The team showed resilience and the ability to lock down and defend when they need to do so. Kot clearly has ice in his veins when they need a shot. That said, we are a crummy team. We needed a buzzer beater to beat a poor Fresno team at home. Our fundamentals are terrible. We are lazy. We lose focus. We turn the ball over way too much. We struggle to get the ball into the frontcourt if there is even slight pressure. We are undisciplined. Situational basketball IQ, outside of the last second shot sequence, is wholly lacking. We have no true point.
I get that we are a young team that is patchwork in the talent department, but we are halfway through the season and are still making the same dumb mistakes we were in Game 1. While I may disagree with certain foul calls, the reality is that if you are in the first half and have 2 fouls, you have to change how you guard. Powell and Walters seem to double down for some stupid reason and render themselves useless until the second half, and by then, the game is usually too far gone.
Linder may be a basketball genius, but he apparently struggles to teach his brilliance and have it stick. He may be better suited to be an assistant in the NBA, SEC or BIG. His ego won't allow it, but that is where he belongs with the current state of NCAA basketball, NIL and the porthole.