Purdue game thread

Men's Basketball
61

Mamadi Diakite, Kihei Clark, Braxton Key, Jay Huff, and Casey Morsell are the team. That’s what everyone thought before the season started, and it’s proven true. Of course, without Key, now they’re a four-man team, which isn’t going to win much.

All of the wishful thinking about Tomas Woldetensae, Kody Stattmann, and Justin McKoy has proven to be just that: wishful thinking. It’s not really a knock on them. Bennett is giving them developmental minutes, which is a good thing, but none of them are going to win games for us. Not at this point.

When a top 5 team is playing walk-ons for significant minutes in competitive games, they’re probably not really a top 5 team.

None of this is shocking or disappointing. The top 5 ranking was fool’s gold, and everyone knows it.

That doesn’t mean the season is lost. Not many teams will have a frontcourt like Purdue to shut down Huff and Diakite. But it does mean Virginia is probably a .500 ACC squad. There isn’t a single coach in the ACC who isn’t smart enough to figure out that you only need to defend within 5 feet of the basket to beat Virginia, because we have no shooters. We will get exposed. But Virginia’s defense, with better effort than last night, is still going to be a problem for ACC teams.

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62

I’ll state the obvious that it’s way too early to pronounce judgment on any players or the team. They are clearly struggling offensively collectively and individually at this point. Given Tony’s track record, I’m going to wait and see what happens this season while continuing to enjoy this great ride. Of the three players you’ve sorta written off for the year, I expect that at least one of them will improve significantly and become a key contributor in ACC play.

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63

We’re 8 games into a 30 game schedule. The season is nearly 30% over. It’s not to early to draw some conclusions.

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64

Agree that it’s not too early to draw conclusions on where they’ve been. But based on Tony’s history, I’ll stick with my opinion that it’s too early to conclude where individual players and the team will end up.

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65

I’m kind of high on Mckoy being a good contributor with some experience. He’s a freshman with only a few minutes under his belt. I believe he finds his role.

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