Do we have clouded judgement?

[bballbeadle]

Praising the general is always insightful!

Ha ha! Yesssssss.

 

[kcsu]

If Sid is healthy we are going to crush most teams and be in every game.
We are loaded.

 

[HakAttack]

I have argued for years that the regular season, especially the conference season, is a better measure of a team's strength than the single elimination post season. I always got told that the post season, specifically the NCAA tournament was all that counted.

If we are now going to acknowledge that the regular season is the better measure of a team, then we should learn to appreciate regular season accomplishments. if we can win a conference regular season title, (even if it's unofficial), win 30 games, get ranked #1, we should remember the teams that did that as fondly as teams that had good post season runs.

As far as predicting how far a team will go in the tournament, all i want is to be curious, rather than nervous on selection Sunday. The regular season can get a you a good seed but that's all it can do. The rest is a spin of the roulette wheel, (as Virginia found out last year).

That perspective is exactly why the 2011-2012 team will always be one of my favorites, if not my outright favorite.

They lost three times ALL SEASON, and went undefeated in the Dome. That to me was pound for pound the best SU team we've ever had.

 

[billsin01]

A JB quote in recent article (about rarity of returning all starters) has me wondering something - here it is:

“The returning five have given rise to high expectations for this year's Orange, but SU coach Jim Boeheim preached caution, noting that Syracuse struggled to 20 regular-season wins last year.

"We have to be a lot better than we were last year,'' Boeheim said. "The (NCAA) tournament doesn't really matter. That's just an isolated instance. We played good for a week. We didn't play good for the whole year last year.''

My question: Are we letting our final impression of last years team (success in NCAA tournament) cloud our judgement about how good this year’s team may be?

Like many here I am extremely optimistic about the 2018-19 SU basketball team. Like, dreaming of a Final Four or more.

But is this optimism grounded in reality? Per JB, this is a team that did not look great heading into the Tournament last year...thoughts?

Interesting post because it's always the question in the preseason, right? So I think it's been answered pretty well and if we were looking for a really succinct answer, it'd be fair to say we should be good defensively (we were all year, even while losing more games than we wanted last season) and better overall offensively (even if the improvement is nowhere near as significant as many or all of us hope it will be). That should lead to a team that is fighting for a top 4 ACC spot and at least a threat to go pretty deep in March.

I think the part of the question that interesting is how likely or unlikely are the 'this will be a special season' type expectations. That to me is really intriguing. One of the things that got lost a bit as the losses piled up at times last season was how many of those games were tight games: ND was brutal, the Bonnies in OT, FSU in OT, at GT, NC State at home, Carolina at home, even Duke in the tourney ...

Now, I don't get into the what-if game very much because for the most part I don't believe we were quite good enough to pull those games out -- that's part of being a solid but not really good team. Those things happen.

But it's interesting as you look at this year b/c it's not a huge leap to say that if we play with more tempo and have more depth and more variety of offensive threats, that we have a chance to be at least 5-6 ppg better offensively while still being really tough defensively.

Not sure that exactly makes me think we're seeing a 30-win season, but it's not hard to talk yourself into a scenario where we see maybe 25 wins in the regular season. Again, it's hard to look at paper and predict what's going to happen on the court, but what makes this group interesting is that I'm not sure it really requires a massive sea change to see a dramatic shift in the regular season win/loss record.