Quote Originally Posted by ShortFatHokie View Post
We quit playing offense. If we had taken advantage of a couple of those easy scoring opportunities instead of pulling the ball back, running the clock, and not scoring, the lead would have been larger and likely would have put the game out of reach period...
Or we would have had a 9 point lead with 1:30 left to go and the exact same thing would have happened. We had some decent looks despite slowing the game down and we still missed them. With Raines out we had no size at all, FSU did not have to respect the paint at all and we're limited offensively to begin with.

Here's the bottom line. If before the game I said "We'll be up by 9 with 1:30 left and have 2 of our best FT shooters take 4 FTs from that point on", you would probably say the game was "likely out of reach". We didn't make free throws. That's all there is to it. We had a lead that was more than large enough to win the game comfortably if we just hit FTs. Speculating about how we could have maybe possibly gotten a bigger lead is pointless because you're assuming we make shots which we obviously didn't. It's much more likely that our 80+ % free throw shooters hit half their FTs down the stretch... it just didn't happen tonight.