Scott Rich

The other contributor to the turnover issues was Dame Saar.

He had three turnovers in 22 minutes.

But his turnovers, again, were more positive turnovers.

And a turnover is never positive, obviously.

But he's attacking the rim and not quite finishing turnovers rather than what are you doing past turnovers, which we've seen from not only Dame but everyone on this team at certain points during the year.

So...

The turnover issues are still a bugaboo.

They're a thing that are going to, you know, nip us in the bud at some point if we don't nip them in the bud.

I messed up that metaphor.

But I think it's something where I'm encouraged by these are turnovers of aggressiveness, at least from Dame, not turnovers of lack of awareness, right?

So that's what contributed to that early hole.

That's something that I'm sure John Shire is hammering home in their pre-Stanford practices.

But that was a new wrinkle to this slow start that obviously has to get ironed out.

The last thing I'll say in the bad, and I think this is just to balance out that discussion of inflection points.

We were really, really solid at two of those moments, the most key moments.

But there was one of these inflection points that we struggled, and that was immediately out of halftime, where we did let Cal back into this game.

After going to the half with a seven-point lead, it was tied 41-41 with 15 minutes to go.

The flip side of that coin is Duke answered that bell.

Cal made a run.

And rather than letting that momentum go from Cal being tied to Cal leading, Duke scored the next five points.