I still donāt believe in Tennessee. Johnnies were more impressive.
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Arenāt they kinda the same team? Hellacious defense, tragicomic offense?
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The numbers tell me Iām wrong (be quiet, numbers!) but I sort of prefer the Johnnies bucket getters: Luis and Richmond. Smith and Ziegler seems like a wash, but I suspect the stats disagree
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I want, noā¦NEEDā¦Jerome involved with this program after his playing days are over. Heās got future coach written all over him.
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I was never bothered by the losses to the top teams. What bothers me about this season is how we didnāt even show up against Cal and Stanford and Notre Dame, and waited until the last five minutes to show up against Virginia Tech. Itās one thing to get beaten by a superior team, and another thing to lose to beatable teams because youāre not playing hard or smart enough.
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To bring over from the next head coach thread, those Cal, Stanford, VT and ND games are exactly when youād want to see improvement.
Yes roster is not as good as we expected but even so, I think a good coach should have gone something like 4-2 in these games: Memphis, Cal, Stanford, ND, VT, and SMU. Weād be 16-8. We had enough experience at that point to make the necessary adjustments to win those but we didnāt. Kind of a big knock.
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Hot take: only reason any opinion about our team is changing is because we are playing a more fun brand of basketball.
Atrocious defense (166th) and good offense (top 40) over the last 5 games.
If those efficiencies were flipped, even with the same point margins, thereād be no excited chatter.
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It also helps to play against bad teams - like Ga Tech without their 2 leading scorersā¦ Terry scores 15 per game and is their best shooter and played 32 minutes with an injured wrist and couldnāt shoot. And McCollum didnāt play at allā¦ weird how the score for them without those guys was the same score for us vs Cal when Ames was hurt.
Will be interesting to see how the Hoos do against a more full strength Tech and then 3 of the top 4 ACC teams plus at UNC.
Will be cool to see how they compete.
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He absolutely didnāt play 32 minutes with an injured wrist. He played the entire first half with no injury (and no points). He injured it fairly early in the second half on a drive to the rim, and we won bacon because he missed both of his free throws. He didnāt re-enter the game until the under-12 timeout.
Your argument would be stronger if he was injured playing well. He wasnāt. We had shut him down.
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Ok great - missing their 2nd leading scorer and their leading scorer for a half.
And also missing other rotation guys that got hurt earlier in the season. They played a guy 23 minutes vs us who had played 55 minutes all season prior to that game. 
Also missing 2 other 9 point per game scorers that have been out for a while - both were averaging 24 minutes a game.
P.s. never mind - I stand by my original statement and watching him in the first half I could tell he was hurtā¦ see below my next post which shows he has been hurt since before January 18.
Iāll say this, though - he hurt his wrist because of some strong help side rim protection from Cofie (not happy about the injury - but pleased we had the length on the court to contest that shot and played physically defensively and that he had zero points for the whole game, including the first half).
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Not a foul either .. jV call
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And by the way - no he didnāt hurt his wrist on that play ā¦ he may have aggravated it but he has been struggling with a hand/wrist injury for a while.
If someone showed you this screenshot before the season, what would you expect our record to be?
Itās funny because our individual offensive stats actually look pretty damn good, lol.
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If someone showed that screenshot before the season I think most peopleās first reaction would be āWhereās TJ Power?ā
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That is the most shocking development for me. I thought he was going to be one of our top 3 players for sure. Seems like we all missed that one - Scheyer, TB, Ron, our fan base, Goodman, et. al. I actually feel for the kid a little. His dreams are sort of out the window now. He got a nice chunk of change to put in the piggy bank for later but he might want to think about his life without pro basketball.
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Why doesnāt he go play baseball instead?
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Give him a tryout on our team. He would have to be damn good to get a spot.
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3 guys averaging over 5 rebounds a game, and 5 guys averaging 1+ TOs/game, would say to me weāre rebounding well but having some issues with ball security. Which is, unfortunately, half-right as weāre actually bad at both.
Our outside shooting is, as hoped pre-season, wildly better than last year. Unfortunately, weāve proven to be bad at nearly everything else. Actually, weāre pretty good at passing. IIRC, KenPom says weāre #2 overall in % of FGs off an assist. So, weāre doing a lot of passing, just that weāre turning the ball over a lot while we do it.
In preseason I was calling him Baby Jake because I thought thatās what heād be, an inferior Jake Groves right now, but with a higher ceiling by year 4. I figured his D would keep him off the floor a lot, but I had no idea heād be utterly unplayable. Heās now wasted two years of eligibility on mop-up minutes.
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