Our Louisville Cardinals have taken their play up a notch and finished the season sweep of the Seton Hall Pirates today with the 70-61 victory. Louisville now leads the all-time series over Seton Hall 13 to 5. The Cardinals have now won three games in a row and six out of their last seven. They are now within a half game of Big East Conference leaders.
It was a great effort today on both ends of the floor. And coming off one of their best defensive efforts of the season last week against USF the Cards backed that up with another solid performance today forcing 21 turnovers including 12 steals. And Seton Hall hit just 10 of 26 field goal attempts. The biggest improvement is on the offensive end of the floor as the scoring has been much more balanced over the last couple of weeks and again today three guys finished with double digits.
I had mentioned in my pre-game breakdown how I wanted to see Gorgui Dieng be more productive on the offensive end of the floor and today he had his best offensive performance as a Louisville Cardinal leading all scorers with 23 points. Coach Pitino said in his post-game that they had worked on plays to help Gorgui get his shots and it certainly appeared to pay off today. To go along with his offensive efforts Dieng also had 8 rebounds, 2 steals and 3 blocked shots. With talks of Gorgui entering the NBA draft after the season we may be watching his farewell tour.
Russ Smith continues to be the most consistent offensive player for the Cardinals and today he had another solid performance and was the second leading scorer with 19 points. He was also an impressive 10 for 10 from the free throw line. Russ is only 15 points away from joining the 1000 point club at Louisville.
Also mentioned in my pre-game breakdown that I would like to see Peyton Siva get into the lane and get to the free throw line. That didn’t happen and it makes 8 straight Big East games that Siva hasn’t had an attempt from the charity stripe. He did do another great job of distributing the ball and running the Louisville offense. He had 5 assist and now has 163 assists on the year, which is currently the 10th best assist year in UofL Basketball history. He needs 106 for #1 All-Time. He is 2nd in the Big East in that category. He also had 2 steals today and passed Alvin Sims on the All-Time Career Steals List with 220 tying Tick Rodgers for 3rd. Siva needs just 10 to tie Darrell Griffith for the All-Time Record.
Bench scoring was great today behind solid efforts from Luke Hancock with 13 and Kevin Ware with 8.
The Cards come into this one today wanting to fine tune some things and I’d say it was mission accomplished. We are starting to see more consistency and balance. We have also started to see a more consistent substitution pattern. Coach Pitino set a short term goal for this team to win its last seven games of the season. Now with 3 down and 4 to go next up is a trip to Chicago to face DePaul.
