Five Thoughts On The Portland State Game

Box Score

OSU easily took care of business as a ranked team for the first time in five years against a lowly Portland State squad. The buckets came easy and the defense looked sound en route to W #5. Here are five more thoughts on the game…

1. Markel Brown, come on down. 23-5-5 on 10/14 shooting and it was breezy. Nolan and I have been preaching this for the past month[1. Well, Nolo longer than that since he saw the team play in Spain] — if Markel is going to do All-Big 12 things next to Smart and Nash, this team is going to be a wicked out in conference play.

2. Speaking of the team, how much better is the ball movement this year? Bryndon Manzer nailed it in the first few minutes of the telecast when he noted that Smart “reads the tempo of the game really well.”

He’s right and it’s got Nash making skip passes, Forte going dribble-drive, and big men finding the open guy out of the post. Real, live basketball we’re playing!

3. Portland State, my gosh. And Pomeroy had them ranked lower than UC Davis to start the season. Davis would beat those guys by 15, easy.

Also, how does Portland State come to be a Jordan school? Like, what’s the process? Do they have to pay Nike? Send checks straight to MJ? How does this work?

4. A little confidence makes a world of difference. This team has a little swagger right now which, thankfully, has them melding together rather than trying to go lob stilly every other play.

You can tell they’ve bought into Smart what Ford is selling and each game brings another level of trust — both in the system and in each other.

5. Since the game was pretty boring (and my goodness I’ve been dying for some boring OSU blowouts), I’ll leave you with these two thoughts.

1. Why can’t Boone afford some sort of medical device that heals all our injured athletes? That should be within his realm, no?

2. Is this the worst tie of all time?