Hoodie Girl joins Alex Donno to discuss the latest on the Miami Hurricanes basketball team after their comeback win against Virginia Tech. Can the Hurricanes sneak into the NCAA tournament?
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00:00 for the players who sparked that comeback in your eyes?
00:02 Um, I mean, I think we played well the first like five or six minutes of the game.
00:07 And then it kind of just like the end of the, the end of the first half into the
00:10 first 10 minutes of the second half, uh, our defense was pretty atrocious.
00:14 Um, Bensley Joseph, I think pretty much sparked that comeback in the second half.
00:18 Um, he, he's known for his great defense.
00:21 I think he's been in a slump lately, especially with the
00:23 development of his offensive game.
00:25 But he had a couple of threes.
00:26 He's hit some layups, um, made some good defensive plays to kind of getting going.
00:30 Uh, but, uh, I think Keyshawn George, as far as overall, his entire game, I think
00:37 he played, he was the most stable player for us and he was playing great defense
00:40 against one of their best players in Padula and held them to like eight of 18
00:44 shooting and some of those threes that Padula made, cause he had 21 points.
00:47 Keyshawn was in his face.
00:48 So you could tell like his, his length was disrupting Padula and
00:52 he couldn't get into a rhythm.
00:53 Um, and it kind of affected everything because Virginia Tech is like second in
00:58 division one for a free throw shooting.
01:00 And then they shot like seven of 14.
01:02 Um, so I think we were running them pretty hard.
01:05 Um, that's their worst free throw shooting performance of the year.
01:09 And the free throw line pretty much determined the game
01:12 because we shot 27 of 29.
01:14 Wow.
01:15 I want to remind folks that Melissa, AKA Hoodie Grill, who's joining us now, she
01:19 does an awesome job on the Buckets pod.
01:21 And she's also a colleague of mine at allhurricanes.com.
01:24 And you guys will be able to see this interview later on at
01:27 allhurricanes.com as well.
01:29 Uh, Melissa, how important was that victory?
01:32 Because again, uh, Miami had some bad losses, had a lot of
01:37 uneven results earlier on this year.
01:39 Should I even be thinking about NCAA tournament?
01:42 Like what's it going to take to get in?
01:43 So we're on the outside looking in right now.
01:46 This was a big one, a big win.
01:47 It was a quad two win.
01:49 Um, w you could kind of look at this both ways in that we have a
01:52 tough schedule coming up, so that that's rough, but it's also our
01:56 chance to get into the tournament because there's a lot of quad one
01:59 wins that we have available to us coming up.
02:01 Um, we do have some bad losses and if you look at them, we've had key players
02:05 out and a lot of those bad losses, um, that Louisville game could come back
02:09 to haunt us, um, FSU as well, but.
02:13 Virginia beat Clemson yesterday and we play them tomorrow on the road.
02:17 So that's a massive quad one win.
02:18 If we were to get that, we still have two games against USC home and away,
02:23 and we have a game at home against Duke.
02:25 So those are four quad one wins that we can get.
02:28 And if we can get maybe at least two of the four, um, and then when
02:32 the games were supposed to win, I think we have a chance to sneak in.
02:36 Um, but we need to do a lot of winning down the stretch and we need to get healthy.
02:40 Um, with it, we'll get hurt his ankle again.
02:43 I don't know that I don't think he's been a fully a hundred percent, even
02:47 the beginning of the season.
02:48 He didn't even play in our exhibition game because he was, because he was
02:51 nursing a hamstring, I believe Cleveland just came back from a hip North chat
02:56 had the ankle earlier in the year.
02:57 And Nigel had the ankle.
02:58 I don't know what's going on with people's ankles.
02:59 Like we need to figure out if we're healthy, we can compete with anybody,
03:04 but we haven't been healthy.
03:05 And this is where these losses are coming from.
03:06 And our, our, our late game execution down the stretch, our loss against Louisville,
03:11 our loss against Florida state, our loss against NC state, all of these games were.
03:15 A single digit games where we were either within a few points or had the lead.
03:19 And then we, we, or Syracuse, we couldn't, we just, we couldn't, uh, execute down
03:24 the stretch and these are where these losses are coming from.
03:26 And that's something that we were able to do against Virginia tech is in the
03:29 last five minutes of the game, we were able to execute, Benzley played amazing.
03:33 We were able to hit some shots and, and most importantly, we hit free throws
03:37 because our free throw shooting had not been the greatest, the last few games.