Vermont vs Albany 1/2/21

Albany 63 Vermont 62

Albany roared back in the second half and took down Vermont for their first win on the season.  The Great Danes were led by CJ Kelly who poured in 27 points to lead all scorers. The game was eerily similar to last week's one point loss to NJIT as the Cats offense screeched to a halt in the second half when their perimeter shots stopped falling. Albany made some great defensive adjustments and Vermont never recovered. This is the first loss so far that I would term as "bad". The Cats get a mulligan for game one after the long layoff. I think NJIT will prove to be a good team this season and it was a one in a million buzzer beater for loss number two. This is a game Vermont should have won. Albany was missing two starters and the Cats were up by 18 early in the second half. They took their foot off the gas. Again credit Albany for fighting hard and playing tough defense, but the Cats let this one slip away. This team is living and dying by the three so far this season. Not only in terms of offensive production but in energy as well. It seems like the wind is taken out of their sails when the misses start piling up and the offense becomes timid. Ryan Davis led the Cats with 21 points and 10 rebounds. Seventeen of those were in an electric first half. It is really too bad that the Cats are now 1-2 when Davis plays because has made the big leap everyone was looking for and is becoming one of the best players in the league. His touch around the rim is incredible and at this point he is the Cats biggest threat from three. Another thing that is getting lost in the shuffle is that Isaiah Powell is quietly putting it all together. It is too bad he missed the final shot because he was having a great game and finished with 13 points and 6 rebounds. He is finally knocking down shots and looking more and more like the player the coaching staff envisioned him being. The guard play is where Vermont needs more if they are going to start to string wins together. The starting trio of Stef Smith, Ben Shungu, and Justin Mazzulla shot a combined 6- 24 (25%) from the field. It is going to be tough to win games with that type of performance. Shungu gutted out 10 points and 7 rebounds but it wasn't pretty. Stef Smith is not playing with confidence. You can see the indecision when he has the ball as he tries to probe the defense. He hasn't found his place in the offense and teams are keying on him and not giving him any daylight. The bench didn't help as Aaron Deloney and Robin Duncan didn't make a shot in a combined 31 minutes. During the prep for this season I was interested in how the inconsistent preseason and cancelled non-conference was going to affect Vermont. In my mind a large part of how Vermont has built a consistent winning program is an incredibly regimented offseason program followed by a very difficult non-conference schedule where they workout the kinks. This allows the Cats to be humming along and executing at a higher level than any other team in the America East when conference play opens. Without that this season they have been brought back to the pack and they have lost that advantage. Over the years they have been the most disciplined and efficient team in the conference and those intangibles are has won games. It is nobody's fault for obvious reasons and it is a big enough accomplishment to just be playing basketball at this point, but it bears mentioning that this is the experience of many other programs around the country every year. Teams don't always play their best basketball night in and night out. This should highlight how special Vermont has been during Becker's tenure and how lucky we as the Vermont fan base have been. Over the last four years in particular, Vermont has played so few truly "bad" games it is odd to see them execute poorly or not hit the big shot. This is a season where there are going to be a lot of ups and downs as Vermont tries to work out the kinks in "real time" with the hope that they can be where they need to be come playoff time. The game today shows that they have all the pieces to be at the level they are accustomed to being but they are not there yet. I know I have said it each weekend but with the new schedule this season, but the response in game two is the true measure of a team. Back at it tomorrow.