Ground balls win championships. Youth coaches everywhere feel validated.
Our #2 Notre Dame Fighting Irish (13-3) lost to the #1 Princeton Tigers (17-2) in the finals by a score of 16 to 9. One wayward quarter of lacrosse ended the Irish season.
Splat
As Coach Corrigan has noted in the past, sometimes you are the windshield, sometimes you are the bug.
We will have a more in depth recap out soon, but here are our real-time reactions from the press box:
The boys came out the game hot, scoring 3 quick goals to take an early lead. Princeton called a timeout to regain themselves, and quickly responded to tie the game up. After that early stretch of goals, the offense felt a bit slow and had a hard time getting things going against their switch to zone. Granted, there weren’t many possessions.
The faceoff dot has struggled early which has allowed for some make-it-take-it ball from the Tigers. Defensively, another 2-minute locked in penalty kill is great and Corrigan made an amazing timeout save to help with that. Most importantly, the boys are getting killed on ground balls right now, down 3 to 18. This will need to be improved to win this game. 8 Ricciardelli saves are what is keeping the team alive right now.
I don’t even have words for the second. We can’t break a zone. We can’t win a match-up. We can’t slow them down. We can’t get a ground ball. This 25 minute scoring drought feels like an entire year. What else is there to say?
The third was better. The boys are fighting and that is all we can ask for. They are patient against the zone. A big fourth quarter will be needed. It will be hard, but we believe.
Welp. Ricciardeli leveled someone, I guess that was nice. But we needed 2015 Sergio.
Thoughts After a Deep Breath
It was a great season that the boys should be proud of. It sucks that it comes down to one bad quarter, but that is lacrosse for you.
Princeton Adjustment
Princeton made a great adjustment early. They knew in the first three minutes that their stock defense was useless against the Irish. They didn’t waste time scrapping Plan A.
A lot is being said about the boys’ inability to break the zone defense. It’s not a new invention or a great mystery. Zones are great at stopping runs and slowing offenses because they take up a lot of clock to break down.
If you don’t have the ball, a team can’t make the necessary effort to break a zone. The Irish barely had the ball in the late first and all of the second. There’s no secret as to the why they didn’t score. People are acting like Princeton invented the wheel.
Exhaustion
Lacrosse is comparable to hockey when it comes to explosive efforts on defense. No defense is built to sustain 3-4 minute efforts. The defense got stuck defending multiple extended efforts in a row.
They defended the unreleasable penalties well, but the efforts took their toll. More importantly, the Irish did a poor job ending possessions with subpar ground ball recovery. The ball was on the turf a lot. Princeton came up with almost all of them.
The boys exhausted themselves, exhausted defenses give up heaps of goals.
Efforts
Thomas Ricciardelli was amazing. Both goalies were incredible. Keeping up that effort behind an exhausted defense takes incredible focus and ability.
Shawn Lyght owned his matchup against Princeton’s Kabiri. It’s hard to think it could have been worse, but rampant Kabiri added to this would have resulted in a historic rout.
The boys didn’t give up. They made mistakes that inhibited a comeback, but they kept playing and there was never a point where they just hoped the clock would expire. We were happy for this.
The result sucked, but we love these boys.
We’ll get to breaking down the why’s in a day or so.
Go Irish
Luke Burgar
ND-Atl 2.0
So near and yet so far. A bit like the CFP final vs OSU, I sorta think. Fast start, then get blown out, then a gutsy comeback effort, but opponent too tough?
Anyway, as you said, a good season. Thanks to all for helping me appreciate it, and the sport.
Yes and no regarding OSU. It certainly played out similarly, but there wasn’t a gap between the teams going into the game.
A few early mistakes exhausted a defense that was already playing on only a day of rest. Princeton got a tourniquet on their bleeding 3 minutes into the game. Notre Dame’s bleeding didnt have that kind of solution. Princeton’s offense was too good to play against while worn out. FWIW, had the circumstances been reversed, we run it up on them, too.
Thanks! One thing, didn’t Princeton only have one day of rest as well?
Yes! There are two factors at play.
The first is general short rests as it applies to both teams. It reduces the margin of error for everyone, and ND made more mistakes. Among the reasons why the boys’ early exit from the ACC tournament was a disappointment is that the coaches openly use that as a test drive of short-rest issues. ND didn’t get to work out the kinks. ND otherwise plays zero short-rest games.
The second the the late-game theory that has been written about a lot in the sport. The winner comes out of the earlier semifinal an overwhelming amount. The theory attributes this to the shorter rest. We don’t entirely buy into it, but again, it does thin the margin of error for the second team somewhat.
Thanks — very enlightening.
It might have something to do with the early game winner being the #1 seed, no ?
The early time was theirs fair and square
Ground balls always look like chaos to me. How much of that run of losing groundballs is technique, strategy, physicality, or just luck? It seemed like a lot of bounces just went their way – but that would be way to many to statistically be chance.
Watching it live Princeton was certainly getting its share of good bounces, but they were also outworking the boys. -16 in ground balls when faceoffs are even is really bad. There’s no sugar coating that one. It really changed the quality of each team’s possessions and overall time of possession.
As a general proposition, ground ball technique is practices a lot at all levels. It’s probably the first thing they learned as kids, and they practice it constantly as college players. It’s that vital