I am going to start with a postive: Daniel Oturu was the best player on the court tonight by a wide margin. It is an absolute shame that no other players or coaches were even adequate at their jobs tonight. I wasn't impressed with Butler, just extremely upset by everything other than Daniel Oturu.
There is no excuse for this type of roster in year 7 of the Richard Pitino era. None. It's extremely scary that we have at least two freshman (don't know if they actually would have played Inhen tonight for his first game or not) that can't get in this rotation.
Marcus Carr played the worst game from a Gopher point guard that I can remember. Maverick Ahanmisi had far worse stretches when Tubby would play him, but nobody who was allowed to handle the ball as much as Carr has played this bad in a long, long time. He couldn't even dribble tonight, he got zero penetration despite handling the ball for half the shot clock, almost never created a shot for anyone, made a bunch of terrible decisions leading to turnovers, took terrible shots, shot terribly, and missed a bunch of huge free throws. It is completely baffling how Pitino never took him off the ball in the second half and put it in Willis' hands. Hopefully this was just one game, but the thing that concerns me is that there is ZERO burst there. He simply can't get by guys off the bounce. Even when a big switched on to Carr he couldn't create separation for a layup and forced a contested shot.
It seems like Pitino made the exact same mistake with Alihan Demir that he made with Brock Stull. Two games in and it seems very apparent that Alihan cannot play high major basketball. It's absolutely baffling that we knew Murphy was graduating and Curry was 2 years removed from playing basketball and Pitino couldn't sell anyone better than this to come and be his starting power forward. The game turned around when Omersa was inserted for Demir and Jarvis made some nice plays. Unfortunately, Jarvis really seems to struggle with awareness. He gave up two really bad offensive rebounds that lead to 4 points (once a layup, once Jarvis committed a foul) that should have been incredibly easy defensive boards for him. When you really can't shoot, you can't take something else off the table too and Jarvis does that. I honestly don't know how they put two competent "big" men on the floor this year unless a light goes on for Jarvis or Isaiah is the real deal.
I don't know what this team does well. They are not particularly athletic at the 1-3, they haven't shot it well, they have a complete hole at the 4 spot, they turn it over, they don't run any sort of half court offense that has shown to create open looks, they take poor shots and lose their composure on offense, and they are not physical down low. The only positives I see is the guards/wings are willing to scrap for rebounds and the vast majority of the team at least competes on defense.
The officiating, especially in the first half, was absolutely brutal. There were a lot of tight off the ball calls made on the Gophers on one end and then no calls (and a charge!) that hurt the Gophers on offense and got Gabe and others in foul trouble. Butler got at least one possession if not two gifted to them by officials not knowing who the ball went off of. It would be on thing if it was just judgment calls, but it was literally a total different game on one end of the floor than the other when it came to the whistle.