ha nevermind, i see that your name is swWA cougar not swLa cougar. my bad. how do y'all coordinate that though? pretty impressive.
Thanks for the post. Basketball won't get much discussion until after the bowl game, but I am fired up after our win against Rice. We are a team coming off the loss of 5 seniors who contributed heavily to our SEC title run last year. We are led by Tasmin Mitchell who is a helluva player. He is a double double guy every night, and his outside shot is looking really good as of late. Storm Warren is another consistant double double guy, but can get himself into foul trouble. Bo Spencer is a 1/2 guard is our offensive engine. He can be streaky and is sometimes careless with the ball. We have two Freshmen who are starting to contribute, and bothe are coming off career games against Rice. I think this game is a toss up, and it would be huge for LSU to win this game. We are a long reach to make the feild of 65 this year, but the NIT is a likely destination. I have huge expectations for next year. We lose only one senior, return some experienced veterans, have a transfer from Ole Miss who will be eligible, and we have a great recruiting class coming in.
OH... your writing about that game with the big round ball. Can't tell you much about the LSU team. Give Trent a few years to get his guys on the floor.
You all are great fans and I admire the way you support your programs. That flag thing on ESPN game day has been going on now for near 9 years or so, and all true Cougs wake up every Saturday morning and first order of business is to see Ol' Crimson or the White Flag flying. To answer an earlier question, we have a guy that coordinates it and makes sure the flags are there when it counts. ESPN shows us the love as well by making sure we are given a prime spot to fly them. Don't laugh, but we look forward to the day when we get to fly those flags at home, in Pullman, Washington. On to basketball. I follow your scores but know next to nothing about your basketball team. I appreciate the posts on here to help enlighten me. Thanks a bunch. The Cougs are young. Only one senior, no juniors and the rest underclassmen. Coach Ken Bone is absolutely perfect for our program. He's from the Seattle area and has all sorts of ties to anything basketball in the Pacific Northwest. He took Portland State to The Dance the last two seasons. Our kids just love him and you can see it in the way they play. We love to get out and run now, abandoning the pack D that Bennett Ball was all about. We are grateful that Dick and Tony got our program back on track. I think now we have a coach that has found a home for the forseeable future, which is always good for a program. Pullman is nothing like any other city in the Pac-10. We are a totally rural school in the middle of rolling wheat fields called the Palouse. When school is not in session, I doubt there are 15,000 people left in town. As far as this year's basketball team is concerned, we need a win tomorrow night as bad as you guys do. It would be great to start the season 10-2 with a win over an elite SEC school. It sounds like it should be a great matchup. Klay Thompson is our leading scorer. His dad was an NBA player for the Lakers and announces for them now. Reggie Moore is a freshman PG that can score or dish. DeAngelo Casto is our shot blocking center and he's only a sophomore too, like Klay. Abe Lodwick is our #4, a soph that didn't play much last year. Marcus Capers is another sophomore starter at guard. He's a lock down defender who hasn't developed much of a shot yet, but he's very long and athletic. We don't have anyone that will really wow you except for Klay at times with his sweet stroke. I think Reggie Moore might impress you as well, but he takes too many breaks on D off the ball, but recognizes it and has been doing better lately in that phase of his game. He can penetrate almost at will it seems and has a nice touch from the arc. Him and Klay will both end up in the NBA one of these days, imho. Be ready for a fun, entertaining game. Our kids play with a lot of heart as I'm sure yours do as well. I think we stack up with just about anyone in the Pac-10 this season, but UW and Cal are probably odds-on favorites to win it. We could finish anywhere from 3rd thru 8th. Not a great year for the league so far this season OOC. We lost an awful lot of talent to the NBA. I will check in again tonight and early tomorrow morning and that will be it until I visit post-game. Good luck and may the better team win. I'll be happy to give you all my impressions from 2nd row, center court sometime Wed. night or Thursday. Depends on how I feel after a full day of work after a long drive after the game. It's three hours each way for me to Seattle and I have to get up early to go to work Wed. morning, but I am sure looking forward to the game. I don't need any friggin' sleep. Geaux Cougs!!!
Thanks for the info about Wazzu. I expect it to be a closely contested game. The more physicality the refs allow the better our chances tend to be. Trent Johnson basketball is tough defense and strong rebounding. We have a very blue collar mentality on this team. Stick around the forum so we can discuss the post game.
We're pretty familiar with Trent Johnson from his days at Stanford. He always put out a good product, and like you said, tough physical defense. With us being such a young team, you never know how we'll respond to that. We were up on Gonzaga at their place by 15 in the second half and couldn't get it done and Kansas State dominated us with their pressure. Against the Bulldogs we didn't guard the perimeter and Bouldin went off on us. We dominated Portland State our last game with some fantastic shooting, especially from the arc. If you don't contest those shots we're likely to put up some good numbers. Knowing how TJ coaches, that won't happen. I'm more concerned right now with our D and how focused we are for 40 minutes against your guys. Casto is foul prone at times and we're fairly thin in the front court. Gotta head off to work. Again, good luck and chat with you all later. Geaux Cougs!!!
Game is going to be on CBS College Sports. Can't find it anywhere on my dial, looks like radio tonight.
Unfortunately, you're not likely to see much enthusiasm out of our base for basketball this season. Like Wazzou, we're putting an extremely young team on the court that has been severely hampered even further by season-ending injuries to veteran starters. Our team has struggled mightily to beat even in-state teams, which isn't a good sign heading into conference play. Ours is a team looking for a spark, and hopefully they'll find one tonight.
Sounds like it was a good game. I looked for it on TV but no luck. As usual we went cold in OT from the reports I've read. Congrats on the win...
This one hurt. Tigers' had the game playing to their tempo. Tough defensive battle in the 60s. Chris Bass had two free throws to ice the game with 7 seconds left in regulation and missed both. :angry: With the kind of offense that the Tigers have, we cannot afford to miss gimmees. I was kinda hoping we'd see improvement from Bass from the line, and he started off the season looking good in that area. But, he's back to sub .500 from the stripe and that's just not going to cut it from your point guard. I hate to harp on him, b/c others were missing FTs, but that's basically where the game was lost. WSU got to the line a bunch b/c both teams were fouling, and they shot near 80% from the line and LSU shot about 66% from the line. I guess if you look at the positives for LSU, given the way that they had not shown up against ASU and UConn, as their other big road games, at least this loss was respectable. You just hope that for a young team like this, that they gain some confidence along the way to SEC play. The other silver lining here was Dotson continued to show signs of improvement--he shot well enough to score double digits (still missed too many free throws) and rebounded and played good defense. Probably playing at home helped. LSU has an even tougher opponent in Xavier next week on ESPNU on the 29th. I am really bummed that we lost a winnable game, but hope the kids take something out of this. i.e., that EVERYONE has to step up and play like each play is their last... that goes for the FTs too. We have got to get our team FT% up to have a chance against better teams.
