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Message: [QUOTE="SUlax88-09, post: 4982573, member: 9879"] Great points! Thank you for the thoughtful and insightful comments! I wish I could watch Zappitello and Erksa go 1v1 in practice! That must be some match-up! Just a few follow up thoughts: Face-off and goalie play will not be our weak links this year. Our defense is ok, as long as we can limit penalties, but, as you said, we’ll see how it holds up against a great offensive team. Olexo and Trujillo seem to give up too many goals, and Levine struggled last game. Rice is a solid SSDM, but we‘ll need another one that we can count on, too. Our man-up team isn’t clicking on full cylinders, yet, due to Thomson’s shooting struggles, but I just have to believe he’ll snap out of it. How can such a dominant box lacrosse shooter struggle shooting in field lacrosse? Such a weird thing. Must be mental thing. Our man-down team isn’t great (not just in the number of goals it gives up, which is due to our high amount of penalties, but even our percentage of EMO goals given up isn‘t great). Plus I have to agree with Carcaterra (I usually do; he should be a coach!) and his concerns about what happens when the penalty is released and then our 6 on 6 defense doesn’t have a single starter out there. We gave up a goal last game because of it, too. I’ve never seen a top D1 program do what we‘re doing. To be frank, I think this silly experiment is a fail, and we should just stop it. Leo and Rhoa are excellent middies, so those 2 alone make our middies a threat. Although I do wonder what happens to them when they start drawing a long pole. I think teams will even pull a pole from Mule in order to get a long pole on them. Our attack is my main concern (specifically when we play the top teams in the country). I had such high hopes for Hiltz. He had almost as good a freshman year as O’Neil, he has great vision as a passer and he also has a great wrist snap shot, so I can’t explain why he hasn’t flourished in Gait’s ball movement offense. He’s actually regressed. Mule doesn’t add much, to me. I don’t know if anyone on the bench can dodge or if we can move a middie down to attack, but we desperately need an attackman that can dodge and can initiate our offense, even if the person doesn’t score. Ball movement is SO much more effective if an attackman can beat their man or really all they have to do is just draw a slide!, and then that slide unlocks our whole offense and opens everything up for our ball movement. Spallina is such a unique player with his elite vision, phenomenal behind the back shot, and powerful legs when backing down defenders, but he just doesn’t have the speed to beat the top defenders in the country. ‘Speed kills’, and the lack of it is just tough to overcome. Which is why I think we should be doing a Lot more pick plays for Spallina when a top defender is shutting him down. Picks would free him up to then orchestrate our offense. My other concern is that our schedule is just too tough. The ACC is obviously the best conference in the country, so I get wanting to ‘earn’ a playoff spot with non-conference games, but do we have to play every team in the Top 10? These games will be entertaining for us, as fans, but giving these stud sophomores some playoff experience (for our eventual championship run in ‘26) will help them more then playing and losing to Another Top 10 team in the regular season… [/QUOTE]

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