Dave in Green

Not good.

Game on. Score tied halfway through the second half. The overriding impression I'm getting from watching this game is that the Zips can't consistently win playing one-on-one. They really need to start playing more as a team.

Zips don't look great but WMU looks surprising awful considering they've been pretty good at home. Zips lead 19-7 at 6:25 of the first half.

Horrendous start for both teams. Zips leading 5-4 at 12:04 of the first half. Lots and lots of missed shots from both teams.

Anyone at UA who officially knows what happened with Nick wouldn't be allowed to say anything due to student privacy laws, and I've yet to see anything unofficial reported. But if something unofficial does pop up we'd have no way of knowing for sure if it was factual or unsubstantiated rumor. I suspect that reporters have already checked police and court records and would have reported if they'd found anything there. Assuming he sits out a game or two, then whatever he did was probably no more serious than what many of us did at his age, whether we got caught or not. I'm OK with not having an all-choir-boy basketball team because I was no choir boy at that stage of my life. If I thought there was a serious serial problem with many Zips players, I'd be concerned.

Sad story. I never felt totally comfortable with Ianello, but argued here in favor of giving him a fair chance. When he failed to deliver on his fair chance, it became obvious he needed to go. But I still thought he could be successful as an assistant somewhere. He had recruiting experience that went back to 1990 with Wisconsin. His experience as a receivers/tight end coach began in 1997 at Arizona. He's had all the time in the world to produce great results and just hasn't delivered. The receivers at Kansas have produced beyond awful results, and Jayhawks recruiting has been ugly. In the end it appeared that Charlie Weis was Ianello's last lifeline to a significant college football coaching position, and that lifeline has just been cut. He's 49 years old, maybe not too late to find a new profession.

As I recall there was some hint that ESPN might at some point reinstitute some form of BracketBusters on a smaller scale. It originally began on a small scale and then grew into monster, much as the original few football bowl games eventually grew into a monster where almost every team with a 6-5 regular season record ended up bowling. If everyone's doing it, it's not special.

Hopefully a minor indiscretion for Nick that will result in no more than a minor suspension. Burning Kwan's redshirt doesn't look like such a waste right now. Nick's been averaging 21+ minutes per game, and a chunk of that PT is likely to go to Kwan. The starting lineup was likely to change against WMU anyway. Shayne Whittington (6-11, 250) is generally rated the best center currently in the MAC. Coach Dambrot was unlikely to go small against him. Pat will likely get the start at center with relief from Big Dog to try to shut down Whittington.

Detroit metropolitan area = Big Boy Cities. Oakland County is one of the 10 highest income counties in the U.S. with populations over 1 million. Lots and lots of sports fans in the burbs.

And in his first game as an NBA head coach, he has the 21-29 Pistons beating up on the 37-14 San Antonio Spurs. With 2 minutes left the Pistons are winning 105-92.

@akronzips71, BG's rotation is not taller than the Zips' rotation. It's just that BG's tallest players had more PT than the Zips' tallest players. Pat (6-11), Big Dog (6-9) and Kwan (6-9) played a combined 20 minutes compared to 74 minutes for Cam Black (6-10), Josh Gomez (6-10) and Richaun Holmes (6-8). So for much of the game Nick (6-8) or Tree (6-7) was the tallest Zip on the floor. Coach Dambrot has mentioned a couple of times now that he really wants to have a true center on the floor more of the time, but has been using more of a smaller lineup to generate more offense. The message seems to be that the Zips' bigs need to help generate more offense to get more PT.

It's especially tough watching Big Dog move from the POV of the guy between him and the basket when he starts that slow dribble move leading to the quick spin and bank shot while you try to stand your ground. Ask Cam Black after he ended up flat on his butt with no call from the ref.

@1981grad, the reason we saw more of Nyles tonight is because Melo picked up his 3rd foul with 16:10 left in the game and went to the bench. Nyles played nearly 9 straight minutes in his absence. When Melo left the game the Zips had a 7-point lead and when he returned with 07:21 remaining they had a 4-point lead. Hard to say if the Zips would have been in as much trouble late in the game if Melo had played more minutes in the second half. But he played 17 minutes in the first half when the Zips ran up their biggest lead of the game and just 9 minutes in the second half due to the foul problem. Melo had a decent game except for the 2 turnovers and 2 fouls in the last 30 seconds of the first half.

Seriously, what is it about the Zips and last-second long bank shots? Anyway, they left enough seconds on the clock for Q to answer. That second half was tough to watch. I'm suspicious that Coach Dambrot is getting ready to make more lineup changes.

@zippy5, I appreciate you, @BirdZip and others pointing out where stats I post don't strike you as relevant. It helps get me more focused on finding stats that are more meaningful and useful. For example, looking more closely at turnover percentage makes it obvious that turnovers per minute is a much better stat for measuring Melo's progress in protecting the ball. I couldn't find a source for turnovers per minute and had to do the calculation manually. I'm willing to invest this time to satisfy my own curiosity as well as to share with any fellow Zips fans who might be interested. Maybe an even clearer way of presenting the improvement in Melo's ball protection rating is that in the first 17 games versus the last 5 games he went from 1 turnover every 4 minutes of PT to 1 turnover every 14 minutes of PT.

Using all the Google services works great for those who are willing to share that much private information with one megacorporation. Those who prefer not to have so much personal data aggregated under the control of a single entity are better served by spreading things around. For example, Firefox is every bit as fast and usable as Chrome but with better privacy features. Combine that with e-mail and search engines from other providers and no single entity will have as much access to so much personal information about you. Different people have different priorities and one size doesn't fit all. Some don't trust big government, some don't trust big business, some don't trust either and some have no problems with either. It pays for each of us to be aware of as many facts as possible so that we can make the most informed decisions to suit our personal priorities.

If you read the IT websites every day like I do, you'd have a better idea of the full scope of data that Google mines about you without your knowledge or permission. But you don't have to believe me. Here's one small article on one part of the problem from your good friends at Fox News: Google fights for right to read your private emails

@zippy5, some stats are available and some aren't. For example, with lots of passing a player might touch the ball 5 or 6 different times in a possession. No one tracks how many individual touches each player has during the course of a game. The 3 turnover stats that are kept in every game are total turnovers, turnovers per game and turnover percentage. It's also easy to calculate turnovers per minute played. Beyond that it gets murky. None of the individual turnover stats tell the whole story and all of the turnover stats together don't tell the whole story. They only give directional indications. Interpretation is required. That's what we're trying to do here. What we Zips fans know from watching Melo play is that he previously turned the ball over at a fairly high rate per minute played. What's obvious from available stats is that in the last 5 games he's played longer minutes and turned the ball over fewer times. Turnover percentage may not be the best stat to consider when evaluating Melo due to the fact that it's affected by the extremely limited number of shots he takes. I probably shouldn't have even brought up turnover percentage. But, hey, I'm no statistician. I'm just searching for measurements to compare against impressions. Here's my best estimate based on available numbers of the most meaningful evaluation of Melo's performance this season to date: In the first 17 games he played 215 minutes and had 53 turnovers, averaging .25 turnovers per minute played. In the last 5 games he played 122 minutes and had 8 turnovers, averaging .07 turnovers per minute played. Big difference.

@BirdZip, my fault for improperly expressing what turnover percentage actually is. But it is actually fairly simple to calculate as it's all done by computer analysis of official NCAA play-by-play documents submitted after each game. The formula for turnover percentage for an individual player is number of turnovers divided by total number of offensive possessions while that player is on the floor. Look at any play-by-play and you'll see that all the data is there to do the calculation. Following is a more detailed explanation of individual player turnover percentage, which helps explain why a PG who doesn't shoot a lot (like Melo) will typically have a worse turnover percentage than a catch-and-shoot 3-point shooter (like Reggie):

Thanks. It appears that the problem is more IE11 than Windows 8.1. The quote you see above was produced in Firefox, which I just installed on my Windows 8.1 computer. With Firefox I can quote posts as well as copy and insert text with no problems. I finally realized that Internet Explorer, which I've been using forever, was causing other problems such as slow web page loading. I decided against installing Google Chrome as Google has more tracking features than the federal government and is becoming way too intrusive in our lives. Firefox is a non-commercial product that gives users the most control over maintaining their privacy. In other words, it caters to users more than advertisers. In addition to correcting the new ZN.o quote/text paste problems, Firefox loads websites significantly faster and is making my internet experience much, much better.

Right, Zeke helped cover for Alex's soft D. Melo's D is good enough that Coach Dambrot now trusts having him on the floor when the Zips are trying to get a defensive stop at the end of close games, especially against teams with smaller, quicker guards. Taking the total package of offense and defense, Melo is becoming a surprisingly effective overall player. If he keeps this up, he should be considered for the team's most improved player award at the end of the season. The latest NCAA season stats present a stark picture of just how bad Melo was earlier this season. Even counting his low turnover rate in the last 5 games, his earlier record was so bad that he's still #1 in the country in highest turnover percentage at 48.57%. That means that prior to the last 5 games, Melo was turning over the ball on more than half of his possessions. Now for the other end of the scale, the Zips currently have an active player on the roster who ranks #5 in lowest turnover percentage among all players in D-1 college basketball since 2007! Time to give major props to Reggie McAdams and his amazing 5.43% turnover percentage.

Skip, those are some good observations about Melo. The most telling stats to me about how far he's come is that in the last 5 games he's played a total of 122 minutes and had only 8 turnovers. That's an average of just 1.6 turnovers in 24 minutes per game or 1 turnover per 15 minutes. By comparison, last season Alex averaged 2.2 turnovers in 30 minutes per game or 1 turnover per 14 minutes. So over the last 5 games Melo is averaging slightly fewer turnovers per minute played than Alex. I don't know how you could ask anything more from a PG who used to be considered a turnover machine. Obviously we'd love to see Melo score a little more. But even though he doesn't shoot much, he's been incredibly accurate over the past 5 games, hitting 5-6 from the field and 5-6 free throws. If Melo can continue to play at this level over the rest of the season, it would be a huge improvement over the PG situation we were looking at prior to the last 5 games.

Now that I've had a chance to try the new ZN.o on a couple of different computers, I can confirm a problem with Windows 8.1 and Internet Explorer 11 that someone mentioned in another thread. When I hit the quote button to reply to another post, the quoted text doesn't show up in the new post. Also, if I manually copy text from another post, it doesn't show up when pasted in the new post. On a computer with Windows Vista and an older version of Internet Explorer, everything works fine. I've tried changing every option I can find on both ZN.o and IE11 and nothing corrects the problem. This problem did not exist with the old ZN.o or any other forum on which I post, only the new ZN.o. If anyone knows a solution, please share.

Zeke looked good. We sat with GameChngr44 and family behind the Red Claws bench. Ty Walker was not with the team. But newcomer Daniel Orton, a 6-10, 275-pound forward/center was. A University of Kentucky one-and-done who was picked #29 in the 2010 NBA draft, Orton has great offensive moves. But we were close enough to the bench to hear the team's coach tell Orton he needed to play D more like Zeke, who actually had 4 blocks. The stats folks missed the 4th block, which was right in front of us and caused the Canton player's shot to drop about 5 feet short of the basket. Zeke continues to improve, playing more aggressively at both ends and looking like he belongs. His coach high-fived him several times when he returned to the bench, and seems to be pretty high on Zeke's potential.

The game was pretty much what I expected when I posted my pre-game thoughts earlier in this thread. Nothing was working for the Zips, and Coach Dambrot kept trying everything he could think of to kickstart the team. One unusual move near the end was shuttling Reggie in on offense and Melo on defense. Unfortunately, Reggie remained stone cold tonight and couldn't get anything to drop. Ironically, in addition to playing nice defense against EMU's guards, Melo had what I thought was the offensive play of the game when he rebounded and put back a missed Q layup, was fouled and nailed the free throw. That produced the game's first tie at 46-46 with 2:42 remaining and brought the crowd and the Zips to life. I don't know why there's a tendency on this forum to give opposing coaches so much credit for what goes right with their teams and attribute anything that goes right with the Zips to the players, failure of the other team or dumb luck. I thought Coach Dambrot made the right moves at the right time to save a game that appeared to be lost. The bottom line of tonight's MAC games is that order has been restored. At the halfway point of the conference season, the Zips are now alone in first place at 7-2 in the East with Toledo alone in first place at 7-2 in the West.