This is as impressive of a start to SEC play as I can ever recall. I thought we could win this one with a solid performance, but winning in Bud Walton is tough and doing so in the SEC opener makes it an even bigger challenge. To go into Fayetteville and beat the brakes off them is one of the best regular-season performances of the Bruce era. This may be the game we look back to as the point where this team turned the corner from being a good team with a lot of potential to a great team. KP had this game projected at 81-76. Pretty rare to see a projected close game end up being this much of a route.
Broome was an absolute monster coming out of the half. After being held scoreless in the first half, he came out and nearly single-handedly destroyed Ark by scoring most of our points on the run to put them away with 10 in the first 6 minutes of the first half. It takes a tremendously tough athlete to be able to flip the switch from his worst half of the year to arguably his best stretch of play this year. What a luxury to have a guy whose capable of just absolutely dominating on the road in one of the toughest places to play in the country.
CBM was the real key today from my point of view. In the first half when no one else was playing great on O and we went 1/9 from deep, Chad took over with 14 points. He single-handedly outscored our starters by 5 points before the break. That performance is why we are a nightmare matchup for anyone. You can completely shut down our SEC POY candidate and the rest of our starters and then Chad leads the bench to 28 points in a half. What are you supposed to do to stop a team like that?
We could not have possibly drawn up a better start to SEC play with a dominating performance in one of the toughest road environments. We owned the glass a 13-board margin. We had 9 guys scoring 5 or more. Over a 2:1 assist-to-turnover ratio as a team. We are going to get a huge boost to our KP rating, particularly on D after holding Ark to 51 points in their building. Our guys proved today that this team has the capability of making a run at another SEC regular season title. We are in for a very fun winter into spring of basketball.
Broome was an absolute monster coming out of the half. After being held scoreless in the first half, he came out and nearly single-handedly destroyed Ark by scoring most of our points on the run to put them away with 10 in the first 6 minutes of the first half. It takes a tremendously tough athlete to be able to flip the switch from his worst half of the year to arguably his best stretch of play this year. What a luxury to have a guy whose capable of just absolutely dominating on the road in one of the toughest places to play in the country.
CBM was the real key today from my point of view. In the first half when no one else was playing great on O and we went 1/9 from deep, Chad took over with 14 points. He single-handedly outscored our starters by 5 points before the break. That performance is why we are a nightmare matchup for anyone. You can completely shut down our SEC POY candidate and the rest of our starters and then Chad leads the bench to 28 points in a half. What are you supposed to do to stop a team like that?
We could not have possibly drawn up a better start to SEC play with a dominating performance in one of the toughest road environments. We owned the glass a 13-board margin. We had 9 guys scoring 5 or more. Over a 2:1 assist-to-turnover ratio as a team. We are going to get a huge boost to our KP rating, particularly on D after holding Ark to 51 points in their building. Our guys proved today that this team has the capability of making a run at another SEC regular season title. We are in for a very fun winter into spring of basketball.
