He probably did a head fake to see if uva fans would be excited or not. 
1 Like
How many scholarships are available?
Dai Dai would be taking the 13th and final 'ship for next season.
5 Likes
Burton is gonna be a first teamer next year isnât he.
1 Like
Almost 24 hours of seeming assumption that Ames is a Hoo without any news confirming same. Seems weird. Or maybe Iâm traumatized by Perry
And no crystal ballsâŚ
1 Like
He apparently missed BCâs insider meltdown. Leader Johnson from Villanova basically calls dibs on every recruit and ends up with more misses than hits. Recruiting is an inexact science analogous to predicting the weather. You can reasonably forecast outcomes but sometimes that blizzard you called for fizzles out due to temperatures in the upper atmosphere.
Bottom line is that things change frequently and quickly in recruiting. @HoozGotNext does a great job synthesizing information from numerous sources and reporting it without it being colored by emotion.
These attacks on insiders are always funny to me. Get your own info then
12 Likes
Just curious. Any rumblings of schools out there interested in Dante?
With todayâs rules, could he return as a walk-on witn school covered by NIL?
Just adding onto this because itâs interesting to me. To add the numbers to your point, we ranked 69th in three-point shooting percentage. We ranked 294th in three-point rate.
Our percentage was good, but we couldnât get many off because so few guys could hit them. And when we got to games that actually mattered and other teams had time to game plan for us, it was too easy to kill our offense because it was so obvious who we would be trying to generate shots for and it was so easy to sag off almost everybody else.
In my opinion, itâs way easier to resolve spacing issues like those by having multiple guards who can shoot the three, which is why I care about it so much. Stretch fours are very nice, but generally canât be as dynamic with the ball in their hands and are easier to shut down than elite shooting guards. I donât think itâs a coincidence that all of our elite teams from 2014 to 2019 had two or three guards who were major threats from three on significant volume. I think we need that again, so will be desperately hoping Bliss or Ames can do that for us.
7 Likes
Heard he was kinda pissed to be shown the door and didnât really wanna transfer out, so doubt heâd have any interest in that
1 Like
I think we need to make that offensive transition regardless of lineups. Itâs not a good thing to be so 1-dimensional on offense that an off shooting night or good defense completely de-fangs our offense. I share your concern re Tonyâs willingness to change, and unfortunately, I think weâll have to wait until next year to see what happens. Heâs tried to change systems before only to revert to BM if he doesnât like the way things are going with the new system.
6 Likes
I like the idea of going to the UConn style offense because I think it is in keeping with our structured style. The Huskiesâ offense is thought out and deliberate. It would not require us to bring in five star players every year to out athlete other teams. That offense is a decision based (option) offense that works with great athletic talent with high basketball IQ but you can also plug in role players (as long as they have high basketball IQ). I think that works with guys we are able to bring in.
The rub is you have to dedicate a lot more time to teaching the offense. No doubt 95%-100% would love to see extra teaching time go into the offense. The question becomes how much time shift is CTB willing to go from defensive instruction to offense?
7 Likes
Iâm not particularly invested in running a particular type of offense (UConn or otherwise), though I do think we ran too much B/M the past few years. However I just chalk that up to it being Tonyâs default and Tony doesnât like to change his default (1) at all, ever, and (2) especially when we are not doing the default well enough (which Iâd submit is a mistake, but what do I know?).
But the second paragraph is where I really agree. The bigger tell is whether Tony cares about the offense being so awful, and to your point, cares enough to change any of his habits or tendencies around offseason prep, game prep, and in-game approach. He could run 100% B/M and still change quite a bit, to take an extreme example.
3 Likes
I do wonder if the way UConn has been able to also have an elite defense with this intricate offense really just boils down to âhave Donovan Clingan and Stephon Castle.â They were still quite good on defense in Clinganâs bench/injured minutes, but he had a pretty big effect on their defense.
Just bringing it up since sometimes people bring up UConn as an example of being able to have it all in terms of not making much of an offense/defense tradeoff, which is both true and perhaps not widely generalizable depending on your personnel.
Also, agree with @haney, offense is more than just the design of your actions. My go-to example for this is to compare Tennessee and Davidson, which run the same offense but have very different outcomes in terms of types of shots taken.
4 Likes
You know who else is named âDay-Dayâ? Draymond Green.
2 Likes
Real tangent here - but Iâm kinda wondering if we will come to see that Clingan was really super important to UConn in both natty years.
Counterpoint - they won a natty with him coming off the bench. And they did pretty well when he was banged up. Letâs see how they do with Samson JohnsonâŚ
2 Likes
On the defensive side, having elite rim protection is certainly part of the success. UConn was good on ball but I am sure the fact they knew they had a shot blocker behind them helped players play free.
I get what you are saying with the Tenn-Davidson comp, but we are closer to UConn in talent than Davidson is to the Vols. I really am just saying letâs install an offense and really invest in teaching it to our players.
2 Likes
Actually with that I meant that people (rightly) think Tennesseeâs offense is a little yucky but (rightly) think Davidsonâs offense is nice looking even though they run the same actions (and they do result in different rates of 3s taken). Thatâs where the personnel mix comes in, Tennessee uses bigs (and wings) best suited to playing Rock Em Sock Em Robots on the boards but are limited shooters, while Davidson plays more shooters and makes some defensive tradeoffs as a result.
3 Likes
Yeah we talk a lot about system, but in many cases system is secondary to (a) having talented players play with confidence and (b) scheming to your playersâ strengths and away from their weaknesses.
11 Likes