Me too. Dare I say… he may have that dawg in him
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I think he’ll play for sure, but watch those extended highlights in the clip above. Kid has a motor and is going to be super fun, but he has a lot to learn on defense. Second play of the game is him losing a man behind him down low and giving up a layup. He’s not boxing out on a number of rebounds, flying by dudes on close outs instead of staying in front, etc.
All of that is completely normal high school basketball stuff, but he’s going to have to learn a ton and correct a bunch of that. He will - cause he seems super motivated - but it’s a bigger transition for bigs than anybody else. I hope we see him a lot as the best place for him to learn and improve is on the floor, but there will be growing pains.
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I’ve heard enough, let’s offer him the option to redshirt and then have him say no but then don’t play him against a little sister of the poor team so he comes back and says yes. Let’s also redshirt another person so he has company while redshirting.
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how do we watch the NIKE game?
Hoop Summit 23 (Blake Buchanan) Streaming Details:
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Tweet on the Nike Hoop Summit says it’ll be on NBA TV.
https://twitter.com/usabjnt/status/1643644675645923328?s=46&t=vkjgQUekzGC7z44tIfnIRQ
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Feels like the “new normal” should be to play freshmen more liberally. In the era of easy transfers out, coaches need to swallow some rough play in the early season. And it’s not like Blake won’t improve with actual gameplay.
In fact, in an era of easy transfers, both from and into programs, waiting to play guys until they master the packline seems anachronistic. Better to take lumps early than to take lumps late (i.e. NCAA tourney).
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A former enrollee will find out that Omaha biliews, too.
Leave it up to interpretation as to other things that might biliew.
Yeah agree but this was apparent last year as well so we’ll see if the staff takes the hint
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Is this specifically for Bennett? Either way, I’m not sure I agree.
Freshman played 118 out of 1200 minutes in the Final Four, just under 10% of minutes. This may have to do with COVID seniors, but each freshman needs to be taken on a case by case basis. If the freshmen can help, play them. If not, don’t play them, and if they transfer and just recruit someone else! This seems more like the “new normal” to me.
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For me it’d be a longer term development arc so that: (i) We keep our promising freshmen; (ii) A year of actual gameplay > year of redshirt or primarily practice squad experience.
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It has to be case by case decision, I agree. But now player retention is a bigger factor in that calculation, which is going to drive a shift (of some amount) away from redshirting.
At the margin, you’ve got a guy who is playable but won’t really contribute this year, but we’re really excited about him in future years… and we think he’s a flight risk. Oh, and we don’t expect him to be in college for 5 years. That’s a guy you play, for some minutes, even if they’re not really that helpful to the team.
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Yes, but you might lose that player to the transfer portal anyway. So in the end, I know it sucks because we have a connection to those players, but developing young players is getting more and more difficult to count on and you might as well turn your focus to “win now” mode every year.
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Interesting point.
In our four postseason games our freshmen contributed 18.5% of available minutes (148 of 800).
I wonder, had we played Traudt and Bond, would we have still lost Traudt but also perhaps another of the three because PT would have been less-than-expected? Instead of Dunn and McKneely averaging 18 mins per game apiece in the post-season, all four are playing and averaging 9 apiece — would they be happier?
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I meant this as a generic example, wasn’t trying to describe anyone in particular, but… lol… yeah. Ah well.
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I generally agree on playing freshmen more liberally, but I also think it depends somewhat on who the competition is and what’s happening in the early season game. Teams have to avoid Quad 4 losses at home at just about any cost. I know there’s a popular narrative here that not playing Traudt during the NCCU game was the first domino that fell, ending in his recent transfer. At the time and still today, I believe the coaches made the right decision to not play Dunn and Traudt in the NCCU game to avoid a Quad 4 loss-- particularly with the Monmouth game next on the schedule where, as it turned out, Dunn began his ascendency to a regular rotational player.
I read the HGN post where he said our coaches don’t want to talk about redshirting right now. I’m not exactly sure what that means, but I’m interpreting it as the coaches are rethinking their strategy on redshirting. So I’m wondering if they will lean more towards discouraging a redshirt for a player who didn’t come in with a plan to redshirt, if that player has a decent chance of getting some non-garbage time minutes during the season. I’m not a big believer in the theory that Traudt’s redshirt was the primary cause of his eventual decision to transfer. Sometimes players do tell the truth on why they are transferring, and Traudt did very quickly decide to transfer to a school close to home which his longtime girlfriend attends. So I’m going with Ockham’s razor on the Traudt transfer that he was very homesick from the time he matriculated at UVA and was always going to transfer back home, rather than more elaborately constructed rationales. On the other hand, it couldn’t hurt to try redshirting less just in case.
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I agree with @bhc3 that we should play frosh more liberally. I don’t think many of us advocating that Tony loosen up a bit at the margins to be a bit more like 2010s Tony are advocating that because we think that more frosh PT = more final 4s in the year the talented guys are freshmen.
I think the way I think about this is that the best teams are still constructed from homegrown talent, and get the vast majority of the best talent on their teams (on average) from HS recruiting, and are supplementing through the portal.
In the context of Blake the Snake, my thoughts are:
- Default presumption should be no redshirt. If there’s a compelling reason to do it, think about it 5 non-consecutive times, and if it still seems compelling, then do it.
- Assuming no redshirt, carve out some time and maybe more importantly, carve out a role. It seems like Blake can do some nice things that other bigs on our team (and the bigs that are getting the most chatter here) can’t, and we should let him do those things, accepting that he might exhibit some normal freshman behaviors.
- Take the Sanogo-Clingan view as a bit of a model. UConn could’ve iron-manned Sanogo all year. In fact, at the end of last year (from Feb 1 on), Sanogo played 30+ MPG in 9 games. This year, he played 30+ MPG in only 3 games in the same stretch. Clingan never started, but he was pretty consistently in that 10-15 MPG range. Instead, you have Clingan with a clear role and a clear spot where he excels. (as I repeatedly annoyed you all with this year, the issue wasn’t with 15+ MPG BVP or 20+ MPG Jayden, the issue was with pretending that the two of them were clearly above the other guys in our frontcourt).
So in conclusion, the big thing isn’t “play freshmen”, it’s “keep a mostly homegrown team”, but that means you have to focus on keeping your good, young talent. As opposed to this theory I keep hearing that the portal just means we completely lose any incentive to advance plan, and just pretend that there is no tomorrow because we** get to just re-shuffle everything come portal season.
** Because whoever “we” encompasses, it certainly doesn’t seem to encompass UVa.
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I know it’s the wrong thread here, but don’t pretend there was a clear logic here one way or another. I have never coached hoops and I’ve never played hoops at any real level, and I’m uncoordinated and unathletic. I’m also short and gaining too much weight and I should probably drink less my doctor tells me, but what does he know? Anyway, I’m getting off topic, here. The point is I can’t play or coach hoops. BUT, I went away to college and I knew about homesickness and I had a long distance relationship in college for a spell, and I knew plenty of friends at UVa who also dealt with that stuff. I mean, honestly, probably the majority of them. I suppose there is theoretically an incurable version of “I have to be at the same school as my girlfriend” and/or “I have to be in the same state/hometown/general region of my birth”, but IMO, it’s a fairly curable disease in the vast majority of cases, and the cure is widely known and understood: get more comfortable with where you are, and if we think hard for a minute or two, I think we know how that translates to a top 50ish hoops player who is riding the pine with no hope for a reprieve in this academic year.
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