Marquette (#6 seed) and Stanford (#3) played late Saturday afternoon in, if nothing else, a very exciting game. Stanford won 82-81 in overtime on a basket by Brook Lopez with 1.3 seconds left. A random collection of my thoughts on the game:

• Tom Crean got out-coached by the assistant who had to take over for Stanford.
• Where was the Mbakwe!? We needed more Mbakwe! He got 1 minute in the game, and that stiff Blackledge got four. I may be mistaken, but we were getting killed inside by 2x Lopez. Some additional bulk inside wouldn’t have hurt.
• Jerel McNeal went on a tear late in the game, but I think he forgot that there were 4 other guys on the court. Granted, he got hot - and outside of Matthews no one else really was - but he wasn’t looking to pass once he got the ball, and threw up some really poor shots.
• Speaking of bad shots… Dominic James continued to take ridiculous jump shots. Very effective when he drove and dished; not so much pulling up from 8 feet behind the arc with a man in his face.
• The biggest beef I had with MU this year is that Crean seeming gave his team a green light to do whatever they felt like offensively. Jack up a crazy 3 with 30 seconds on the shot clock? Absolutely. Try an alley-oop when both players have a man on? Why not! Take (and miss) 5 consecutive threes from the corner in a 1-point game? Go for it. They got away with that stuff all year because they were beating teams like Southwestern Florida Coastal Community Technical College by 25, or getting blown out by Louisville/West Virginia/Connecticut by the same. Those plays all add up in close games.

The good news: I’m fairly certain that the NBA isn’t going to be interested in James this year. The knock on him last summer was that he needed to work on his jumper, and that didn’t exactly pan out. McNeal might be intriguing to someone, but I’m not sure he’s ready. Matthews will be back. Hayward will probably get over his 3-for-March shooting slump by next season, and we’ll get a full year of some Mbakwe! Losing Barro, Fitzgerald and Burke thins out the front line - hopefully they’ve got a good recruiting class coming in there.

Overall, another good season for the Warriors, but frustrating because I think they could have been much, much better.