***OFFICIAL MACALASTER AT MINNESOTA EXHIBITION IN-GAME THREAD!!!***

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60's Guy said:
You are saying the Gophers (or the hypothetical more athletic seniors) have no one athletically capable of guarding Williams or active skilled 8th grader??
I'm saying BS to both...granted somebody needs to coach defense...you do need a plan so it is 5 guys guarding the ball aka team defense. But it is ridiculous for the Gophers to allow him to score 41 points when 3 of the 5 other guys were uncomfortable if they had the ball. Absolutely 100% preventable with a plan.
It's not like the Gophers didn't know who Macalester was....that is who dominated the ball for them and scored prior to the game.
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What would you have done to stop him?
 

Dakota2 said:
We know what Payne is bringing. More concerning is the nature of the injury to Christie. He missed the open practice at the Barn. He missed the exhibition game in Ft. Collins. He missed the exhibition game in Colorado Springs. He is missing tonight.
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No injury he had mono he will be fine
 

Dakota2 said:
So if Kansas started five quick guys with limited or even no size and athleticism they would contend for a national title?
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Well, that will depend largely on the type of shoes they are wearing and the head coach's game day wardrobe choices.
 


topos said:
The shots he was making were borderline absurd. People around me were just laughing. Props to him; he put on a show! So many of the shots, you literally could not play better defense without fouling. I've never seen anything like it.
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On occasion I got into a shooting zone like that and I couldn't tell you how or why the friggin' thing went in half the time. I drained some crazy-ass spinorama shots that had no business going in. He's a terrific shooter for sure, but agree some of those were just absurd. He was in zone.
 


Write up from Macalester website:

MINNEAPOLIS, Minn. – Junior guard Caleb Williams (Wild Rose, Wis./Wild Rose) scored 23 of his 41 points in the first half, as the Macalester College men's basketball team played the University of Minnesota in an exhibition game Thursday night in Williams Arena. In an exciting and fun evening for Scots fans, the Gophers came away with a 97-73 victory.

Early on, Macalester used the three-pointer to stay ahead of Minnesota. Williams hit a pair of threes to score eight of the Scots' first 11 points to lead 11-5, then threes from first year guard Kaden Holbrook (Palo Alto, Calif./Gunn) and sophomore guard Eric Wentz (Minot, N.D./Minot) put Macalester on top, 17-9 at the 12:47 mark. As the Gophers started to heat up offensively, Williams continued to score, keeping the Scots ahead as late as seven minutes left in the half. With Macalester leading 25-24, Minnesota closed out the half with a 21-9 run to take a 45-36 advantage into the halftime break. Williams was 8-of-15 from the field, including 4-of-8 from beyond the arc, in the first half.

The second half belonged to the Gophers. After three Williams free throws made the score 53-41, Minnesota went on a 26-11 run to put the game away, 79-52. Williams exited the game with 2:32 remaining and received an ovation from the Williams Arena crowd. The two-time All-Region and All-MIAC guard was 14-of-31 overall and 5-of-12 from three-point range to finish with 41 points and five rebounds. He eclipsed his career high of 39 points from last year's game at Concordia on Feb. 1. Junior guard Coby Gold (Denver, Colo./Kent Denver) hit three three-pointers and finished with 14 points, five boards and four assists, while Holdbrook also made three from deep en route to 11 points and a team-best five assists. Joshua Ola-Joseph led the Gophers with 21 points.

Macalester begins the regular season on Wednesday, Nov. 8 at home against UW-Superior. Game time is scheduled for 7:00 p.m. in the Leonard Center.

athletics.macalester.edu

Men’s Basketball: Williams Drops 41 on Gophers in Exhibition - Macalester College Athletics

Junior guard Caleb Williams (Wild Rose, Wis./Wild Rose) scored 23 of his 41 points in the first half, as the Macalester College men's basketball team played the
athletics.macalester.edu athletics.macalester.edu



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60's Guy said:
You are saying the Gophers (or the hypothetical more athletic seniors) have no one athletically capable of guarding Williams or active skilled 8th grader??
I'm saying BS to both...granted somebody needs to coach defense...you do need a plan so it is 5 guys guarding the ball aka team defense. But it is ridiculous for the Gophers to allow him to score 41 points when 3 of the 5 other guys were uncomfortable if they had the ball. Absolutely 100% preventable with a plan.
It's not like the Gophers didn't know who Macalester was....that is who dominated the ball for them and scored prior to the game.
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How shameful, we didn't have a plan for the guy who got hot and made a lot of lucky shots. That was a trillion percent preventable. And Greta weeps.
 

just noting that Caleb Williams is a bit of an athlete. Track: Jumped in High school in Wisconsin. high, long and triple. State Champ in the triple jump 2019
 

60's Guy said:
You are saying the Gophers (or the hypothetical more athletic seniors) have no one athletically capable of guarding Williams or active skilled 8th grader??
I'm saying BS to both...granted somebody needs to coach defense...you do need a plan so it is 5 guys guarding the ball aka team defense. But it is ridiculous for the Gophers to allow him to score 41 points when 3 of the 5 other guys were uncomfortable if they had the ball. Absolutely 100% preventable with a plan.
It's not like the Gophers didn't know who Macalester was....that is who dominated the ball for them and scored prior to the game.
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So one guy scores 41 but they still lose by 25+ and you are railing about that. Did the Gophs win, yes. Did he score 41, yes. Did his team lose, yes. The guy made just about everything he threw at the rim. He had almost little other help. Some of you on here are such Debbie downers it’s ridiculous. Sports is entertainment, sit back and enjoy a performance for what it is. The sun comes up tomorrow again and the world goes on. That young man can play and it was a blast to watch.
 

I didn't go last night (family gathering) and arrived home to read this thread. The initial reaction was they must have lost with all the negative reactions. It's a D-3 opponent and there isn't much to learn no matter what, but a 25 point win seems okay on the surface for now. Not much to be super excited about, either, but I'll stay off the ledge for a while, at least.
 



60's Guy said:
You are saying the Gophers (or the hypothetical more athletic seniors) have no one athletically capable of guarding Williams or active skilled 8th grader??
I'm saying BS to both...granted somebody needs to coach defense...you do need a plan so it is 5 guys guarding the ball aka team defense. But it is ridiculous for the Gophers to allow him to score 41 points when 3 of the 5 other guys were uncomfortable if they had the ball. Absolutely 100% preventable with a plan.
It's not like the Gophers didn't know who Macalester was....that is who dominated the ball for them and scored prior to the game.
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It was an exhibition/scrimmage and Johnson probably did little to no game planning. They rolled the ball out and they played their base offenses and defenses to get guys game action.
 

MaxyJR1 said:
It was an exhibition/scrimmage and Johnson probably did little to no game planning. They rolled the ball out and they played their base offenses and defenses to get guys game action.
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Assunine!
The goal is to win the game, NOT TO SHUTDOWN THE HIGH SCORER.
IF YOU SHUTDOWN HIS TEAMMATES, AND WIN THE GAME, MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!
 

60's Guy said:
You are saying the Gophers (or the hypothetical more athletic seniors) have no one athletically capable of guarding Williams or active skilled 8th grader??
I'm saying BS to both...granted somebody needs to coach defense...you do need a plan so it is 5 guys guarding the ball aka team defense. But it is ridiculous for the Gophers to allow him to score 41 points when 3 of the 5 other guys were uncomfortable if they had the ball. Absolutely 100% preventable with a plan.
It's not like the Gophers didn't know who Macalester was....that is who dominated the ball for them and scored prior to the game.
Click to expand...
It was an exhibition game.
Maybe the coaching staff wanted to play a vanilla style of defense to see how our guys could handle 1 on 1 defending.
 

The goal of the night was to win the game and learn some things, not to make sure nobody scores 40 on you. The chucker threw up 31 shots! We got beat by whatever against colorado state and people were ready to jump off a cliff when we didnt even know how johnson approached the scrimmage. Now we win by 25 without 2 of our best players and 90% of the people on this board are pissed because we didnt win by 80 and some guy scored 41. Cant win on this board. Hawkins scores 17 and Mitchell gets 13 and all im reading is how Williams a D3 player is clearly better than any of our guards. Lol
 


Few things off the box score.
Ihnen played only 12:26, less than even Betts who played 13:19
Only 5 turnovers total. Ola-Joseph with 3 of those.
38 made field goals with 32 assists. Ola-Joseph with 2 assists! Hawkins and Mitchell both had 9
Gophers were a perfect 6 of 6 on free throws in the first half, and a horrendous 5 of 12 in the 2nd half. Betts, 1-4, and Fox, 1-3 didn’t help the cause.
Only 3 steals and Carrington had them all.
10 of 26 from 3, with Hawkins going 4-6.
43 rebounds, 12 offensive with Garcia the leader with 11, Mitchell with 6

 

gophereric30 said:
The goal of the night was to win the game and learn some things, not to make sure nobody scores 40 on you. The chucker threw up 31 shots! We got beat by whatever against colorado state and people were ready to jump off a cliff when we didnt even know how johnson approached the scrimmage. Now we win by 25 without 2 of our best players and 90% of the people on this board are pissed because we didnt win by 80 and some guy scored 41. Cant win on this board. Hawkins scores 17 and Mitchell gets 13 and all im reading is how Williams a D3 player is clearly better than any of our guards. Lol
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Yep and our guards each had 9 assists a piece. Scoring in the paint was 54 to 4 or something like that and Payne didn't play.

The team sounds like there has been improvement and we will how much soon enough.
 

60's Guy said:
You are saying the Gophers (or the hypothetical more athletic seniors) have no one athletically capable of guarding Williams or active skilled 8th grader??
I'm saying BS to both...granted somebody needs to coach defense...you do need a plan so it is 5 guys guarding the ball aka team defense. But it is ridiculous for the Gophers to allow him to score 41 points when 3 of the 5 other guys were uncomfortable if they had the ball. Absolutely 100% preventable with a plan.
It's not like the Gophers didn't know who Macalester was....that is who dominated the ball for them and scored prior to the game.
Click to expand...

By my count, Johnson put five different defenders on him. So what you are saying is Johnson should have used a new defense that he's never going to use again the rest of the year because someone got red hot... in a 20+ point blowout exhibition where the main goal is to figure out rotations and work on sets you're actually going to use during the season.

The Gophers aren't ridiculous, your response above is.
 

gophereric30 said:
The goal of the night was to win the game and learn some things, not to make sure nobody scores 40 on you. The chucker threw up 31 shots! We got beat by whatever against colorado state and people were ready to jump off a cliff when we didnt even know how johnson approached the scrimmage. Now we win by 25 without 2 of our best players and 90% of the people on this board are pissed because we didnt win by 80 and some guy scored 41. Cant win on this board. Hawkins scores 17 and Mitchell gets 13 and all im reading is how Williams a D3 player is clearly better than any of our guards. Lol
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That's the problem with playing against such an inferior opponent. There is almost no upside. I'm not trying to be critical of scheduling a DIII opponent for their scrimmage. Everybody does that. But it's so hard to really know what you have until you play against your peers. As of now, we can only look at what has happened the last two years and what happened last week, getting blasted by CO State. That's also the infuriating part of scheduling arguably the worst non-conference slate of games we've ever seen. What do we really have here?
 

golfing18now said:
That's the problem with playing against such an inferior opponent. There is almost no upside. I'm not trying to be critical of scheduling a DIII opponent for their scrimmage. Everybody does that. But it's so hard to really know what you have until you play against your peers. As of now, we can only look at what has happened the last two years and what happened last week, getting blasted by CO State. That's also the infuriating part of scheduling arguably the worst non-conference slate of games we've ever seen. What do we really have here?
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There is an upside!
They practiced defending a team with one dominant scorer and they won!
It may happen again during the conference season against an opponent with only one dominant scorer in THAT GAME.
 

gophereric30 said:
The goal of the night was to win the game and learn some things, not to make sure nobody scores 40 on you. The chucker threw up 31 shots! We got beat by whatever against colorado state and people were ready to jump off a cliff when we didnt even know how johnson approached the scrimmage. Now we win by 25 without 2 of our best players and 90% of the people on this board are pissed because we didnt win by 80 and some guy scored 41. Cant win on this board. Hawkins scores 17 and Mitchell gets 13 and all im reading is how Williams a D3 player is clearly better than any of our guards. Lol
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You nailed it.

I walked away with optimism. We have two very capable PGs who push the ball. It was enjoyable watching Hawkins and Mitchell out on the court together. It felt like an entirely different system from what we watched the last two years.

The offense was fast and crisp, with few mistakes. It was a night and day difference between how we looked against St. Olaf last year.

The defense needs to guard the 3-point line better; there's no arguing. However, Macalester took plenty of awful shots, most from Williams that happened to go in.

If they played this game again tonight, and Ben played it seriously with optimal lineups, I'd set the line at about -36.5.

My biggest question, leaving the arena last night: Whose minutes will be cut to make room for Payne and Christie?

I think the easy choice is Betts, who played around 12-13 minutes. Wilson played a bit at the end of the first half (maybe 3-4).

Ihnen didn't play a lot of minutes. He took two ill-advised shots and got yanked immediately. I think in the Big 10, he will play more because of his length. He probably did the best job on Williams, including back-to-back blocks late in the second half.

Fox is going to have a role. He reminds me of a bigger, more athletic Ramberg. He knows where to be when to cut, and how to get easy baskets. I was very impressed with his play. His minutes could ramp up!

Carrington probably has the most to lose when Christie returns, even more so if Ihnen can defend the #2 guards.

It's nice to have guys pushing each other! I can't wait for Monday!
 
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Caleb Williams is really good. He created for himself and hit multiple tough shots!! I believe that Williams can play at the D1 level and be effective!!

What is concerning is that we gave up 41 to him//anyone. Macalester had no bigs to account for, and we give up 41 to a jump shooter. Now, Williams would be our best guard, IMO, but holy shit.

We are better than last year, but still cannot shoot the ball well. Our guards are quicker and play with pace, but against BIG10 opponents it will be rough.

I will put the number of BIG10 wins at 5. And I will take the UNDER!! This will be another long season. Bad shooting, and our guard play will not be on par with the rest of BIG10 basketball teams.
 

topos said:
You nailed it.

I walked away with optimism. We have two very capable PGs who push the ball. It was enjoyable watching Hawkins and Mitchel out on the court together. It felt like an entirely different system from what we watched the last two years.

The offense was fast and crisp, with few mistakes. It was a night and day difference between how we looked against St. Olaf last year.

The defense needs to guard the 3-point line better; there's no arguing. However, Macalester took plenty of awful shots, most from Williams that happened to go in.

If they played this game again tonight, and Ben played it seriously with optimal lineups, I'd set the line at about -36.5.

My biggest question, leaving Williams last night: Whose minutes will be cut to make room for Payne and Christie?

I think the easy choice is Betts, who played around 12-13 minutes. Wilson played a bit at the end of the first half (maybe 3-4).

Ihnen didn't play a lot of minutes. He took two ill-advised shots and got yanked immediately. I think in the Big 10, he will play more because of his length. He probably did the best job on Williams, including back-to-back blocks late in the second half.

Fox is going to have a role. He reminds me of a bigger, more athletic Ramberg. He knows where to be when to cut, and how to get easy baskets. I was very impressed with his play. His minutes could ramp up!

Carrington probably has the most to lose when Christie returns, even more so if Ihnen can defend the #2 guards.

It's nice to have guys pushing each other! I can't wait for Monday!
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Ihnen needs to go away. He cares about 1 thing and 1 thing only.....getting his!!
 

TD12 said:
Ihnen needs to go away. He cares about 1 thing and 1 thing only.....getting his!!
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Ihnen was the only player to stick it out through the coaching change, has gutted out a two-year rehab, and this is the conclusion you draw from 12 minutes of basketball in his first game back since 2020?

Get a grip.
 

TD12 said:
Caleb Williams is really good. He created for himself and hit multiple tough shots!! I believe that Williams can play at the D1 level and be effective!!

What is concerning is that we gave up 41 to him//anyone. Macalester had no bigs to account for, and we give up 41 to a jump shooter. Now, Williams would be our best guard, IMO, but holy shit.

We are better than last year, but still cannot shoot the ball well. Our guards are quicker and play with pace, but against BIG10 opponents it will be rough.

I will put the number of BIG10 wins at 5. And I will take the UNDER!! This will be another long season. Bad shooting, and our guard play will not be on par with the rest of BIG10 basketball teams.
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You can't judge a team's shooting ability based on one game. Every team and every shooter has good and bad games.
One bad (or good) shooting game proves nothing...Stephen Curry occasionly has bad games.
 


TD12 said:
Caleb Williams is really good. He created for himself and hit multiple tough shots!! I believe that Williams can play at the D1 level and be effective!!

What is concerning is that we gave up 41 to him//anyone. Macalester had no bigs to account for, and we give up 41 to a jump shooter. Now, Williams would be our best guard, IMO, but holy shit.

We are better than last year, but still cannot shoot the ball well. Our guards are quicker and play with pace, but against BIG10 opponents it will be rough.

I will put the number of BIG10 wins at 5. And I will take the UNDER!! This will be another long season. Bad shooting, and our guard play will not be on par with the rest of BIG10 basketball teams.
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You could be right on the money about the big ten wins, but, just from last night’s game, just last night, how did you come away with them being a bad shooting team? They were 38-67
 

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