Watching practice right now

Some thoughts on the open practice today.

If you have kids or nieces and nephews this would be a GREAT event to take them to. There was a group of young kids (10 and under) right behind me who absolutely loved Jarivs Omersa's dunks. Daniel Oturu also put down a pretty sick reverse that they loved. The Gophers finished practice by throwing some t shirts in to the crowd and I saw a little kid who had already put his on few minutes later. The practices are just 40 minutes, so good for short attention spans as well.

An older man in an Iowa sweatshirt sitting just in front of me turned around and noticed my Gopher shirt and started talking to me after the practice had ended. He was really in to the practice (counting along with Gopher student managers the number of shots made in a shooting game for example) and said the combination of the Gophers practice presentation and the band was the second best one he has seen and he has been to all the practices in Des Moines. The only one better was UConn he said.

The first thing I noticed was Matz wasn't on the court. I also didn't see Eric Curry anywhere, so I am not sure if he made the trip. The Gophers didn't do anything at more than 60-70% effort at most with the notable exception of a couple of the dunks/dunk attempts. Jarvis in particular was trying some crazy stuff. When they split up in to guards/bigs, it was Ed Conroy who worked with the bigs on one end of the court. One thing that was particularly cool to me was being right behind the Gophers as the took corner 3's one after the other. You were able to get such a good view of their shot that you could get a better idea of why a guy was a good/bad shooter beyond just the form is weird. It was kind of alarming how poorly the team shot as a group in uncontested/warm up situations.

The Gophers split in to two groups, one on each of the court, and played a game where each group had to make 4 3's from each of 5 spots around the arc. When they had made 4 from each spot they ran to half court and starting shooting from there. I believe they only had to make one half court shot to "win" but not sure about that. The losing group had to do push ups, but they did may be 5 with dubious form so not exactly a punishment. They then switched ends and played the game again. Each group ended up winning once. They finished practice by taking/posing for a group photo at center court and then threw out the t shirts.

I don't want to make a big deal about this as I assume/hope the Gophers are having another more serious practice later in the day. Having said that, I stayed for most of Bradley's practice and that group practiced with a purpose. They were running the same/similar drills as the Gophers, but doing them at much closer to game speed. You could hear coaches instructing and the player were engaged and talking with each other in a serious manner. It was really night and day to what I had just seen from the Gophers in terms of energy/intensity/focus. I had to leave to meet someone for lunch, but would have been curious to see Louisville's practice (who was up next) to see how it compared to Minnesota's and Bradley's.

Thanks for the recap, fun to get a first hand account.
 


SS - Bad feeling
 

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Bummer for Matz, being a senior vs. his old team. Murphy and Oturu best be staying out of foul trouble...
 


The public practices are for show. Not really a practice. Wouldn't be concerned about that. The real stuff goes on behind closed doors.

Agreed. Plus Pitino has a lot of history with playing in the tournament when you factor in Pops, so I'm pretty sure he has a good plan for prep.
 




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