Today was not a good day. We lost, and looked bad (offensively) in doing it. We simply did not look like a team capable of making a deep run in March/April. As the more insightful commenters have pointed out (repeatedly), losing 3 games in a row will likely make us drop in the AP poll and get a lower seed in the tournament.

Let's do a little thought experiment here. Humor me for a minute. Does winning matter? Obviously it does. Otherwise we wouldn't be watching games. But, does it matter in predicting how we'll do in March? Intelligent people disagree.

Brad Stevens (of the fire Pitino,hire Brad Stevens fame), recently appeared calm and cool while his team made a game winning shot in a huge game against Eric Martinez's favorite team (seriously, that's not the real Martinez posting on CC, right? It's Lennay Kekua trying to make Martinez look stupid, right?).

When asked about it, Stevens said something like: Whether that shot goes in doesn't affect who we are as a team and what we do.

In other words, the end result isn't that important.

Ken Pomeroy chimed in here, and explained why psychometricians don't care if the final score is 53-52 or 51-52 any more than they'd care if the final score was 57-52 or 55-52.

If two plays go differently, we're sitting at 18-2 with one loss with a full strength team (granted, one bad loss, but still). If Siva simply holds the ball when we're up 1 against syracuse and doesn't turn it over, we win. If his shot goes in today, we win. Let's say, for the sake of argument, the chances of him NOT turning the ball over against Syracuse is 90% and the chance of him making the shot today is his season average of 44%, the chance of both of those plays going our way is around 40%. Not good betting odds, but not a long shot either.

So, the question I ask is: if those two plays go our way, do you feel different about this team?