

There are many aspects to every sport that are greatly influenced by confidence......in basketball, outside shooting is a big one......and many of those aspects are contagious. Teams can all go cold at once--luckily it doesn't happen to us often, but it can happen. Another example from another sport is hitting in baseball. Look at the Yankees over the past few years. They have had one of the most incredible top to bottom lineups in the history of the game, but in a given playoff series, they have gone completely cold......the whole team. Did they have tired arms/hips? I don't think so. A few guys got cold and it just snowballed.

Yes, our guys were probably a little more tired last night than they would be after 4-5 days of "rest". However, we need to be shooting 3's to be as good a team as we can be. To suggest we abandon the 3 because we are tired is a bit ridiculous. This team is made up of elite college athletes.......and I will again say that if we can't make 3's because we have tired legs after a one day layoff game, we might as well pack it in for this season, because we aren't going to do very well in any tournaments. We had a bad night--we need the upcoming days off to get our heads together.....not our legs. Bad shooting games happen--this was one of the worst--we will recover and unless it somehow becomes a trend, let's just let it go.

[GUJook97]

I dont think anyone here is using it as a full-fledged excuse, but I have said that it was a factor, and I stand by that. I dont see how tired legs is any less legitimate than "confidence" and "cold shooting that snowballed." We looked like we were affected from playing two tough games within 50 hours. We will get better, and learn from it, but there arent many times during the course of the entire season when you are going to play two tough teams like Pitt and UConn back to back like that.

[idhoya]

BET and NCAA's are two games in three days, but at the same venue. GU played an emotional, hard fought, game saturday, traveled sunday and played another hard fought game monday. I agree with Jook in that it was a factor. That said, gotta fight through these types of situations as they are not exclusive to GU. Every team has to go through the same thing. That was my Mike Tomlin impression.

[Hoya TMF]

high smith isn't denying that it was a factor. he's saying that if it was a factor, then we are in serious trouble. big east tournament games are back to back to back (if you want to win the whole thing). ncaa games provide only a day's rest, are always emotional and hard fought, and can often feel like they are on the road (see osu in 2006).

if their legs were tired, then they need better conditioning. if their minds were drained, then they are going to have to learn how to recover faster. honestly, i don't think any of those things mattered. last year, we played notre dame in the bet semi-final and the game came down to the last possession. then we absolutely destroyed pitt about 24 hours later. sure we didn't have to travel, but there was even less time to recover emotionally and physically and those games mattered a lot more than these last two.

we had a bad shooting night. these things happen. it was a confluence of factors that conspired against us, but there is no need to make excuses. i highly doubt we'll have such a bad shooting night again this season. if we do, now the team can draw on this experience and figure out another way to win.

[SFHoya99]

We had the same uninspired/tired performance at this time last year.

Criticism/questions I can understand. I don't understand the progression to basically saying we won't get anywhere. There are a ton of games between now and March.

[hoyaboy1]

It could also very possibly have been bad luck. People always want to find reasons for things (ie tired legs), but sometimes teams shoot 3/20 and sometimes they shoot 13/20 without necessarily doing anything different.

[AustinHoya03]

Jan 15, 2008 21:55:45 GMT -5 SFHoya99 said:

We had the same uninspired/tired performance at this time last year.

Criticism/questions I can understand. I don't understand the progression to basically saying we won't get anywhere. There are a ton of games between now and March.

Amen. Here's Exhibit A that the team's performance against Pitt is in no way a good predictor of what this year's Georgetown team is capable of:

guhoyas.cstv.com/sports/m-baskbl/stats/2006-2007/010807.html

We played much better overall basketball last night than we did in the disgusting slop-fest linked above. After that game, the board wanted Jeff Green benched, and questioned whether we could compete with the league's elites. Projections of how we'd do based on the game against 'Nova (and the following game at Pitt) turned out to be totally wrong -- so why are we making projections based on yesterday's Pitt loss?

[vcjack]

I remember a home Saturday game followed by a Monday road game that happened last year where we lost the Monday game in a far more humiliating fashion, and the symptoms were the same: bad outside shooting, little hustle for boards/loose balls, and bad transition defense. That was the Syracuse game and that was a WEEK before the BET. "Tired Legs" happen, and I can almost garuntee you that if our situations were reversed Pitt would have come into the Booth looking far worse than what we did.

[grokamok]

Jan 15, 2008 21:55:45 GMT -5 SFHoya99 said:

We had the same uninspired/tired performance at this time last year.

Criticism/questions I can understand. I don't understand the progression to basically saying we won't get anywhere. There are a ton of games between now and March.

Agreed. We'll get better, and probably more so than other teams will.

With regard to the initial post, I think it was reasonable to assume, given the difference in the previously played teams (UConn being more athletic/physical/challenging than the Hall) and the fact that we had to travel, not only that our legs would be tired, inhibiting our jump shooting accuracy, but also our legs would be *more* tired than those of our opponents, making cuts, rebounding, etc. more difficult. We might utilize an alternate strategy (greater use of reserves, greater focus on play in the paint, etc.) in the future if a similar situation arises.

Sometimes, the emotion of a situation can lead players to dig deeper to counter the exhaustion of games in quick succession. McNamara's team had to win to get to the NCAAs; this was Pitt's biggest game of the season, though not so ours. Sometimes, as well, a particular player can just "bring it" night after night. McNamara did for that tournament and Mullin always seemed to do so; on our side, I remember Smitty, Reggie and Sleepy regularly playing & shooting through exhaustion, and AI never seemed tired, though there certainly were games where his shooting was less than great (examples only, this is not meant to be an exhaustive list -- pun intended). However, this is not necessarily a thing one can expect from a player and is a thing rarely achieved by an entire team.

Just my thoughts on the matter.

[The Stig]

The team has a long time to get in better shape before March. This might be a good wakeup call to make sure they do.

It's also worth noting that the BET and NCAA's are different than this because both teams are on short rest.

[DanMcQ]

DFW had the real reason on the front page - the date:

0-4
GU's record for
games played on
Jan. 14 since the
2002-03 season.

www.hoyasaxa.com/sports/bball.htm

[RockawayHoya]

Emotionally drained? I'd buy that, although it can't be an excuse for March (what if we had been too emotionally drained after the ND BET game or the Vandy NCAA games?) But I find it hard to believe our starters shot poorly on Monday because they were tired. Our starters played arguably if not the least amount of minutes on average for any starting unit for an elite team in the country during the OOC portion of the schedule. Maybe if they had all been logging heavy minutes throughout November and December you might see the effects of fatigue starting to wear on the starters about now. But that's simply not the case.

My opinion is that a 48 hour turnaround had nothing to do with our bad perimeter shooting. We were bad against UConn for the most part until the very end of the game (after having not played for 4 days) and it carried over into last night's game. Shooting slumps happen.

[grokamok]

Jan 16, 2008 0:15:54 GMT -5 RockawayHoya said:

Emotionally drained? I'd buy that, although it can't be an excuse for March (what if we had been too emotionally drained after the ND BET game or the Vandy NCAA games?) But I find it hard to believe our starters shot poorly on Monday because they were tired. Our starters played arguably if not the least amount of minutes on average for any starting unit for an elite team in the country during the OOC portion of the schedule. Maybe if they had all been logging heavy minutes throughout November and December you might see the effects of fatigue starting to wear on the starters about now. But that's simply not the case.

My opinion is that a 48 hour turnaround had nothing to do with our bad perimeter shooting. We were bad against UConn for the most part until the very end of the game (after having not played for 4 days) and it carried over into last night's game. Shooting slumps happen.

I agree that shooting slumps just happen, on occasion. However, the starters played more minutes against UConn than they had in any of their previous games; as the conference season began, because of the importance of games, the level of competition and the more likely closeness of the score, this was expected (the second-highest number of minutes for the starters was in the Rutgers game). When combined with the physical nature of that game, the two-day turnaround and travel, the likely result was a tired team.

We were "bad" against UConn in a way that had little to do with a lack of energy -- I think we played that one with more energy than usual, as evidenced by our rebounding in that game (80% of the possible defensive boards and 33% of the possible offensive boards). Ultimately, if this expense of energy made the team (or the starters) tired, one would probably notice this from the way in which they played in the Pitt game. To me, it seemed that they were, indeed, a tired bunch -- the difference in energy level from the starters to the bench was palpable.

Again, I think that the starters will be used to both a high number of minutes and short turnarounds between games by the time March rolls around. I just wish we had approached this game a little differently.

[The Stig]

Jan 15, 2008 23:38:22 GMT -5 DanMcQ said:

DFW had the real reason on the front page - the date:

0-4
GU's record for
games played on
Jan. 14 since the
2002-03 season.

www.hoyasaxa.com/sports/bball.htm

Good thing we're playing Cuse on Jan. 21!

[prhoya]

Jan 15, 2008 20:53:12 GMT -5 Highsmith said:

I really have to question the "tired legs syndrome" excuse I keep seeing pop up on many threads regarding the Pitt game--if we can't play 2 games with a day's rest in between, we might as well not even show up to the BE tourney or the NCAAs. For that matter, we might as well give up a number of our other games, as we will have a few more (I think) that will involve short rest.

I hate this whole comparison, as it involves Syracuse, but I find it hard to believe that Gerry McNamara has the legs of a god compared to every one of our 3-point shooters. I seem to remember him almost single-handedly leading SU to a BE tournament championship "the hard way" a couple of years ago and his whole game was 3's. Either "The Rat" is Superman or we really need to hit the gym and the leg weights.

There are many aspects to every sport that are greatly influenced by confidence......in basketball, outside shooting is a big one......and many of those aspects are contagious. Teams can all go cold at once--luckily it doesn't happen to us often, but it can happen. Another example from another sport is hitting in baseball. Look at the Yankees over the past few years. They have had one of the most incredible top to bottom lineups in the history of the game, but in a given playoff series, they have gone completely cold......the whole team. Did they have tired arms/hips? I don't think so. A few guys got cold and it just snowballed.

Yes, our guys were probably a little more tired last night than they would be after 4-5 days of "rest". However, we need to be shooting 3's to be as good a team as we can be. To suggest we abandon the 3 because we are tired is a bit ridiculous. This team is made up of elite college athletes.......and I will again say that if we can't make 3's because we have tired legs after a one day layoff game, we might as well pack it in for this season, because we aren't going to do very well in any tournaments. We had a bad night--we need the upcoming days off to get our heads together.....not our legs. Bad shooting games happen--this was one of the worst--we will recover and unless it somehow becomes a trend, let's just let it go.

Really? Read on...

washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080121/SPORTS/91920578/1005

"They are one of the best teams in the country, and it is going to be a tremendous challenge for us," Boeheim said after the Orange dropped an 81-71 decision to Villanova in the Carrier Dome on Saturday. "We have one day to get ready for them."

The Hoyas know the feeling after last week's quick road turnaround, which yielded a fatigue-addled 69-60 loss at Pittsburgh last Monday. Road teams are 0-4 in two-day turnaround league games this season.

It was precisely such a setup that stung the Hoyas against Syracuse last season, when Georgetown clinched the Big East regular-season crown with an emotional 61-53 victory over Pittsburgh in Verizon Center on Feb. 24 and then traveled to Syracuse the next day for a Big Monday meeting with the Orange. Celebrating its senior night against the weary Hoyas, Syracuse snapped Georgetown's 11-game winning streak by strapping a season-worst 72-58 beating on the Hoyas."

Did you really think that after an emotional win vs. Pitt at home, the clinching of the BE regular season title after so long, the well-deserved party that night and a Sunday trip (I wonder if it's a bus or plane, but nevertheless...) to Syracuse we were going to be ready to play on Monday against a pumped up Syracuse needing the big win to get an invitation to the Tournament? "Tired legs" is not an excuse; it's a result of lack of rest and other things.

Other posters addressed the ridiculous comparison between this two-game stretch vs. the two-games-in-the-same-venue weekends of the tournament and the BET games, so I'll leave it at that.

[hifigator]

If there is a tired legs issue tonight, then I think it favors us temendously. Syracuse is just not a deep team at all. Combine that with having to travel the one and only day between the games, and I like our chances to cover the 12 1/2 points. As I will do on the prediction thread, I say Hoyas win pulling away in the second half 77-59.

[GUJook97]

I think it favors us, but i still contend, as i noted above, that it will be a factor. Even with back to back home games, playing within 48 hours is tough on college players. It's not just fatigue, but as others have noted, it is emotions and energy. Remember, last year we drilled ND at home on Saturday, too, and the monday after, in my opinion, we played our worst game of the season against Villanova. This is Syracuse, though, and I think it will be different. Plus, we can learn from what happened last week.

[hoyarooter]

If Syracuse had "tired legs," how badly would they have beaten us if they had been fresh? Oh, wait, I guess the reason that they scored four points in the last nine minutes last night must be "tired legs."

[prhoya]

Bilas mentioned the tired legs several times at the end of the game.

[JohnJacquesLayup]

Roster depth MAY have something to do with one team needing more time to recover than another, but a few minutes more per player the game before really isn't much. Travel, though, has nothing to do with it. Last I checked, the Orange didn't Editeding walk from Syracuse.