I personally am not looking forward to the Neptune Experience.
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Poor Jim, getting hung because Sanchez canât win games.
Late reply, but worth saying that Boals did well at Stony Brook too. While he is from Ohio, heâs shown that he can succeed elsewhere. Boals would work well with us. The fear with him would be him jumping to Ohio State after a few years of success, as he was Mattaâs top assistant years ago.
Edit - corrected Mattaâs name. Also, Iâll add that Boals has shown he can identify and develop lesser known guys like Mark Sears and Jason Preston.
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He does seem to be a good talent evaluator. Thatâs maybe his biggest plus.
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I agree with most all of this (although I donât think Taine playing for SO long through that helped anyone, including Taine).
The past few years weâve made a bunch of decisions with how weâve played and used our roster that have felt counter-intuitive. It doesnât feel like that right now - it feels like weâre still learning but are working to play through our strengths and evolving in that direction. Sometimes we (I do this all of the time) sense the end of the book and want to skip ahead to that point already - but it does often need to be a more gradual process when it comes to the people management aspect of the team.
The main thing, in my opinion, will be can he get this team to play with intensity. Guys like Cofie and Saunders and Ames will go a long way toward that. I thought iMac and Power had a noticeable shift in that direction in-game as well (especially iMac).
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As far as that Taine Thang. Taine knew he was playing terrible. Ron and staff yanking him out would not have made Taine realise how much of a bad game he was having. I thought (and know) in this sort of game thats an important message for a guy who we are gonna need his best from this season
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After reading your piece today about energy, Iâm all for Ron starting the five hardest playing guys to send a message about the importance of energy and fire, glue guys to the bench who arenât hustling, all in the service of coaching this team to be the most energetic team on the floor every night, to hopefully negate some of our disadvantages with talent or experience.
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For me, the Taine thing is a good synecdoche (look it up!) for some of Ronâs choices and really how Ronâs choices would deviate from Tonyâs or any other coach.
I basically put the whole Taine decision / non-decision in the âit doesnât really matterâ bucket. The game was over. The choice wasnât Taine or TJP or Rohde (who was hurt). It was basically Taine or just run out the clock with walk-ons. Whether Taine learns not to dribble into a set zone by screwing it up several times or by getting yanked and having someone whisper in his year âdonât dribble into a set zone; youâre no good at thatâ isnât a terribly interesting problem to me.
Our tough issue so far : selecting a PG. Iâm judging Ron on that.
Some of these other things: Cofie PT, playing through mistakes, etc â we will get a better idea on Ron tendencies when we play good teams.
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Example for yall. Balla to refer to @haney is an synechdoche
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Yeah - thanks for reading already. I wrote in the piece that normally I focus on tactics but I do think just - energy, motivation, fire, intensity⌠all of the synonyms are such a huge piece to this yearâs puzzle.
My biggest thing re: playing Taine through all of that mess wasnât that he was making mistakes - it was that he just looked like he mentally wasnât in the game (it wasnât just late it was the entire night). And you gotta bench that when it happens, IMO, because that kind of thing can be contagious with a young team like this playing for a coach they didnât expect.
I think your last point is a critical one, a lot of this is Ron still trying to find his identitfy as the UVA head coach, not jsut a head coach. It seems he has started off doing what Tony (or what he thinks he, as UVA coach) should do, lean on Tony UVA principles. Play the guys with the best handle on the UVA systems of offense and defense. That of course leads to heavy Rohde and Taine mins, where what he probably should be doing (and might start to be leaning that way as Cuts points out in his piece) is play the best basketball players that could help the teams ceiling. That is Dai Dai and Jacob. Yes, you have to live through âsystemâ mistakes on both ends of the court in the near term but come Jan (maybe sooner?) dividends should be evident. Will be fascinating to continue to watch.
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I will be looking closely at tomorrowâs game to get a real read on Ronâs early potential. Nova is looking like the easiest of our six high profile pre-Christmas games (the others being UT, BU/StJ, UF, SMU, and Memphis), and this canât be a âtinker/experimentâ kind of game. It needs to be a âthis is our Top 8 rotation and our well-designed gameplanâ kind of game, with the intent to maximize through 40 minutes and having guys up their intensity and execution after a couple of mid-majors.
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Your lack of synechdoche however was what I mainly noticed
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Yep, you are exactly right, it is go time on that and the reason why I wished we had squeezed a third cupcake in before now.
The most depressing movie ever:
Looking forward to reading the Cuts @Cuts_from_The_Corner
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Yea but thats more tautological
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Show me you donât know what a tautology is by showing me you donât know what a tautology isâŚ
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Everyone is everyone is quite literally the definition of an tautology.
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Fresh, my thoughts is Sanchez embarrassed himâŚWe all know Taine is capable however it was obvious to me with his first turnover that something was way off. Maybe girlfriend, family, academic, theres a slew of issues kids deal with in collegeâŚBut leaving him in there embarrassed him and could be problems down the line with confidence.
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Just a joke to use a current message board trope⌠that is also a tautology. 
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