I thought we were having a good discussion on this topic in the Transfer Portal topic, but while it was a tangent off of thinking of potential transfers, it really spiraled into its own topic, so here we go.
There are some good posts from that topic in the morning of March 14 (good = anything not written by me 
) for a good intro…
I’ll move what I was going to say in the other thread to here to keep that one transfer focused!
I think that’s what’s made the years since the national title a little frustrating. Tony has achieved so much with rosters that were talented but not stocked with top recruits (although that 2016 class was great when they were recruited - Tony killed it on the trail that year). When we won a national title, I - maybe naively - thought our recruiting would instantly take a noticeable step up. I was excited to see what Tony could do when he had closer to his pick of the litter, so to speak, given what he’d already achieved with guys slightly lower on the ranking totem pole (although obviously Tony was identifying NBA-level talent regardless - this just meant he’d have even more to pick from). And while it’s not that important, I assumed at least one 5-star-level talent would be a good fit and willing to join a champion. Happens at Villanova, so why not here?
But all of that didn’t immediately materialize. I guess Reece, Jabri, and Carson were a solid class immediately after the title, but we’ve only got 1/3 contributing two years later. The 2021 class of Taine and Igor aren’t doing anything yet, and that class again felt like “we’re going to option C because we got none of our top targets”. Obviously the 2022 class looks very good, but I guess things are just progressing a little slower than I imagined they would. And yeah, I know that with the way recruiting works, we’re only just starting with the classes where we made first contact post national title, but I guess I kind of thought we’d be able to throw our weight around a little more immediately post title and bust into some recruitments we hadn’t been involved in early.
Anyway, a good deal of this might just be unreasonable expectations of how quickly a national title impacts recruiting. And with the 2022 class already looking very solid, we may have already righted the ship a little so to speak. But it’s just felt really weird. Just thought we’d be in a slightly different place.
A CTB-led team “moving things along slower than expected” shouldn’t be a surprise.
Agree. To extend this to the interminable discussion of the 3 M’s, the reason their lack of PT is more of a fly in the ointment than it would be in a vacuum is that it seems that their lack of PT either reflected Tony getting a bit overly conservative with PT, or it reflected yet another way that recruiting has gone sideways since the 2016 class.
The '22 class seems to represent a nice fluffy landing to all that, though, so hopefully this won’t be a repeat discussion.
Disappointed in what was generally considered a developmental year that we didn’t get good developmental PT for our younger guys. I guess sacrificing roster development for short-term gains toward an NCAA berth would have been understandable, but we didn’t do that either.
So next year, we’ll have this year’s 2 freshmen plus 4 or 5 incoming freshmen all thrown into the mixing bowl. In addition to getting some experience for Murray and Milicic, it would have been interesting to see how 6’5" and 6’10" shooters could have been integrated into the offense. We didn’t have that elsewhere on this year’s roster and it’ll all be very new to the offense next year as well. I hope McCorkle can make strides too, but frankly we have better/more athletic players at that position and with more coming in, so not sure he’ll get traction.
Interesting response in the tweet. 29 out of last 40 final 4 teams have ranked 200 or lower in bench minutes.
Tight rotations are the move. Just need those 6-8 guys to be ballers.
Disappointing year for sure, but I’ll never forget how incredible that first Duke game was.
A tight rotation only works when the rotation guys are miles better than the other guys.
I think ‘21-‘22 was a continuation of two of the big trends of the last 3 seasons. Namely, we struggled to find complete contributions at the wing (2/3) positions and/or the athletic big wing. We offset those partially with stellar defense in ‘19/‘20 and better shooting and overall talent in ‘20/‘21, leading to top 25 results both years. This year we never found the offsets and were mediocre on both ends overall.
None of the recruits or veterans for those spots have panned out over the 3 years (the 3 Ms, Kody, JAR, Casey, McKoy). And our transfers in have all been solid, but all also with warts (Hauser, Murphy, Tomas, and Gardner all with defense and / or rebounding challenges, and Franklin with major distance shooting issues). The end result this year was another year of the Kihei and Reece show, poor long range shooting, and our worst season in a while. We got tougher and improved over the course of the year, but never had a chance to be a top 25 type team. We were just too flawed.
Of course we also played a rotation that implied we were a good team, and that tight PT frustrated most of us. Were I Tony, I would have provided 5-10 minutes/game to Taine and Igor at minimum. But there is a cultural method to his madness, and I’m not too worked up about it. If those guys were ready to really help us, they would have played.
Next year presents some great recruits and possible additional development from the returnees. I’m highly optimistic we will be better. But we really do need those 2 big holes to close much further next year without opening new holes. And while I think we will be top 20 next year, it’s no sure thing.
Folks who think that the narrative of the season is that it was sunk in the noncon, and that we are playing more like a 5-seed or so (or at least an 8-seed) since a certain point should run some searches on barttorvik.com and see what they find. I just ran since March 1 and since Feb 15, and I can’t get us into the top 50… Trying to avoid the Transfer Portal thread because I think I’ve annoyed folks by talking about things that are only tangentially related to transfers.
@AnonymooseHoo @WFS_HOO @Wahooblue @Hoos9412 And @tlgoudy usually likes this stuff, too…
For example, here is since Feb 15:
For me all I had to do was watch some of the madness teams and then watch our games in the NIT…. Size and athleticism was Varsity vs JV
Right : eye test metric says the top 6 are small, unathletic, and can’t shoot. Torvik says we haven’t been a top 50 team down the stretch. I’m just wondering what the belief that we are now more like a top 7 or so seed is based on.
and shooting. teams in NCAA tourney have guys drilling 3s.
There was a point when we were playing at that level though, so maybe that’s where it comes from. If you go back to Feb. 1 through now, we are 33rd in ranking and 37th in Wins Above Bubble.
If you go Feb. 1 through the start of the ACC Tournament (March 7), we are 17th in ranking and 35th in WAB. The games in the ACC Tournament really put a damper on the argument that we are playing like an NCAA team down the stretch.
But that is the difficulty with being able to pick and choose which games matter and which ones don’t, you can make us look really good, or really bad (we are 103rd in ranking since March 7th)
Agree, good stuff. If we are going to gerrymander, I think we have looked like a top 10 team for our 4 Duke/Miami games and like a team that won’t play in the postseason for our other games.
Those wins against Miami and Duke were not flukes. We played well. In fact, since February, with the exception of North Carolina, we were in position to win every game in the final minutes – we just couldn’t close the deal.
In other words, we were good enough to play like a top team, but not good enough to maintain that level. The margin for error was too slim. Small lapses killed us. That’s clearly a reflection on the very real flaws in the team, but it also suggests that there’s talent there and that we weren’t that far off. We will have a strong returning core next year, and one of the top recruiting classes. I think there’s reason to be optimistic.
Wish I saw this thread before further detailing the transfer thread
Right!
If you want to, you can even go down to the individual game level and with a little digging can figure out what we played like during each game, if I understand the Game Score correctly.
Starting with the Miami game at home:
Miami - Torvik’s Game Score 97 - would rank just behind Gonzaga, 2nd
@ Duke - 97 - 2nd
GT - 91 - 16th
VT - 81 - 52nd
@ Miami - 90 - 18th
Duke - 87 - 25th
FSU - 68 - 104th
@ Louisville - 94 - 8th
Louisville (ACC) - 61 - 126th
UNC (ACC) - 8 - 351st lol
Miss. St. (NIT) - 89 - 21st
@ NT (NIT) - 90 - 18th
I don’t think any of them are flukes. Collectively, they are who we are. The 4 Miami/Duke games were not flukes, and the 3 NC state school beatdowns were not flukes. Crushing Providence wasn’t a fluke and letting a non-tourney FSU team close the gap on us to win wasn’t a fluke. Gotta take the good with the bad and the bad with the good.
Agree 100% The Hoos are exactly who you thought they are. When it clicks and everyone reaches their potential they can beat Duke at Camron sweep Miami and go to the wire at home with Duke. When one or more player is off on offense or the defense is out of sync via a bad matchup, then you get the Carolina beatdowns, and then there’s the first Clemson and NC State game, where the team just doesn’t show up.
That’s what a roster of this build does, not enough talent to out perform a system break down, not enough system to cover the flaws of the talent.