SWC75
Bored Historian
- Joined
- Aug 26, 2011
- Messages
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- If you keep playing somebody, eventually they're going to beat you.
- JB summed it up both at halftime and after the game when he said that Cal is a veteran team and we have young guys who aren’t ready to play in a game like this. We’ve been spoiled by teams that replaced people with guys who ready to excel early and went off on tremendous winning streaks to start the season and attained high national rankings, (every team in this decade has gotten to #3 in the country or higher). You can’t keep losing people and continually be good every year. The players on this team have a chance to be on a strong team someday but they aren’t on one now. The key to the season is whether they can become a strong team by the end of the year, (and not lose enough games along the way that they aren’t in the NCAA tournament).
- JB loves to recruit long, athletic guys rather than bulky guys that live in the paint. We may have tossed those dice once too often, too. Rakeem Christmas is supposedly 250 pounds but doesn’t have a lot of bulk. Chris McCullough is a string bean. Chinoso Obokoh isn’t going to have serious minutes against good teams, (for a while anyway). DaJuan Coleman is on the shelf. Tyler Roberson was supposed to be an inside force but he isn’t. This team is going to be like the guy who gets sand kicked in his face in those old Charles Atlas ads:
Maybe we need some “Dynamic Tension”.
- We are also kind of short. Christmas is 6-9, average for a modern center. McCullough is 6-10. But everybody else is about 6-7. Jimmy Salatin called them “a bunch of small forwards”. When I did my preview of SU’s schedule I couldn’t help but notice how many teams had 7 foot centers, (one team had three of them). We’ll be at a height disadvantage many times this year. Are we back to the “Roy’s Runts era?
- Kaleb Joseph is not Tyler Ennis. He can be a good player but he’s nowhere near on that level at this point. In this game he got some late garbage points to finish with 13 but had only 4 assists to 3 turnovers. He just never got us into any semblance of an offense. Surprisingly, he seemed reluctant to go to the basket, settling for jumpers too often. Joseph has a reputation of being a dribbling whiz but he isn’t using that skill. A point guard breaks a defense down with penetration, not jump shots.
- Trevor Cooney still hasn’t found the range. He was 3 for 10, 2 for 6 from the arc. We haven’t hit 30% of our three pointers since the Carleton game. That makes things hard. Cal was 8 for 19, which made things easy. The turning point of the game was when Michael Gbinije missed a dunk at 20-22 and Cal made four unanswered threes. That’s how you take control of a game.
- Any Ron Patterson fans out there?
- Remember when the basketball season was supposed to make us forget the frustrations of the football team?
- JB summed it up both at halftime and after the game when he said that Cal is a veteran team and we have young guys who aren’t ready to play in a game like this. We’ve been spoiled by teams that replaced people with guys who ready to excel early and went off on tremendous winning streaks to start the season and attained high national rankings, (every team in this decade has gotten to #3 in the country or higher). You can’t keep losing people and continually be good every year. The players on this team have a chance to be on a strong team someday but they aren’t on one now. The key to the season is whether they can become a strong team by the end of the year, (and not lose enough games along the way that they aren’t in the NCAA tournament).
- JB loves to recruit long, athletic guys rather than bulky guys that live in the paint. We may have tossed those dice once too often, too. Rakeem Christmas is supposedly 250 pounds but doesn’t have a lot of bulk. Chris McCullough is a string bean. Chinoso Obokoh isn’t going to have serious minutes against good teams, (for a while anyway). DaJuan Coleman is on the shelf. Tyler Roberson was supposed to be an inside force but he isn’t. This team is going to be like the guy who gets sand kicked in his face in those old Charles Atlas ads:
Maybe we need some “Dynamic Tension”.
- We are also kind of short. Christmas is 6-9, average for a modern center. McCullough is 6-10. But everybody else is about 6-7. Jimmy Salatin called them “a bunch of small forwards”. When I did my preview of SU’s schedule I couldn’t help but notice how many teams had 7 foot centers, (one team had three of them). We’ll be at a height disadvantage many times this year. Are we back to the “Roy’s Runts era?
- Kaleb Joseph is not Tyler Ennis. He can be a good player but he’s nowhere near on that level at this point. In this game he got some late garbage points to finish with 13 but had only 4 assists to 3 turnovers. He just never got us into any semblance of an offense. Surprisingly, he seemed reluctant to go to the basket, settling for jumpers too often. Joseph has a reputation of being a dribbling whiz but he isn’t using that skill. A point guard breaks a defense down with penetration, not jump shots.
- Trevor Cooney still hasn’t found the range. He was 3 for 10, 2 for 6 from the arc. We haven’t hit 30% of our three pointers since the Carleton game. That makes things hard. Cal was 8 for 19, which made things easy. The turning point of the game was when Michael Gbinije missed a dunk at 20-22 and Cal made four unanswered threes. That’s how you take control of a game.
- Any Ron Patterson fans out there?
- Remember when the basketball season was supposed to make us forget the frustrations of the football team?
