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Message: [QUOTE="billsin01, post: 2390252, member: 837"] Interesting post and always enjoy the perspective and I agree with your assessment on most of the players, though I'd suggest that Dolezaj having a significant impact despite shooting just once and tallying zero points, is pretty impressive. Also agree on your thoughts about the freshman class as well as the theory that last year's team was a bit of an anomaly. Having said that, I disagree a bit on what we should have expected from this team as well as a bit on what we currently really know about them. For one thing, it's been quite a while since since SU has put together a really solid OOC performance. We all know about last year, the previous year we had the disturbing loss against an absolutely terrible SJU team and a bad loss to G'town. In '14-'15, the losses were against OK teams but we had four of them. So you're really going back to the ridiculous run that the Ennis team went on to start the '13-'14 season for the last time we had a really solid OOC performance (not that we should be undefeated each year or that we haven't had some good OOC wins in that time). And, I would suggest, a big part of the struggles early has been the difficulty of having a lot of unproven pieces trying to figure our roles. Obviously, we are in that spot again this year. Also, as far as offense goes, I still don't know that I know exactly where our offense comes from outside of Battle. Having him on the bench for that run vs. Tex. Southern and seeing Geno go for 13 was really, really encouraging. But I'd say right now Geno is still very much figuring things out, or getting healthy ... or more likely a little bit of both. Outside of that spurt, he's 7 for 22 for 18 total points in three games, and the numbers look even worse if you add in the second half of the Tex. Southern game. So I too hope Geno gets healthy and we get another solid scoring option from him, but I'm not entirely sold that's exactly what we have. Frank is interesting too. Career high last night and the passing seems to have returned as well with 14 assists in his last two games. But he's also a guy who reached double-figures in five of our first 11 games last year and had 9+ assists in five of those games as well. So I feel like it's ok to stay in wait-and-see mode a little bit with him at least until we get toward the conference slate. So I really still our offense against good competition as Battle (complete stud), Brissett (been really impressed with the energy and aggressiveness even if the results haven't been entirely pretty), and then a few possibilities (Geno and Frank most notably, but maybe some contributions from Sidibe and Marek). That still feels shaky to me. Overall, I've been impressed with this team's athleticism, effort and hustle. That translates to really solid defense and the rebounding has been great. But I just feel like each solid performance is huge for this team. I'm not taking anything for granted: Toledo, UB, St. Bonaventure ... just feel like they all are tough contests. G'town and UConn will be tests as well and UMD and KU feel like tall tasks. But with every good performance, the confidence should grow, Geno should get healthier and more comfortable and guys like Moyer and Dolezaj should grow into their roles. The potential for a very, very interesting team is there, but I guess I'm more in cautiously optimistic mode vs. being sold just yet. [/QUOTE]

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