Missed baskets may be an after effect of COVID-19 for DePaul's Men’s Basketball team

The DePaul Blue Demons went into this game against the Butler Bulldogs hoping for their first conference win of the season, while also keeping Butler’s away game losing streak alive.

With Butler coming off a huge win on Saturday, and also having played 13 games this season, they dominated DePaul with a 14-point victory. Granted, DePaul has only played six games to Butler’s 13. Could the lack of games be the reason DePaul took such a hard hit tonight?

DePaul struggled with their own positive cases within the organization resulting in cancelled games. By the looks of the game tonight, it seems as if missed shots may be a long term side effect of the coronavirus.

If your team is consecutively without games, workouts, and practices throughout the beginning of the season, you can’t expect them to miraculously come back and start winning games back to back. That just doesn’t happen, especially not for this team. Especially not under this coach.

In the post-game conference, Coach Dave Leitao said, “Both teams are going through struggles, they just seem to be handling them and overcoming theirs better than us.” Is it that they’re handling their struggles better, or is it that Butler is being coached through their struggles on a different, more mature level?

At the start of this game when DePaul’s energy was steady, Coach Leitao mentioned that he “wasn’t concerned” with the way the offense was playing because the energy from the bench and the court was noticeable. His opinion switched as the game worsened for his team. “Not being able to make shots at the rim changed the rotation of our defense coming back. We weren’t taking tough shots and missing, we were taking every day makable shots and missing.”

DePaul came into this game with a different approach than Butler. Had DePaul’s offense came in with the intensity they had the first two minutes and the last eight minutes of the game, it would have been a completely different outcome. The game would have been fast paced, the energy would have been upbeat throughout the whole game, despite the lack of fans, and the Blue Demons might have come out on top.

With this season being unlike any other and not having a fan attendance to keep the energy, DePaul is going to need to come with intensity from the start of the game to the last buzzer if they want to get a winning streak started and continued this season. It’s going to take more than just the bare minimum of shooting efforts to win games for the Blue Demons.

Credit: DePaul Athletics.