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Message: [QUOTE="sutomcat, post: 5539548, member: 27"] Was listening to some college basketball bigwig talk about SU hoops the other day. I think,it was on Steve Infanti’s radio show. Anyway, this guy liked the talent on the roster but he had reservations, especially on quality the SU defense. Said the past two seasons SU was one of the wrong teams in the country at giving up baskets early in possessions. There is a stat on average time required to get a shot off and we have been horrific at this during the Autry era. We have given up a ton of baskets in transition in recent years where one or more players were hopelessly out of position or just zone out and let their guy get open almost immediately. But even when we are able to set up our defense, it often just takes a pass,or a quick move and the other team ends up with an easy shot. I think we are going to score a lot of points this year. I would be really surprised if we are not one of the best teams in the ACC on offense. The defense still concerns me. We don’t have to be great on defense or even good. We just have to be mediocre. Note that I am not saying that should be the goal, but to me if we want to be in the mix,for,an NCAA bid, we are going to need at least 21 wins and need to be finish in the top third of the conference. I really think we have one of the top two or three offenses in the conference. If we can just finish somewhere around 9th or 10th in the conference in defense, we’re gonna be a damn good team. We don’t have a great shot blocker in the middle. We’re going to block quite a few more shots than last year, but there’s no great job shot blocker here. We don’t have a great ball.hawk heading up our defense up top either. Again I think the guys we brought in are gonna be better than the guys that left, but these are the things you normally build a great defense around and we don’t have either. Back to the question at hand. Clearly Red wants us to play faster. He wants us to get to transition whenever possible. It will be nice to not have to see him get upset over and over when Carlos refused to push the ball down the court, constantly ignoring what the head coach wanted. I do think we’re going to play faster this year. I do think we’re going to score more baskets in transition. We might even press some. I expect our scoring to be up, and I expect other teams to be able to score on us some too. I did not expect us to make the other team work really hard to get a good shot off. We should be better here than last year, but nothing special. Sadiq is the one guy who could really make a difference on defense and I think he,is going to impact some games in a major way but he is a frosh and is going to do frosh things. I worry about him getting in foul trouble a lot. He is so crazy aggressive playing defense. I think Souare is going to be a plus defender for us. From what I saw in practice, I think Freeman made a big leap in defense over the summer and will be a plus defender. Kyle, George, Betsey, Kingz and Fennell should be average type defenders. I am hoping JJ can up his defense to that level. Didn’t see Kiyan practice but I watched a bunch of his HS and summer games and ex-etc him to really struggle on defense. He wasn’t interested in defending then and he doesn’t look physically capable of being a plus defender at the college level right now. Sometimes there’s a big change when guys jump to the college level. Maybe that will happen with Anthony. I hope so. If anyone is going to do it, it will be him. What does all this mean? I think we’re going to score triple figures two or three games this year. [/QUOTE]

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