“They wanted it more” is one of the great sports cliches. It generally applies any time you can’t quite pinpoint why your team lost. It can also be thrown out when your team gets beaten by a lesser team. It’s also a failsafe for a coach. All players understand the meaning, so don’t have to worry about offending someone when you say it. Trot out the old “they wanted it more” and move on.
This has led to a bit of blowback in fandom. At the school I played/coached for one of the professors would come
down into the offices the day after games to vent his spleen. Inevitably, his advice was to box out and try harder. This was, of course, completely useless advice because everyone was trying hard. It’s college basketball. No one who has made it that far isn’t trying.
But the idea remains that when your team loses it is somehow the fault of your effort. That was abundantly evident in last night’s Xavier game. Twitter exploded as the various Dr. Early’s of the world (sorry for putting you on blast if you’re reading, Doc) started yelling that Xavier simply wasn’t trying hard enough. The world class athletes who have dedicated their lives to one specific thing just couldn’t be arsed to actually do that thing. That’s the opinion of 40-60 year old men comfortably ensconced on their couches.
And maybe sometimes that is true. We have all watched a team go down 20 and kind of toss in the towel or reach a gentleman’s agreement with the other team that the time for wounding one another is over. That wasn’t the case last night, and it is incredibly stupid to claim that it was. Xavier erased a 13 point second half deficit to take a lead in the game. To listen to the masses on Twitter, you’d think they did that while also not giving any sort of real effort.
Xavier didn’t lose last night because they didn’t try hard enough. This complaint, of course, comes from the fact that Marquette grabbed 19 offensive rebounds for a 44% rate and corralled nine of them in the final six minutes. All credit to the Golden Eagles, they were working hard. The only rebound that seemed to be specifically grounded in effort was one that hit the ground near Isaiah Walker. The ball didn’t hit the ground as hard as Walker’s head had earlier in the game, though, so he can probably be forgiven for looking dazed.
Ben Gold is going to grab this rebound. Which Xavier player here isn’t trying hard enough? The ball comes off the rim, hits a hand and bounces beyond the pursuing crowd and out to Gold. Xavier has four guys who have caught up to a fast break and are chasing it all the way to the rim. That’s actually part of the problem, but more on that later.
This is Marquette’s next offensive rebound. Who here isn’t trying hard enough? All four Xavier players get a seal, Borovicanin leaks out, and… the ball hits Pape N’Diaye and bounces out of bounds.
Here’s the next one. Ben Gold throws Filip Borovicanin out of the way and Borovicanin gets called for the foul. Bad call. Coach Pitino flips his lid, the ref literally shrugs, life goes on. Was this bad effort?
And finally, one that really encapsulates Xavier’s issue. This is classic overpursuit. Filip Borovicanin is walled up well against a driver who will ultimately miss this shot. Tre Carroll is not going to be able to block this shot, largely because he’d have to get over his own 6-9 teammate to do it, but he still tries. He leaves Royce Parham wide open. Malik Messina Moore is in defensive rotation and can’t get there in time.
This is not an effort issue, it’s an execution issue. That’s not Xavier players not wanting to win enough, it’s Xavier players wanting to win a lot and forgetting to do the simple things you have to do in order to win. Isaiah Walker missed a rebound because he has two men because All Wright chased, Pape N’Diaye missed another one that hit him in the chest. Jovan Milicevic missed one because his self-inflicted foul trouble meant he was focused on going straight up, not attacking the ball. Anthony Robinson simply cannot hang on to a basketball. None of those are effort issues, all of them are execution issues.
Xavier isn’t losing games, and didn’t lose this one, because they aren’t trying hard enough. That’s rarely the reason a college team loses a game. It’s more than a little insulting to claim it is. Please, someone track down Roddie Anderson today and tell him his team lost because he didn’t try hard enough. Let Tre Carroll know that Twitter thinks the team they like would have won if he just cared enough to put forth a little effort. Frequently, teams lose games because they break down. That’s what happened to Xavier last night. They hustled, sometimes too much, they fought their way back into a game that they trailed by 13 with just over ten minutes to play.
At that point Xavier’s mathematical odds of winning were 6.4%. They came back to take the lead. Effort wasn’t the problem last night. Execution was. You can teach execution, you can’t teach the kind of guts to fight back into a game you have no business winning.
