Got so into the football talk forgot to chime in here re lineups.
I have a hard time thinking Warley isn’t in our “best five” lineup so with that I assume him to start. Absolutely agree with basically everyone, I don’t like him and Dai Dai lineups either unless we’re looking to continue to win 53-50 games. With this in mind, I assume Bliss to start with iMac as the other guards.
Warley kind of is a near perfect fit for taking pressure off of Bliss given his experience as a “lead” guard, able to create. If he could shoot he would be perfect. Not to take up too much of the Dai Dai thread with other player chatter, but someone here very early mentioned Warley as our version of Leaky Black, I love that comp.
Most interesting spot for me is the Power/Saunders battle for the 4 spot, but that can be discussed in a more appropriate thread. Ending back on Dai Dai, I believe he could be a legit 6th man of the year candidate.
Yeah Dai Dai isn’t a beat you with speed guy like Kihei or Dante and he isn’t as tall/long as Reece. But he is much more comfortable looking shooting the basketball than any of them and he looks to be a little stronger/tougher than they were at this stage. He is also clearly bigger than Kihei/Dante. But I don’t think he really fits into the mold of Kihei/Dante or Reece.
That doesn’t mean he is going to be a star next year - just that the comparisons are harder to make and he has a different route to success than those guys did.
I read/watched shooting and the dribbling section through the Devin Carter steal.
On shooting, my takeaway from watching the clips was that he’s not a good shooter but he could become a decent shooter. Like better than Reece maybe roughly on par with Kihei (who was a decent, not great shooter). He’s not that tall and not that explosive so not that quick getting into his shoot, plus it’s a bit out front. I suspect that led to a little hesitation as he realized how good D-1 players are at close outs and that hesitation made him shoot less and shoot worse. So there’s a narrative there, when I look at the data that says, see - he shoots more and better once he got a little more comfortable. (Is that narrative correct? I don’t know…)
On the dribbling/distribution to teammates stuff - very positive! If the worst offense is a turnover in November to the best non-RD defender in the draft? I can live with that.
In suspect you’ll get into this, but I understand the concerns with Warley. You wouldn’t pick that combo, and we kinda backed into because of circumstances. But if Dai dai can be decent with his shot, and we have enough other shooters around him, I think it could work. Will it work? I don’t know…
I think this is gonna happen unless Power can play the 3 and Power turns out to be very good. I can’t imagine teams being like, “so I’ve got a big, long elite perimeter defender. Who on UVa should I try to shut down? 1a - Andrew Rohde. 1b - Taine Murray. That’s the key…”
I don’t really have much of a quibble with the rest of your lineup thoughts, which is why I excerpted just this. I’d also prefer that iMac be our shooting guard with a playmaker (who can shoot some) at the 1, with a plus offensive guy at the 3. I just don’t have much to go on as to who that would be… as I’ve also alluded to, Blake being decent at offense would solve a lot, but who knows whether that will happen? Not me… did he even come up in Fresh’s rundown?
TL;DR - this might be a good offensive lineup: PG who’s good at offense, iMac, SF who’s good at offense, Saunders or Power, C who’s good at offense. If we have three theoretically good offensive players, plus iMac and a stretch(ish) 4, we might be good at offense. Oh, plus a coach who gives an F about it. This is me being optimistic.
This is why I love the idea of playing Saunders (or, if you prefer, Power) on the wing - because you really can’t afford to go small on either which provides that buffer for iMac (and it gets you a lot of other things from crashing the glass to the defensive side). But, aside from that - I agree with our more traditional guards.
I’ve got some distant hopes that Tony unlocks something in Warley, but I think in that scenario (PG, IMac, Warley), the opposing team would probably risk a lesser defender on Warley and cheat towards packing it in? What do others think ?
I’ve seen a number of people treat him as effectively a non-shooter or not a threat offensively. People are scared of pairing him with someone like Warley. I just think there’s upside in Ames’s offensive game.
If he was a HS recruit, nobody would be talking about a limited offensive game. They’d be talking about a kid who can fill it up inside and out. Nothing he did his freshman year makes me think he won’t end up being that kind of player. His stats are basically identical to Devon Hall’s 2nd year stats (on a much worse team in KSU). So many of us love Eli but if he was a transfer commit we wouldn’t exactly be wowed by his stats. Dai Dai played 20+ mpg in the B12 for a reason and for a true freshman on a bad team, he fared pretty darn well.
I don’t understand these types of arguments to be honest. “If he were a high school commit…” but he’s not. He’s played a year at a higher level of basketball so we now have more information on him. That doesn’t mean a guy’s first year stats dictate how good he’ll be, and he indeed may still be great, but I don’t understand why people say “you’d be thrilled with him out of high school!” Maybe we would have, but he’s not coming out of high school - we’ve actually seen him play for a year! We have more info now. So much more info a guy like @Cuts_from_The_Corner can write a whole piece examining his play against the actual caliber of competition we’ll be playing against as opposed to random Chicago high school squads.
With younger transfers in there’s always an element of “will they improve (a specific area) and by how much?”
There is an upside to his offensive game that’s mostly tied to his improvement as a shooter. It seems like you’re thinking most of these opinions are being formed just looking at his stats, but he did struggle getting his shot off from outside and, more, wanting to get his shot off from outside. It doesn’t mean that he can’t improve there, but the “will he” remains TBD and no guarantee.
Either way, it’s easy to understand that he could become a better shooter, but it’s hard to see him changing his game so much than he’d be an effective SG - which is basically what he’d need to be if he’s playing with Warley a lot because we’ve had almost a full college career of Warley to see that he doesn’t even want to be taking looks from out there.
Basically, Ames could improve his game quite a bit and I still don’t think that pairing would be a good one because both really want the ball in their hands a lot to be effective and that’s not likely to change.
Our best two teams during the Bennett era played at least two PG-types for 25-30 mins/game — London, Malcolm, Devon, and Darius in 2016 and Ty and Kihei in 2019.
One has to be able to shoot at a high-30s or better clip from outside. It’s too early to tell if Ames or Bliss can. But it doesn’t mean they can’t — or won’t.
But all of those combos had a guy who was just as effective off the ball.
Ames may or may not shoot better than 32% and change next year but that’s not going to be where he’s ideally suited - he was not effective at all playing off ball to Perry’s on ball last season… that was the big night and day difference to his game - when they let him play point more and Perry off things were way better. Watch the first half vs. second half against Texas in the Big 12 Tournament last year as a small scale example of this. Everything changed when they made that adjustment.
The reason they went away from him as a starter mid season is because they hadn’t figured that out/stuck with it yet.