Yeah, Crean’s crowning achievement at Georgia has been getting Anthony Edward’s to stop by there for one year, and the team achieved exactly nothing as a result. With the rest of the SEC stepping up their game and the resources Georgia has, he probably isn’t going to last there much longer unless he can pull off something totally unexpected.
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The Georgia program is the disaster scenario IMO. Not only did everyone leave and they have a completely new group, 4 of their 5 leading scorers are transfers (most multiple times) who will only play one year at UGa before exhausting eligibility. So this is just a placeholder team that will completely destabilize again in April.
We’re still feeling the effects of Ty, Dre, and Kyle leaving early. Also affected by the one-and-done nature of Murphy and Hauser. Other transfers out and some recruiting misses (plus Covid challenges), and we’ve got what we’ve got right now. In my perfect world, we never bring in a transfer because we never need to. We just keep recruiting those Top 40-100 type of players (ones who know there is no instant gratification route here), develop them, and 8 or 9 are always ready to go with the younger ones ready to fill in for graduating players or one or two who don’t pan out and transfer out.
Georgia could win given our current state, but that program is a complete mess and will be for some time.
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Yeah Georiga’s future ain’t bright no matter what.
If we lose tonight I hope we just give Kadin Reece Igor and Taine 40 minutes a game for the rest of the season.
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Maybe even 50 minutes per game. Get 'em ready for the talent infusion next year.
Kadin needs some post work, and really needs to stop bringing the ball down to waist level. I really miss having a post player who can receive and entry pass and make a quick, smooth, and purposeful post move in rhythm. An effective post player that commands help attention from perimeter defenders gives our shooters more space, especially if they relocate well.
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Feels like a win tonight. Not the “statement win” type (not that you can really have a statement win vs. a team outside the top 150 in KP), probably another game like Coppin St. where it feels too close and like the Hoos left some meat on the bone, but I watched the College Football Playoff Preview Georgia vs. Cincinnati game a week or so ago as well as their matchup vs. GT a few days ago and they looked pretty bad.
They’re not the type of “mid-major without much elite talent but that plays with confidence & is willing to jack plenty of 3s” bad team, either. They’re 317th in the country in three-point rate (3PA/FGA). They have a pretty heliocentric offense with Aaron Cook at the helm, plenty of PnR stuff with him and their two bigs (Bridges, who is pretty good, and Ingram, who didn’t impress me). Lots of transfers, not a lot of chemistry — they have a pretty high assist rate, but they aren’t really ball-movement assists, they’re mostly PnR dumpoffs or drive-and-kicks. Lots of ball stopping. They are a team that’s happy to play slow (250th in offensive pace) so this game could get pretty ugly to watch.
I’ll take us to win ugly because CTB is just that much better than Crean. Everyone on here will still be justifiably pessimistic, and I think we most likely lose to Providence/Northwestern if we do win (though either opponent will make for a really good game). Positives I’ll be watching for: more Igor/Taine minutes, hopefully without Taine forced to play out of position at the small-ball 4; a decent game from JAR, because it’d still be cool to see him succeed; more offensive experimentation along the lines of what we saw last game to try and find a scheme that doesn’t look stuck in mud.
Seeing UVA -8, o/u 122 on Action Network right now — I’d take the under & Georgia to cover but UVA to win. There’s a reason we’re 0-4 ATS this year. Final score prediction is UVA 58, Georgia 52. My last prediction is that Reece is going to have a good game on both ends tonight. He can bother Cook with his length and probably force some turnovers, while you can probably hide Kihei on Oquendo. And Georgia’s perimeter defense is awful, very low-effort from what I saw. Especially if UVA goes with a PnR-heavy approach, Reece should feast against lazy perimeter D.
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Yea that 2012/13 was an example used as one that would’ve made the tournament under the quad system when the whole thing was rolled out. And that leaves out the switch from RPI to NET as the primary sorting tool. Fairly different selection process now.
I watched some of the Georgia-GT games. Is it me, or is a lot of JAR’s game just to stand 30 feet from the basket and act like he’s open for a pass? He plays the game like he’s in strict social distancing protocol. Even when he running around screens, he seems to run around the 3-ft painted court boundary.
I certainly hope that’s not the case. It’s 3 years later. Under no scenario would any of them have ever impacted this roster. Seems more it has to do with missing on guards for basically an entire generation of recruiting.
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2nd photo. Look who they are using to promote the tourney. It’s time.
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Yeah, I guess he’s just trying to showcase that NBA range or something. Reminds me of Kristaps late last year with the Mavericks — standing in deep 3PT range calling for the ball, kinda divorced from the rest of the play.
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Reasonable people could disagree on this. But I think their departure factored into the Hauser and Murphy transfers - Hauser announced after those three left, and Murphy came a year later when no one had really filled the void. (It was further exacerbated by the loss of Diakite and Key the next year without suitable replacements). Other guys who may have been in the queue were not prepared (perhaps were not good enough to ever be prepared). Hauser and Murphy’s roles were for one year but certainly contributed to discontent - and transfers - from other guys who didn’t get PT they desired. Now we’re bringing in transfers just to fill out 10 scholarships on a roster, and we’re hoping that young guys will get enough development time without the team going in a tailspin. Not saying all this was undeserved, but it was a disruptive sequence that played out over multiple years.
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LOL, he’s so far out of the play, he’s out of the picture. And I felt like he did that a lot.
Was that the year that Joe had to play point guard in the preseason tournament because both Jontel and Tevin were out?
Completely irrelevant but JAR stays on his tiptoes a lot. Almost as much as Blackshear did at tech. For some reason I don’t fully understand, it bugs me.
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There was a butterfly effect. They likely wouldn’t have added Justin McKoy that spring if Guy or Jerome had stayed. it’s complicated but he was a way of killing two birds with one stone. Immediate depth while addressing a future need without interfering with what Bennett considered most important for 2020 (Beekman and another guard which became Jabri).
Keep spinning it forward and they would have had a 2020 forward instead of McKoy, maybe Henry Coleman or Terrance Williams. And keep spinning, they might have gone for a different type of transfer this year than Gardner. Not sure any of this makes the team dramatically better or worse, but a little different.
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The potential ripple effect is crazy. Then you add in McCoy JAR and Casey Murphy leaving that’s a whole different ripple effect that we’ll have to work through.
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Good memory. Both out v. Fairfield, Jontel back only 6 minutes vs Delaware (which became an L). Then the tourney became Lamar and N Texas because we missed MSG …
Maybe a little, but feels more like multi-system failure than butterfly effect.
Just a guess, but I suspect Jabri did not develop physically or otherwise the way we were projecting in summer 2019. That may have created the biggest ripple.
Biggest issue IMO isn’t Dre et al leaving early, it was the whiff on several guys that are playing in the NBA or for top ten teams as upper-class PGs…
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And maybe Casey’s time here is different if instead of starting his first collegiate game replacing KG in the Carrier Dome he spends his first year as a defense first backup guard. That pressure broke him (for us) IMO.
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I have come to realize I’m in the minority, but I reject this explanation. If that pressure broke him, there was never any hope. (Not saying it wasn’t a minor factor, but I can’t imagine it was major)
I mean, this wasn’t “you’re the next anointed one” pressure, like a UNC PG or KY/Duke blue blood. We had other dudes. We had upper-class guys. This is Virginia, not the NY Yankees. Was Doughty harassing him? Jeff White kept trying to get him to do the podcast? What are talking about here? We just needed a guard to shoot or score competently, and he couldn’t.
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I think you’re right about the pressure on Casey. The system set up didn’t do him any favors. But I think stepping into those massive shoes on a national championship defending team got to him. And he was never going to be “right” at JPJ
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