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Message: [QUOTE="SWC75, post: 1591511, member: 289"] - We should have a great season if we keep playing Colgate. This might have been a better Colgate team than the one we had been beating by 50 points a few years ago but they weren’t 25 points better. - We won the game by hitting 14 treys. It’s good we can do that but 30 of our 51 shots were from outside the arc. Typically, we had four guys at that distance and one guy within the arc. We got only 9 offensive rebounds because we had only one guy going after them,, surrounded by Colgate players. If the ball didn’t bounce right to him, (or if it did and he was DaJuan Coleman) we didn’t get it. If Colgate, who had a significantly smaller player at position, could break even on the boards against us, what will North Carolina do? Heck, what will St. John’s do? - A guy like DaJuan should have Colgate for lunch. He did get a couple of late baskets to reach 10 points but he had only 2 rebounds in 20 minutes and negated that with 2 turnovers. He still holds the ball low or dribbles to gather himself. He tries lay-ups when he could dunk, (although he final threw one down in the final minutes). He never seems to come up with loose balls because he doesn’t get low enough to retrieve them. This year is his window of opportunity to make something of his once promising basketball career. Next season we’ll have Chukwu. There just enough signs of progress so far. - We made 14 of 30 three pointers, an excellent 46.7%. Those shots were wide open. We should have made that many. Why is that on the downside? Because against a good defensive team, those shot aren’t going to be open. - The big story of this game is that Mike Hopkins stuck with his top guys throughout. Against Colgate, in a 27 point win Michael Gbinije played 39 minutes. Trevor Cooney played 36 minutes. Malachi Richardson played 34 and Tyler Lydon 32. Franklin Howard, Kaleb Joseph and Chinoso Obokoh played a total of 16 minutes. I’m not saying that Hopkins was wrong to do this. The point is that what the players who played so little show3ed him in practice and in the game was not enough to convince him that we could afford to have them out there against Colgate. - And this is the difference between having 9 scholarship players rather than 10 or 11. Yes, we normally play no more than 7-8 players against good opponents. But if you have 10-11 guys competing for those spots you have a better chance to make that 8 and you have a better chance to make it a good 8. If Howard, Joseph and Obokoh weren’t doing enough, they’d be a couple of other guys competing who might be giving us more. But this year, those guys aren’t there and we have four guys playing 32+ minutes against an over-matched team. - Of course it could also mean that Mike isn’t satisfied with the was even those 6-7 top guys a re playing and wants to give them the time to get their game up to speed. [/QUOTE]

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