Scott Rich

But against a Cal team that's really, really driven by Day Day Aims, like we talked about in the preview, that worked really darn well.

Once Damesar took him out of the flow of the game, and he did that from the start, he did not score until the second half.

And again, this is Cal's engine, you know, their best player by far.

He was already out of the flow of the game, and that had huge impacts.

We'll talk a little bit about the intricacies of those runs, I think, a little bit more.

Dame Saar wasn't on the floor in either of those runs, but his impact was.

The fact that he was able to take Dede Ames out of the flow of the game, even when he wasn't on the floor, Cal had to adjust.

Cal had already implemented adjustments to how are we going to score against Duke when Dame Saar is taking Dede Ames out of the flow.

And then even when Dame wasn't on the court, those adjustments were still in place.

Cal was still going to their second and their third options, their second and their third plans because of those adjustments.

I thought that was really, really encouraging.

I thought it was encouraging both from Dame Saar's development, but also from a coaching perspective of, hey, John Shire diagnosed an issue and said, hey, sometimes simpler is better.

Sometimes we have to keep it simple, stupid.

And it felt like that's what worked against Cal.

I think it's worth, you know, if you have the time, go back and look at the SMU game and look at the Cal game and ignore whether the shot goes in or not.

And ask yourself why.

what is the quality of shot that the opposition is getting?

I left the SMU game feeling optimistic about our defense, even despite the metrics, because it just seemed like, hey, these guys were making really hard shots, and hey, their second and third guys were making shots they don't normally get.

It felt like that momentum carried over into this game, where it was still, we're forcing their best players to take really, really hard shots.

The law of averages just came back in our favor, and lo and behold,