This is the sixth installment in a season-long blog by Canisius senior guard Bob Bevilacqua. "Bobby Drinks" will provide an insider's look at the men's basketball team all season long, and this week he gives some X's and O's on what the Griffs did to beat Buffalo Tuesday night.

I hope that everyone had a happy and safe holiday.  Because we're in season, most players on the team do not get to spend this holiday with family, but most of the team went to coach Parrotta's house for Thanksgiving dinner after practice.

We played Buffalo at Alumni Arena on Tuesday.  In a back and forth game, we were able to make the big plays at the end against a very good, veteran team.  Frank Turner has been playing like a first-team all-league player, and Julius Coles and Greg Logins have not been far behind.  Those three were huge in our win over UB.  Alshwan Hymes made some clutch plays in the second half, as well. 

In the two days of practice leading up to the Buffalo game, we spent a lot of time defending the UB offense.  Buffalo runs a systematic motion that fits their personnel very well.  We knew that there would be times where they would get decent looks at the basket, but we wanted to make sure those instances were few and far between.  In preparing for this game, we actually watched how the University of Akron defended UB in the MAC Championship game last season.  We tried to emulate how Akron defended UB by switching during specific times and being in especially good help-side defense in certain plays.  UB likes to set ballscreens, raise their other forward and roll their screening big man down the now-open lane.  We tried to counter this by having our weak-side guard right in the middle of the lane to discourage this pass, and if you were at the game, you saw Frank get called for a foul doing exactly what we worked on, even though he was in the correct defensive position.

We knew going into the game that limiting turnovers would be a key to victory.  In the first half, we had 12 giveaways and not surprisingly, found ourselves down 10 at the break.  Some of them came when they trapped our post players with their two forwards and we didn't handle it well in the first half.  In the second half, we made an adjustment to have our post player find a guard on the weak side and "chase it," or to go set a ballscreen.  This was effective in spreading their defense out and it allowed our guards to drive directly to the rim.  In the second half, we had only four turnovers, which was a big reason we were able to come away with the win. 

We beat St. Francis (NY) last Saturday to start our two-game road winning streak, and we have our home-opener against Howard tomorrow at 3:15 pm, following the women's game against Binghamton.  It'll be another tough test for us, as Howard only lost to Niagara by five and they have plenty of talent.  A challenge for us will be to bring the same intensity that we brought to the Buffalo game to a Saturday afternoon contest before we head to Eastern Michigan on Sunday for Monday's game. It's a busy time of year, but we're playing confidently, and that goes a long way. 

Hope to see you Saturday.

Until next week,

Ciao

Drinks #10