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Message: [QUOTE="SWC75, post: 1259279, member: 289"] - We are heavily dependent on the “Big Three” of Rakeem Christmas, Michael Gbinije and Trevor Cooney. They put up amazing number sin this game, (see The Upside), but is any of them is not functioning at full capacity, we are mediocre at best. In the first half Gbinije had one point. In the second half and overtime, he had 16. Even with that, we barely pulled this one out. We are counting on these three players to not only be productive but to be consistently productive. All three have been role players until this year and they’ve never shown the consistent production we need from them now. But that’s college ball: you lose guys and new guys have to step forward and be the heroes. If they don’t, it’s a long, long year. - While those guys are our big three, we can’t go 3 on 5 and beat good teams. We need some production form the other guys. Kaleb Joseph, Tyler Roberson, Ron Patters and BJ Johnson were 6 for 22 from the field and scored 13 points. But it’s not the shots they missed that bothered me. Boeheim complained that Joseph was “just circling around out there”. Patterson drove through the lane several times and seemed to have an open shot at the basket, even a lay-up but used the drives to force the ball to Cooney in the corner. Wake finally timed that and got a big steal late in the game. Tyler Roberson was short on several shots, then made one, then stopped shooting. He’d get the ball 10-15 feet from the basket with no one bothering to guard him and look around for someone else to get the ball to or just dribble it aimlessly. Then he finally made a couple of jumpers down the stretch and looked good doing it. He got 4 offensive rebounds, which is good, but each time looked to pass the ball out to a teammate, instead of trying to score himself when he had the ball right next to the basket. I realize these guys are not the #1 options but you have to make the defense at least respect you. - I won’t bring up the subject of fronting the inbounds guy to avoid these half-court bombs JB was complaining about in the post- game: it’s too late at night to get into that again. I’ll just say that five guys don’t do a very good job of guarding four guys if they’ve been to make sure not to foul them. - I think Konstantinos Mitoglou just hit another one. [/QUOTE]

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