SWC75
Bored Historian
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- In a pre-game interview Jimmy Larranaga called Syracuse “a great offensive team”. But are we? We’ve got one really good outside shooter in Trevor Cooney. CJ Fair can occasionally make one from out there. Tyler Ennis hasn’t hit one since the St. John’s game. Fair is trying to display a one-on-one game for the NBA but has a weak handle. Grant can maneuver around the basket but away from it he is mediocre. And we have still have no real inside scorer. Christmas can get some put backs but Keita is useless offensively. Miami is a very good defensive team and took away our options , one by one, until we were reduced to feeding the ball to Keita- Keita!- to try and score. We went from a dunk by Grant with 1:43 left in the first half to a three pointer by Fair with 8:50 gone in the second half- 10 minutes and 33 seconds- without a field goal. No, we are not a great offensive team. We need somebody who can catch and finish inside as a cure for a team that extends its defense against us.
- We are famous for playing a great zone defense but we again proved that we don’t know how to attack one. I continue to maintain that CJ Fair is the guy we need at the top of the key, not Jerami Grant. Grant hit that one 15 footer but CJ is much better from that range. When we first saw him making an impact a couple of years ago, it was from the top of then key. People were comparing him to Josh Pace with his ability to slip through the defense from that spot for floaters that always seemed to go in. Now we have him putting up jump shots from the side and Grant up top and it’s not working very well.
- Cooney was 2 for 12, all three pointers. Yes, you are going to have nights like that. But he has the skills to drive to the basket when his shot is not working. And he should certainly be capable of a pull-up jumper. He actually got a lot of open shots in the second half but he rushed them. What sometimes happens when you are closely guarded is that when you get open shots, you tend to hurry them even when you dot’ have to and I think that happened to Trevor today. I just hope there is no carry-over.
- Baye Keita, after a couple of productive games, slipped back into his “I’m not really here” mode. He missed his only two shots. He did manage a couple of rebounds, (I don’t remember them), and let some alley-oops go past him for scores. It was his third scoreless game. He has two more in which he’s scored one point, (no field goals), and six other games in which he scored 2 points, (and one of those was on free throws). “But we can’t expect Keita to score a lot for us.” No we can’t.
- With Keita we are going 4 on 5 offensively, (and sometimes defensively). When Gbinije is in there, it’s 3 on 5. Cooney had a lousy shooting game but the minute he left it, Miami stopped guarding G-man and went after everyone else and we had no offense at all. JB had to pull him back out after 4 minutes. What happened to this guy?
Sure, it’s against high school kids. But the basket is still 10 feet tall. And if the other team isn’t guarding him, shouldn’t he have been able to do some of these things?
- We only played 7 guys and only 5 of them scored. My Three Sons had their shots but they didn’t take enough advantage of them. And putting Grant into the starting line-up means that our leading reserves, Keita and Gbinije, are not offensive guys. Thus in this game, our bench scoring was zero.
- We nearly lost this game in the Dome. Our next opponent is a team that beat this team. And we’ll be playing in their place, the first of 9 ACC road games where we will be playing, not in the big city arenas we are used to in the Big East but on-campus sites with the opponents fans and students breathing down our guy’s necks.
- In that interview, Larranaga said that they’d lost their top 7 scorers from last year: 5 were seniors, one jumped to the pros early and another was injured. Can you imagine what last year’s Miami team would have done to us today? And we see ourselves as a #2 team nationally, a potential NCAA champion? Like JB says, we have a lot of work to do.
- We are famous for playing a great zone defense but we again proved that we don’t know how to attack one. I continue to maintain that CJ Fair is the guy we need at the top of the key, not Jerami Grant. Grant hit that one 15 footer but CJ is much better from that range. When we first saw him making an impact a couple of years ago, it was from the top of then key. People were comparing him to Josh Pace with his ability to slip through the defense from that spot for floaters that always seemed to go in. Now we have him putting up jump shots from the side and Grant up top and it’s not working very well.
- Cooney was 2 for 12, all three pointers. Yes, you are going to have nights like that. But he has the skills to drive to the basket when his shot is not working. And he should certainly be capable of a pull-up jumper. He actually got a lot of open shots in the second half but he rushed them. What sometimes happens when you are closely guarded is that when you get open shots, you tend to hurry them even when you dot’ have to and I think that happened to Trevor today. I just hope there is no carry-over.
- Baye Keita, after a couple of productive games, slipped back into his “I’m not really here” mode. He missed his only two shots. He did manage a couple of rebounds, (I don’t remember them), and let some alley-oops go past him for scores. It was his third scoreless game. He has two more in which he’s scored one point, (no field goals), and six other games in which he scored 2 points, (and one of those was on free throws). “But we can’t expect Keita to score a lot for us.” No we can’t.
- With Keita we are going 4 on 5 offensively, (and sometimes defensively). When Gbinije is in there, it’s 3 on 5. Cooney had a lousy shooting game but the minute he left it, Miami stopped guarding G-man and went after everyone else and we had no offense at all. JB had to pull him back out after 4 minutes. What happened to this guy?
Sure, it’s against high school kids. But the basket is still 10 feet tall. And if the other team isn’t guarding him, shouldn’t he have been able to do some of these things?
- We only played 7 guys and only 5 of them scored. My Three Sons had their shots but they didn’t take enough advantage of them. And putting Grant into the starting line-up means that our leading reserves, Keita and Gbinije, are not offensive guys. Thus in this game, our bench scoring was zero.
- We nearly lost this game in the Dome. Our next opponent is a team that beat this team. And we’ll be playing in their place, the first of 9 ACC road games where we will be playing, not in the big city arenas we are used to in the Big East but on-campus sites with the opponents fans and students breathing down our guy’s necks.
- In that interview, Larranaga said that they’d lost their top 7 scorers from last year: 5 were seniors, one jumped to the pros early and another was injured. Can you imagine what last year’s Miami team would have done to us today? And we see ourselves as a #2 team nationally, a potential NCAA champion? Like JB says, we have a lot of work to do.
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