SWC75
Bored Historian
- Joined
- Aug 26, 2011
- Messages
- 32,600
- Like
- 62,860
Jim Boeheim’s radio show is on Thursdays from 7-8 or 9PM on ESPN Radio in Syracuse, which is AM1200 or FM 97.7 on the dial. The show originates from Carrabba's Italian Grill in Fayetteville. The first hour, hosted by Matt Park, the Voice of the Orange, is on their general network. The second hour, which begins with the conference season, is hosted by Gomez, a local radio personality.
This year’s schedule: Tuesday, November 12, 7:00 pm, Tuesday, November 19, 7:00 pm, Thursday, December 5, 7:00 pm, Thursday, December 12, 7:00 pm, Thursday, December 19, 7:00 pm, Thursday, December 26, 7:00 pm, Thursday, January 2, 7:00 pm, Thursday, January 9, 7:00 pm, Thursday, January 16, 7:00 pm, Thursday, January 23, 7:00 pm, Thursday, January 30, 7:00 pm, Thursday, February 6, 7:00 pm, Thursday, February 13, 7:00 pm, Thursday, February 20, 7:00 pm, Thursday, February 27, 7:00 pm,
Thursday, March 5, 7:00 pm.
You can call into the show locally at 315-424-8599 or nationally at 1-888-746-2873. For Gomez’s portion, use 315-424-8599. Or you can submit questions from this page:
Submit a Question! - Syracuse University Athletics
Or on Twitter at mattpark1 or “askBoeheim”.
The show can be heard in Syracuse on FM 99.5. It’s sometime simulcast on AM 1200 or FM 97.7. You can also get it on: TuneIn | Free Internet Radio | NFL, Sports, Podcasts, Music & News
I will be posting my rough transcript the night of the broadcast focusing on my questions, the team and their last and next games and then a second post the next day on other things that were discussed.
MY QUESTIONS/COMMENTS
First Hour:
“Coach, I’d just like to pay tribute to the accomplishment of securing our 50th straight winning season. That’s a special achievement because that’s the longest streak in the country and the second longest in history, (UCLA 54 from 1949-2002). It unites all the coaches, players and fans who have contributed to the program over the last half century in one achievement. All the teams have been part of one team: Syracuse and there’s a real sense of it being a family of players that continue to bleed Orange. It’s gotten us through 50 Central New York winters and put this community on the map nationally.
I still have the little pamphlets that passed for SU’s Media Guide at the beginning of the streak. You and Bill Vesp were Roy Danforth’s assistants. Coach Vesp coached the freshman team to a 17-1 record, led by our future police chief, Dennis DuVal. You had coached the freshmen the year before and now were assigned to be the lead recruiter. This was the “Roy’s Runts + One team: our center, Bill Smith was 6-11. Point guard Tommy Green was 5-11. Shooting guard Greg “Kid” Kohls was 6-1. So was forward Mark Wadach, an amazing rebounder for his size. The other forward was Mike Lee, 6-3, who is less remembered than his younger brother Jimmy because of Jim’s 1975 shot against North Carolina but was more of an all-around player and one of the most under-rated players in SU history. I also remember Chuck Wichman, who make a spectacular lay-up to beat Niagara and send us to the NIT, a much more prestigious tournament then than now, (it was won by 13th ranked North Carolina with Charlie Scott, a team that went 26-6). Chuck did the same thing to a highly ranked Fordham the next year.
They were the ones who got it started and thanks to Elijah, Buddy, Marek, Joe, Bourama and the rest, it’s still going on today.“
Second Hour:
“Coach, I know you are focused on Miami but it’s the last show of the season and this is my last question so I’ll ask about next year. You figure to have 13 recruited scholarship players with varying skill sets on the roster next year. You said earlier that this is being done to protect the program against defections and injuries. You’ve also said that you still want to have a rotation of your best guys for continuity and so that when other coaches use their bench, you can match your best players against less than their best. I look at what Leonard Hamilton has done at Florida State. He seems to use the whole roster with little drop off. It helps him deal with foul trouble, fatigue and injury. It might also help with recruiting. How does he make it work as well as it does at Florida State and could such a system work here?”
COACH BOEHEIM
(I have, in some instances, put together statements from different parts of the broadcast on the same subject. The quotes may not be verbatim –they are from my scribbled notes. I have not knowingly changed the meaning. In recent years they have started out doing one hour shows and then shifted to two hour shows in January. When they do two hour shows. I might do two posts: one on the night of the broadcast on the issues directly relating to the team on the other the next days on other things that were talked about.)
PART ONE
Matt Park: “How are things coach?” Jim Boeheim: “Things are fine. We are ready to go south.” (Me: “I thought we already did that, coach”) “We aren’t too sad going on the road. We’re better there… Guys can get tight at home.” (‘Tight?”)
About the Boston College game: “They were missing three guys but lost to Notre Dame by 1 without two of them. We got off to a sloppy start. We actually did a good job on the three point line. They were 11 out of 34 when we sent the reserves in and 8 of 9 the last three minutes.” He would reference this several times so I looked it up. The subs came in at the 5:13 mark and BC made 7 threes in a row after that, then finally missed one with 8 seconds left. The score went from 72-50 to 84-71, so we were out-scored 12-21 in that stretch. BC was 19 for 42 from the arc for the game so they were 12 for 34 before that, which is 35.3%. JB also pointed out that they got to the line only 10 times because they were just shooting from outside and that was big factor, too, (as was the fact that they, incredibly, only made 2 of them). “In college basketball, you can’t just let them shoot it. You have to know the defense to determine who is at fault. On some of them the center has to cover the corner. On some the forwards have to go out. Each of four guys probably had two open threes they gave up. A couple of them were crazy long. But they knew they were going to lose. When you feel no pressure, that’s when you make shots.”
Jim said that Buddy ‘s ankle was still sore and that he was short on his last 4 shots “or he would really have had a big night. …Bourama made the Pitt game easy and took over in the second half against Boston College.
“We are closer to having 4-5 guys playing well, which would make us tough to beat. We are not a great team but a really good road team. We should have beaten Clemson and could have beaten Florida State. We’ve beaten three teams on the road after losing to them in Syracuse. We were in a bleak situation when we were 8-7 with some tough games ahead.”
I called in and did my spiel about the 50 year streak of winning seasons. JB: “We’ve had great fans – fans like you who come to the games and support the team. There are always critics but they normally don’t come to the games. Bill Guthridge who replaced Dean Smith for a couple of years at North Carolina was asked what made the program so successful. The #1 thing he said, was the fans. They are the basis for any winning program. Connecticut was mediocre before Jim Calhoun but they were already selling out their arena. Tom Brady and Jimmy Fallon are not easily impressed but they were by the fans at the Dome. We’ve got the 70 top attendance games in history”. (On campus games, of course.) “I thought when we moved our games these that we might get 15,000. We’d been getting 9,000 at Manley so that would have been good. We got that the first year. “
“Everybody talks about money. It’s important to football because they need facilities. We have as good a facility as there is in basketball and it doesn’t cost a lot. Providence built a 42 million dollar facility and it isn’t better than ours, which cost $20 million.”
“In football you have to realize that there aren’t a lot of football players in the north. Florida had 200 top players and another 200 that are pretty good. Upstate New York has 2-3 top players and maybe 10 more that are OK. In basketball you can get a couple of real good players and some good supporting players and you have a good team.“ True but that means that there are a lot more good teams, which makes sustaining success harder even if achieving it might be easier.
“Every great program has an off season. North Carolina has four McDonald’s All-Americans It can happen to anybody.“
“We’ve had a lot of good players. There’s been some close calls. One year we were 14-13 going into a game at Connecticut. We played a great game and won and wound up with 17-18 wins. That was probably our worst season.” I was unable to find the year he’s talking about. It would require a mediocre record with a late season victory at Connecticut. The 1982 team was 13-8 when they won 78-71 and finished 16-13. The 1993 team was 12-5, won 60-57 and wound up 20-9. The 1997 team was 1107, won 65-53 and wound up 19-13. The 1999 team, (the one I thought he meant), was 15-6, won 59-42 and wound up 21-12. The 2002 team that wound up 23-13 didn’t play Connecticut in the by-then-bloated Big East. the 2006 and 2007 teams lost at Connecticut and the 2008 team didn’t play there. Our next mediocre team was in the ACC. We’ve played Connecticut since then but always early in the season. When you’ve been coaching for 44 years…
Matt said that “Nobody’s holding a parade over the streak. But, as Steve said, it does have a unifying effect on the program. Al the guys who come back for events like the weekend’s program are guys who have never seen a losing seasons.” JB: “We’ve had to win on the road to get the winning season this year. We’ve lost some that we could have won but we’ve also won some that we could have lost. We’ve had a high number of Sweet 16’s. (21 in the 50 years, 19 in the JB era). We’ve been to 5 Final Fours. That’s a pretty good number.” (And the actual number, 6, is even better – Jim’s been to 5 as a head coach.) “Consistency in winning games is what we wanted to do.” Nobody does it better…
“This was always going to be a tough year. We lost 4 guys. We struggled early because we were still learning. We’re still trying to get better. The players are always in early and stay late. It’s everybody. Not just 2-3 guys.” Matt said that we are playing the best basketball of the year, having won 3 of 4, only losing to UNC who has won 3 in a row. JB: “If you could pick your next opponent, they are the last team we’d want to play. I would not be surprised if they beat Duke by 11-12 points. That would give them and bye and then I wouldn’t put it past them to win the ACC tournament. Florida State could be tough for them due to the pressure.
Josh in Boulder called to ask about Marek Dolezaj’s improvement. “Who is teaching him his moves?” JB: “His problem is that he has trouble with physical teams. Also they are now playing him for drives. He’s starting to make mid-range jumpers and threes in practice now. If you aren’t making shots in practice I won’t let you shoot in games. Early on I let Quincy Guerrier take them because he was making them in practice. When he got to 3 of 25, I made him stop. Marek will be working on it all summer. He’s also going to try to gain weight. He made 37% of his threes last year.” (11 for 29: this year he’s 1 for 6. But I don’t want him lunching threes anyway. I want him in the middle of the defense, hitting from the high post.) “He can’t spin when the other team is helping on defense. When the help comes up he can hit guards for open threes. He’s got to get better at the shooting part to be a weapon.” Matt said that he loves Marek’s one man fast breaks. JB: “They are so afraid of the shooters he gets past the forwards on the break. The best thing about the shooters is that they spread the court whether they are making shots or not. We’re not making a lot of threes but coaches have to respect it and thanks to our drives we are getting to the line more.
We’ll be the 5th seed in the ACCT if we can beat Miami. “Normally that would put us into the NCAA tournament. But we had a bad non-conference schedule, (meaning a poor non-conference record). With a decent one, we’d be in. We’ll have to prepare for Chris Lykes being available, (he is having his nose x-rayed and may have to wear a mask as Brycen Goodine did). They will be dangerous at home. It’s this league- all the games will be tough games.
Gomez said this was the end of season 21 or 22 of these shows – he wasn’t sure. Jim: “Who’s counting? When you are going all the time with 2 games a week, it goes by quickly. So does life.”
“The fans have been great. We haven’t played as well at home as we’d like. Some teams have shot it well here and not as well when we are on the road. The Duke and north Carolina games were fun to watch, although I think some fans might like to see a bad game that we won.”
He returned to the subject of what we lost from last year. “Tyus and Oshae were good defenders. Paschal was 7-2. Not many big guys had a good game against him. He had 18 points and 16 rebounds at Duke and that really made a difference.” (Actually he had 10 points and 18 rebounds at Duke. Bourama had 18/16 at Pitt two years ago.) We are a better offensive team this year but a worse defensive team. We are second in the league in points scored and 7th in defense, a little lower than normal. Replacing four guys is hard. We were picked for 8th in the conference. The worse we can do is a tie for 5th. The non-conference schedule was tougher than we thought. When we were 8-7 the nay sayers were predicting a
losing season. “
Gomez asked how can BC hit 19 threes and lose by 13. Jim went back over the three point numbers after the substitutions. “11 of 33 is a good number and so is 10 foul shots. We stopped really working at it and left players open. They made a couple of long ones. We went from pretty good defense to horrible. We made our free throws and they never got to within 11. It was not fun to watch.”
I called in my question about using our whole roster the way Leonard Hamilton does at Florida State. JB: “They are completely different programs. They play 9-10 but 2-3 guys play a lot. They have a simple fundamental system. I watched Villanova play and they had two guys play two minutes and one guy who played six minutes. Their starters average 38 minutes. That’s normal. Kansas does it the same way. In a perfect world you’ve got a good back-up center, a forward and a guard. 7-8-9 guys is ideal. Jesse wasn’t quite ready. Jalen would have helped us. ..I expect 2-3 guys to leave. Elijah is probably leaning toward it. Somebody who isn’t playing a lot might transfer. The new transfer rule may be in effect by then. We are still looking at high school players and grad transfers. We have to protect the program. There will be lots of movement and we’ll have to be flexible. We’ll be recruiting al spring and summer. This is the transfer era. 800 guys will be transferring.”
I asked if Jim was saying that we couldn’t be like Florida State because our system was more complicated than theirs and so we couldn’t have 9-10 guys learn it equally well. He wasn’t quite ready to say that. “We’ve always recruited based on giving guys a lot of minutes.” (As opposed to giving a lot of guys minutes.) “That’s why they come here. When we had Derrick Coleman and Bill Owens we had a guy named Keith Hughes who went on play for Rutgers. We could have played him 20 minutes and had Derrick and Billy play 30 minutes but then they would have been mad. If you are the best guy, you will play. We are never going to be Florida State. Leonard Hamilton always has 2-3 key guys in there. Most teams play 7-8-9 guys and the 9th guy plays maybe 2 minutes. That’s the way college basketball is.”
They ended with Tom, (not Steve) from North Syracuse, who congratulated Jim on “44 non-losing seasons. I’m 100% for you but not 100% behind all your callers. You’ve got nothing to lose so go all out the rest of the year.”
(I will do Part Two tomorrow. )
This year’s schedule: Tuesday, November 12, 7:00 pm, Tuesday, November 19, 7:00 pm, Thursday, December 5, 7:00 pm, Thursday, December 12, 7:00 pm, Thursday, December 19, 7:00 pm, Thursday, December 26, 7:00 pm, Thursday, January 2, 7:00 pm, Thursday, January 9, 7:00 pm, Thursday, January 16, 7:00 pm, Thursday, January 23, 7:00 pm, Thursday, January 30, 7:00 pm, Thursday, February 6, 7:00 pm, Thursday, February 13, 7:00 pm, Thursday, February 20, 7:00 pm, Thursday, February 27, 7:00 pm,
Thursday, March 5, 7:00 pm.
You can call into the show locally at 315-424-8599 or nationally at 1-888-746-2873. For Gomez’s portion, use 315-424-8599. Or you can submit questions from this page:
Submit a Question! - Syracuse University Athletics
Or on Twitter at mattpark1 or “askBoeheim”.
The show can be heard in Syracuse on FM 99.5. It’s sometime simulcast on AM 1200 or FM 97.7. You can also get it on: TuneIn | Free Internet Radio | NFL, Sports, Podcasts, Music & News
I will be posting my rough transcript the night of the broadcast focusing on my questions, the team and their last and next games and then a second post the next day on other things that were discussed.
MY QUESTIONS/COMMENTS
First Hour:
“Coach, I’d just like to pay tribute to the accomplishment of securing our 50th straight winning season. That’s a special achievement because that’s the longest streak in the country and the second longest in history, (UCLA 54 from 1949-2002). It unites all the coaches, players and fans who have contributed to the program over the last half century in one achievement. All the teams have been part of one team: Syracuse and there’s a real sense of it being a family of players that continue to bleed Orange. It’s gotten us through 50 Central New York winters and put this community on the map nationally.
I still have the little pamphlets that passed for SU’s Media Guide at the beginning of the streak. You and Bill Vesp were Roy Danforth’s assistants. Coach Vesp coached the freshman team to a 17-1 record, led by our future police chief, Dennis DuVal. You had coached the freshmen the year before and now were assigned to be the lead recruiter. This was the “Roy’s Runts + One team: our center, Bill Smith was 6-11. Point guard Tommy Green was 5-11. Shooting guard Greg “Kid” Kohls was 6-1. So was forward Mark Wadach, an amazing rebounder for his size. The other forward was Mike Lee, 6-3, who is less remembered than his younger brother Jimmy because of Jim’s 1975 shot against North Carolina but was more of an all-around player and one of the most under-rated players in SU history. I also remember Chuck Wichman, who make a spectacular lay-up to beat Niagara and send us to the NIT, a much more prestigious tournament then than now, (it was won by 13th ranked North Carolina with Charlie Scott, a team that went 26-6). Chuck did the same thing to a highly ranked Fordham the next year.
They were the ones who got it started and thanks to Elijah, Buddy, Marek, Joe, Bourama and the rest, it’s still going on today.“
Second Hour:
“Coach, I know you are focused on Miami but it’s the last show of the season and this is my last question so I’ll ask about next year. You figure to have 13 recruited scholarship players with varying skill sets on the roster next year. You said earlier that this is being done to protect the program against defections and injuries. You’ve also said that you still want to have a rotation of your best guys for continuity and so that when other coaches use their bench, you can match your best players against less than their best. I look at what Leonard Hamilton has done at Florida State. He seems to use the whole roster with little drop off. It helps him deal with foul trouble, fatigue and injury. It might also help with recruiting. How does he make it work as well as it does at Florida State and could such a system work here?”
COACH BOEHEIM
(I have, in some instances, put together statements from different parts of the broadcast on the same subject. The quotes may not be verbatim –they are from my scribbled notes. I have not knowingly changed the meaning. In recent years they have started out doing one hour shows and then shifted to two hour shows in January. When they do two hour shows. I might do two posts: one on the night of the broadcast on the issues directly relating to the team on the other the next days on other things that were talked about.)
PART ONE
Matt Park: “How are things coach?” Jim Boeheim: “Things are fine. We are ready to go south.” (Me: “I thought we already did that, coach”) “We aren’t too sad going on the road. We’re better there… Guys can get tight at home.” (‘Tight?”)
About the Boston College game: “They were missing three guys but lost to Notre Dame by 1 without two of them. We got off to a sloppy start. We actually did a good job on the three point line. They were 11 out of 34 when we sent the reserves in and 8 of 9 the last three minutes.” He would reference this several times so I looked it up. The subs came in at the 5:13 mark and BC made 7 threes in a row after that, then finally missed one with 8 seconds left. The score went from 72-50 to 84-71, so we were out-scored 12-21 in that stretch. BC was 19 for 42 from the arc for the game so they were 12 for 34 before that, which is 35.3%. JB also pointed out that they got to the line only 10 times because they were just shooting from outside and that was big factor, too, (as was the fact that they, incredibly, only made 2 of them). “In college basketball, you can’t just let them shoot it. You have to know the defense to determine who is at fault. On some of them the center has to cover the corner. On some the forwards have to go out. Each of four guys probably had two open threes they gave up. A couple of them were crazy long. But they knew they were going to lose. When you feel no pressure, that’s when you make shots.”
Jim said that Buddy ‘s ankle was still sore and that he was short on his last 4 shots “or he would really have had a big night. …Bourama made the Pitt game easy and took over in the second half against Boston College.
“We are closer to having 4-5 guys playing well, which would make us tough to beat. We are not a great team but a really good road team. We should have beaten Clemson and could have beaten Florida State. We’ve beaten three teams on the road after losing to them in Syracuse. We were in a bleak situation when we were 8-7 with some tough games ahead.”
I called in and did my spiel about the 50 year streak of winning seasons. JB: “We’ve had great fans – fans like you who come to the games and support the team. There are always critics but they normally don’t come to the games. Bill Guthridge who replaced Dean Smith for a couple of years at North Carolina was asked what made the program so successful. The #1 thing he said, was the fans. They are the basis for any winning program. Connecticut was mediocre before Jim Calhoun but they were already selling out their arena. Tom Brady and Jimmy Fallon are not easily impressed but they were by the fans at the Dome. We’ve got the 70 top attendance games in history”. (On campus games, of course.) “I thought when we moved our games these that we might get 15,000. We’d been getting 9,000 at Manley so that would have been good. We got that the first year. “
“Everybody talks about money. It’s important to football because they need facilities. We have as good a facility as there is in basketball and it doesn’t cost a lot. Providence built a 42 million dollar facility and it isn’t better than ours, which cost $20 million.”
“In football you have to realize that there aren’t a lot of football players in the north. Florida had 200 top players and another 200 that are pretty good. Upstate New York has 2-3 top players and maybe 10 more that are OK. In basketball you can get a couple of real good players and some good supporting players and you have a good team.“ True but that means that there are a lot more good teams, which makes sustaining success harder even if achieving it might be easier.
“Every great program has an off season. North Carolina has four McDonald’s All-Americans It can happen to anybody.“
“We’ve had a lot of good players. There’s been some close calls. One year we were 14-13 going into a game at Connecticut. We played a great game and won and wound up with 17-18 wins. That was probably our worst season.” I was unable to find the year he’s talking about. It would require a mediocre record with a late season victory at Connecticut. The 1982 team was 13-8 when they won 78-71 and finished 16-13. The 1993 team was 12-5, won 60-57 and wound up 20-9. The 1997 team was 1107, won 65-53 and wound up 19-13. The 1999 team, (the one I thought he meant), was 15-6, won 59-42 and wound up 21-12. The 2002 team that wound up 23-13 didn’t play Connecticut in the by-then-bloated Big East. the 2006 and 2007 teams lost at Connecticut and the 2008 team didn’t play there. Our next mediocre team was in the ACC. We’ve played Connecticut since then but always early in the season. When you’ve been coaching for 44 years…
Matt said that “Nobody’s holding a parade over the streak. But, as Steve said, it does have a unifying effect on the program. Al the guys who come back for events like the weekend’s program are guys who have never seen a losing seasons.” JB: “We’ve had to win on the road to get the winning season this year. We’ve lost some that we could have won but we’ve also won some that we could have lost. We’ve had a high number of Sweet 16’s. (21 in the 50 years, 19 in the JB era). We’ve been to 5 Final Fours. That’s a pretty good number.” (And the actual number, 6, is even better – Jim’s been to 5 as a head coach.) “Consistency in winning games is what we wanted to do.” Nobody does it better…
“This was always going to be a tough year. We lost 4 guys. We struggled early because we were still learning. We’re still trying to get better. The players are always in early and stay late. It’s everybody. Not just 2-3 guys.” Matt said that we are playing the best basketball of the year, having won 3 of 4, only losing to UNC who has won 3 in a row. JB: “If you could pick your next opponent, they are the last team we’d want to play. I would not be surprised if they beat Duke by 11-12 points. That would give them and bye and then I wouldn’t put it past them to win the ACC tournament. Florida State could be tough for them due to the pressure.
Josh in Boulder called to ask about Marek Dolezaj’s improvement. “Who is teaching him his moves?” JB: “His problem is that he has trouble with physical teams. Also they are now playing him for drives. He’s starting to make mid-range jumpers and threes in practice now. If you aren’t making shots in practice I won’t let you shoot in games. Early on I let Quincy Guerrier take them because he was making them in practice. When he got to 3 of 25, I made him stop. Marek will be working on it all summer. He’s also going to try to gain weight. He made 37% of his threes last year.” (11 for 29: this year he’s 1 for 6. But I don’t want him lunching threes anyway. I want him in the middle of the defense, hitting from the high post.) “He can’t spin when the other team is helping on defense. When the help comes up he can hit guards for open threes. He’s got to get better at the shooting part to be a weapon.” Matt said that he loves Marek’s one man fast breaks. JB: “They are so afraid of the shooters he gets past the forwards on the break. The best thing about the shooters is that they spread the court whether they are making shots or not. We’re not making a lot of threes but coaches have to respect it and thanks to our drives we are getting to the line more.
We’ll be the 5th seed in the ACCT if we can beat Miami. “Normally that would put us into the NCAA tournament. But we had a bad non-conference schedule, (meaning a poor non-conference record). With a decent one, we’d be in. We’ll have to prepare for Chris Lykes being available, (he is having his nose x-rayed and may have to wear a mask as Brycen Goodine did). They will be dangerous at home. It’s this league- all the games will be tough games.
Gomez said this was the end of season 21 or 22 of these shows – he wasn’t sure. Jim: “Who’s counting? When you are going all the time with 2 games a week, it goes by quickly. So does life.”
“The fans have been great. We haven’t played as well at home as we’d like. Some teams have shot it well here and not as well when we are on the road. The Duke and north Carolina games were fun to watch, although I think some fans might like to see a bad game that we won.”
He returned to the subject of what we lost from last year. “Tyus and Oshae were good defenders. Paschal was 7-2. Not many big guys had a good game against him. He had 18 points and 16 rebounds at Duke and that really made a difference.” (Actually he had 10 points and 18 rebounds at Duke. Bourama had 18/16 at Pitt two years ago.) We are a better offensive team this year but a worse defensive team. We are second in the league in points scored and 7th in defense, a little lower than normal. Replacing four guys is hard. We were picked for 8th in the conference. The worse we can do is a tie for 5th. The non-conference schedule was tougher than we thought. When we were 8-7 the nay sayers were predicting a
losing season. “
Gomez asked how can BC hit 19 threes and lose by 13. Jim went back over the three point numbers after the substitutions. “11 of 33 is a good number and so is 10 foul shots. We stopped really working at it and left players open. They made a couple of long ones. We went from pretty good defense to horrible. We made our free throws and they never got to within 11. It was not fun to watch.”
I called in my question about using our whole roster the way Leonard Hamilton does at Florida State. JB: “They are completely different programs. They play 9-10 but 2-3 guys play a lot. They have a simple fundamental system. I watched Villanova play and they had two guys play two minutes and one guy who played six minutes. Their starters average 38 minutes. That’s normal. Kansas does it the same way. In a perfect world you’ve got a good back-up center, a forward and a guard. 7-8-9 guys is ideal. Jesse wasn’t quite ready. Jalen would have helped us. ..I expect 2-3 guys to leave. Elijah is probably leaning toward it. Somebody who isn’t playing a lot might transfer. The new transfer rule may be in effect by then. We are still looking at high school players and grad transfers. We have to protect the program. There will be lots of movement and we’ll have to be flexible. We’ll be recruiting al spring and summer. This is the transfer era. 800 guys will be transferring.”
I asked if Jim was saying that we couldn’t be like Florida State because our system was more complicated than theirs and so we couldn’t have 9-10 guys learn it equally well. He wasn’t quite ready to say that. “We’ve always recruited based on giving guys a lot of minutes.” (As opposed to giving a lot of guys minutes.) “That’s why they come here. When we had Derrick Coleman and Bill Owens we had a guy named Keith Hughes who went on play for Rutgers. We could have played him 20 minutes and had Derrick and Billy play 30 minutes but then they would have been mad. If you are the best guy, you will play. We are never going to be Florida State. Leonard Hamilton always has 2-3 key guys in there. Most teams play 7-8-9 guys and the 9th guy plays maybe 2 minutes. That’s the way college basketball is.”
They ended with Tom, (not Steve) from North Syracuse, who congratulated Jim on “44 non-losing seasons. I’m 100% for you but not 100% behind all your callers. You’ve got nothing to lose so go all out the rest of the year.”
(I will do Part Two tomorrow. )
