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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.
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, this is the last show of the season so while you are focused on Clemson, I’m going to ask about the future. You’ve got 11 scholarship players on this team. Two of them are seniors and one could possibly get a medical redshirt for another season. You’ve got commitments from four guys and I’ve read that you’d still like to recruit another. That’s potentially 15 scholarship players that could be on next year’s team. That’s over the NCAA limit and more than the 10-11 scholarship players you normally have. How many players who could come back do you expect to lose? “
Second Hour:
“Coach, this past week was the 10th anniversary of the 6 overtime game. In the Big East years we won 50 games in the Big East tournament, lost 28, played in the Big East title game 15 times and won it 5 times. Since we joined the ACC, we’ve won 1 game, lost 4 and never appeared in the finals. Is there something about the ACC tournament that makes it more difficult for us than the Big East Tournament was? “
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 will 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.)
JB: “I’ve never seen shooting like that. Six of their threes were 5-6 feet behind the line and off balance…We’ve had three tough games and a good win at Wake, who almost beat duke in their next game. We’ve improved as a team, although we haven’t been as efficient as we’d like to be….we’ve had stretches of good defense with 2-3 really bad games. It’s a tough league. The top 9 teams are really good. Louisville is good. Clemson is good. NC State has played well in some games. Clemson started out the way we are finishing. They started at Duke then against us in the Dome, the hosted Virginia and Georgia Tech, then went on the road vs. Florida State and NC State.” They began 1-5 and are 7-4 since.”
I called in my first question. “Paschal is not eligible for a medical redshirt. I don’t know where people got that impression. You can’t transfer and sit out a year and get a medical redshirt….Tyus planned to go from the beginning. (With Frank Howard being a senior), that gets us down to 8. With the four commits that gets us to 12 players and we still have one scholarship left. We are looking for somebody with size…The likelihood of everybody coming back is small.” If they all do except Battle, that means that Jim is going to have a full complement of 13 recruited scholarship players, (which leaves none for the walk-ons). I do not recall the last time that happened.
Josh in boulder wanted to know how Joe Girard “looks for next year”. JB: “it’s hard to project. People didn’t think Oshae would be ready and he had a great freshman year. Tyus was ready immediately. Joe took 35-40 shots of game in the league he is in. In college he’ll get around 10 at most. That makes it harder to shoot your way out of it if you have a bad start.“ Jim then went over the new class. “Bycen Goodine is really good. Quincy Guerrier will be a really good player. John Bol is a pretty good big guy. (Is his first name “John Bol and his last name Ajak or is his first name John and his last name Bol Ajak? When we go to bed after each game do we say “Good Night John Bol?”) And we’re still looking for a big guy with offensive potential.”
The team will be playing 3-4 games in Italy this summer, their first foreign trip since the Canadian games in 2013. “This will be important to this year’s team. It helped us when Tyler Ennis and Jerami Grant were freshmen. We won’t know what’s going to do what until we get them here. We will have a very interesting team next year.” Maybe that’s a better thing than saying that we will have a very good team next year. We’re less likely to be disappointed if we are just expecting them to be interesting.
“We’ve had hard games, some hard times. It keeps you focused. We didn’t have frank early and then he wasn’t right. We lost two games we needed. We won on the road. We’re capable of playing at a little higher level over the next two weeks. Winning ten games would have made me very happy after losing four non-conference games. We lead the league in fewest turnovers. Our struggles at the line have been discouraging after being so good last year. Our rebounding has not been too bad. We are 1-2 off per game. The North Carolina game throws the stats off because we were down 20. I expected to shoot the ball a lot better, especially against Oregon and Georgia Tech when we faced a zone. We’re not a great team but that doesn’t mean we can’t beat pretty good teams….We lost to ACC teams in our last two NCAA tournaments.”
Tom in Syracuse called in, saying he’s followed the team since Fred Lewis was coaching in Archbold Gymnasium. (Actually Fred never coached a game in Archbold Gym- his first year was the year Manley Field House opened. ) Tom: “I like the kids- they’ve got a lot of heart.” He felt our defense in the first half against Virginia was ”the best defense zone I’ve seen”, (even though we gave up 8 three pointers). He suggested to Jim that Jalen Carey and Robert Braswell could play 5 minutes a game and our starters would be more well-rested. JB: “It’s hard to give them that five minutes in a close game when 5 minutes can knock you out of games.”
They talked about Duke and North Carolina. Matt noted that UNC Coach Roy Williams was dealing with vertigo while Duke Coach Mike Krzyzewski was dealing with the loss of Zion Williamson. Jim felt that Coach K would be “extra cautious” with Williamson and that he probably won’t play until the ACC tournament. “North Carolina is playing at a very high level and it will be hard to beat them without Williamson, who is a force of nature. The ACC tournament will be more interesting. There will be three national championship contenders in Duke, North Carolina and Virginia and Florida State was an Elite 8 team last year and they are better this year… I don’t think Kentucky, Tennessee or Gonzaga have the firepower to deal with Duke, North Carolina and Virginia. Virginia has t overcome the fact that they haven’t done it yet. They’ve won the ACC 4 times.” (They won the unofficial regular season title in 2014, 2015 and 2018 and the tournament in 2014 and 2018.) I remember when Connecticut had a reputation for great regular seasons and NCAA failures. Then they won 4 national championships.
The SU women are trying to nail down a 4 seed for their national tournament. If they can get it, they will host two games in the Carrier Dome. “They showed when they played Oregon, Minnesota and Florida State that they can beat a lot of people if the three pointers are falling. Notre Dame Connecticut, Louisville and Baylor have separated themselves.”
They wondered who would be on the ACC all-conference team. Virginia’s DeAndre Hunter, Kyle Guy and Ty Jerome, Duke’s R. J. Barrett and Zion Williamson, BC’s Ky Bowman and our own Tyus Battle. “it’s going to be almost impossible to pick five guys.”
We are going to win the attendance title from Kentucky. “The fans have been great, 24,000 per game for the conference games. We haven’t played as well as the fans have deserved. We’ve played better on the road and not as well as usual at home. “
Clemson is 2-13 in one possession games over the last 3 years, one of which we won on Tyus Battle’s shot when he was a freshman. Remembering our 61-53 win over them in the Dome two months ago, “ We did a good job on Marcus Reed”.
What will be Tyus’ legacy? “He’s played great for us – very consistent. He made the big plays to get us into the tournament last year and to get us to the Sweet 16. He was great against Texas Christian and Michigan State. He’s taken 19 credits per semester and will almost have enough to graduate and he can make that up in the summer. “
How is Marek Dolezaj, who went down hard in the Virginia game, (but came back to play later in that game)? “He’s had normal practices. We’ve got tough guys who bounce back. These guys are doing everything they can to get there. it’s a tough league.“
NC State is 116th in RPI and 35th in the NET ratings. Go figure.
DI Men's Basketball Rankings - NCAA Men's Basketball NET Rankings | NCAA.com
NCAA College Basketball RPI Rankings (updated today)
Gomez came on for the second hour. he said that this was the 22nd year of this show, (which means they have been doing it since 1997-98). He said it’s been a “quick season”. JB didn’t think so and who can blame him? “We keep starting earlier and earlier. We begin in September. The exhibition games are in October. It’s been 4 months with a lot of basketball left to be played….we started slow without Frank. We played some really good basketball games and 2-3 really bad ones. Ohio State was a really big win and Duke was a monster one. We won at Notre Dame, Pittsburgh, Boston College and Wake Forest. Sometimes you lose one of those but we didn’t. Our free throw percentage went from 77% to 66% and you don’t think that’s going to happen. Oshae was great in his freshman year but not as good this year. Frank has never regained his ability to get to the basket. Overall our defense has been good, except for a couple of bad games. Our offense has been so erratic. We hit 45% of our threes in some games, 15% in others.”
Gomez quoted Gerry McNamara as saying that when he first watched the Virginia game, we seemed to have many defensive lapses but when he re-watched the game, we had guarded the shooters better than he realized. JB: “they made 5-6 shots you wouldn’t think they could make. We’d still have lost but it would be a 10 point game. Sometimes fans don’t want to give the other team credit. We fouled them on a couple of shots and they still made them….There have been a lot of positives this year and I think we can play well during the tournament season.” Some research established that we will play at 7 or 9PM Wednesday, which surprised JB, who thought it would be Tuesday. Hopefully Jim won’t miss the game because he had the wrong night. I think we need him to be there.
Pat called in and said he hadn’t seen the strategy of having a guard dribble into the high post, where Chukwu couldn’t figure out whether he was supposed to cover him or not. JB: WE want the guard to bump him off of that. We matched up a little more in the second half. People think we can’t change our zone but we change it all the time. The problem is, Jerome can back up and attack before the guards get set. And he has two shooters in the corner.” Pat said he had high expectations for Oshae this year but has been disappointed by his play. “His percentage gets cut in half in the losses….he didn’t win his match-up.” JB: “Jerome is physical and smart. Oshae is not going to have a big game if he doesn’t hit form outside. If he had shot the same percentage as last year he’d be scoring 15-16 points a game.” (He’s scoring 12.5.) “Virginia had two big guys inside plus Hunter. Oshee isn’t taking a lot of shots. Hughes isn’t doing anything off the dribble. Howard isn’t scoring. Marek hasn’t been shooting well and can’t score on the big guys. Who gets shots if not Tyus? Tyus has to score and we aren’t giving him enough help. Oshae has a good grip and a good release. He shoots 400-500 shots in practice. Sometimes when you’re in a slump you can’t quite find a way to get out of it. He doesn’t finish well but he didn’t last year either. He may be a little better this year. He only takes 1-2 three pointers a game. He’s missed his two pointers as well.”
I called in my second question about why we haven’t done as well in the ACC tournament as we had done in the Big East tournament. Jim jumped right on that but not in a defensive posture. “It’s because we don’t have as good players! We’re in a downturn. We’ve struggled for the last 4-5 years. You have to be one of the top 3-4 teams in a conference to win the tournament, normally. We’re not in the Top 8…..we’ve lost three close games.” (we lost by 3 to NC State in 2014, by 1 to Pittsburgh in 2016, by 5 to Miami in 2017 and by 19 to North Carolina last year after beating Wake Forest by 9). “We’ve got to get to the top 2-3 seeds.” I asked how we do that. “Get better players. Develop them better. Coach them better.” I knew it- JB is “Alsacs”!!!!
Gomez asked if he’d ever watched the 6 overtime game in its entirety? He thinks he did it once on ESPN Classic. “The first 30 minutes were not all that good. Very sloppy.”
A caller (I think my scribbling says “Breadon in Syracuse) quoted an anonymous NBA scout as saying “Tyus Battle can score but not a team player.” Firstly, don’t quote anonymous people who criticize Jim’s players. “They are anonymous because if they put their name to it they’d look stupid. I asked him to score. He’s really improved his passing. He is a team guy. We were not a great team last year but he propelled us into the tournament and into the Sweet 16. We aren’t a great team this year….you can say that about a lot of players. Cam Johnson of North Carolina. Cam Reddish of Duke. They are supposed to score. If Tyus had a little bit better shot, he’d be a lock for the NBA.“ I’ve always said that if your primary skill is rebounding, nobody complains when you got after every rebound you can get. If your primary skill is to score, shouldn’t you be expected to do it as often as possible?
Rodney in East Syracuse asked if we will do well in the ACC tournament. “I hope so” said JB.
Amir Hinton of Shaw, a DII team, is leading the division in scoring with 29.4ppg. he may be the first DII player drafted since 2005 when Robert Whaley of Walsh was drafted 51st by the Utah Jazz, for whom he played 23 games. The Walsh coach from 1980-83 was Bob Huggins. Wikipedia: “Huggins directed the Walsh 1982–83 team to a perfect 30–0 regular season mark and an eventual 34–1 mark.”
Gomez was trying to remember who was shorter: Spud Webb or Muggsy Bogues? It’s Muggsy:
Muggsy Bogues Stats | Basketball-Reference.com
Spud Webb Stats | Basketball-Reference.com
Jim marveled at how fast Bogues was. “A really good player.”
Lebron James “has got himself into a really tough situation. Guys are hurt and he needs help.” Gomez said the fans seemed to “undervaluing the moment” when James passed Michael Jordan in all-time scoring. They were booing him when he missed free throws. JB: “he’s lost his touch from the foul line.” Lebron is now fourth in all-time NBA scoring behind Kobe Bryant, Karl Malone and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar:
NBA & ABA Career Leaders and Records for Points | Basketball-Reference.com
JB said he might catch Jabbar in 3-4 more years but “Michael Jordan is the best player I’ve ever seen and it’s not close.”
And, with that, Thursday becomes just another night of the week...
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, this is the last show of the season so while you are focused on Clemson, I’m going to ask about the future. You’ve got 11 scholarship players on this team. Two of them are seniors and one could possibly get a medical redshirt for another season. You’ve got commitments from four guys and I’ve read that you’d still like to recruit another. That’s potentially 15 scholarship players that could be on next year’s team. That’s over the NCAA limit and more than the 10-11 scholarship players you normally have. How many players who could come back do you expect to lose? “
Second Hour:
“Coach, this past week was the 10th anniversary of the 6 overtime game. In the Big East years we won 50 games in the Big East tournament, lost 28, played in the Big East title game 15 times and won it 5 times. Since we joined the ACC, we’ve won 1 game, lost 4 and never appeared in the finals. Is there something about the ACC tournament that makes it more difficult for us than the Big East Tournament was? “
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 will 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.)
JB: “I’ve never seen shooting like that. Six of their threes were 5-6 feet behind the line and off balance…We’ve had three tough games and a good win at Wake, who almost beat duke in their next game. We’ve improved as a team, although we haven’t been as efficient as we’d like to be….we’ve had stretches of good defense with 2-3 really bad games. It’s a tough league. The top 9 teams are really good. Louisville is good. Clemson is good. NC State has played well in some games. Clemson started out the way we are finishing. They started at Duke then against us in the Dome, the hosted Virginia and Georgia Tech, then went on the road vs. Florida State and NC State.” They began 1-5 and are 7-4 since.”
I called in my first question. “Paschal is not eligible for a medical redshirt. I don’t know where people got that impression. You can’t transfer and sit out a year and get a medical redshirt….Tyus planned to go from the beginning. (With Frank Howard being a senior), that gets us down to 8. With the four commits that gets us to 12 players and we still have one scholarship left. We are looking for somebody with size…The likelihood of everybody coming back is small.” If they all do except Battle, that means that Jim is going to have a full complement of 13 recruited scholarship players, (which leaves none for the walk-ons). I do not recall the last time that happened.
Josh in boulder wanted to know how Joe Girard “looks for next year”. JB: “it’s hard to project. People didn’t think Oshae would be ready and he had a great freshman year. Tyus was ready immediately. Joe took 35-40 shots of game in the league he is in. In college he’ll get around 10 at most. That makes it harder to shoot your way out of it if you have a bad start.“ Jim then went over the new class. “Bycen Goodine is really good. Quincy Guerrier will be a really good player. John Bol is a pretty good big guy. (Is his first name “John Bol and his last name Ajak or is his first name John and his last name Bol Ajak? When we go to bed after each game do we say “Good Night John Bol?”) And we’re still looking for a big guy with offensive potential.”
The team will be playing 3-4 games in Italy this summer, their first foreign trip since the Canadian games in 2013. “This will be important to this year’s team. It helped us when Tyler Ennis and Jerami Grant were freshmen. We won’t know what’s going to do what until we get them here. We will have a very interesting team next year.” Maybe that’s a better thing than saying that we will have a very good team next year. We’re less likely to be disappointed if we are just expecting them to be interesting.
“We’ve had hard games, some hard times. It keeps you focused. We didn’t have frank early and then he wasn’t right. We lost two games we needed. We won on the road. We’re capable of playing at a little higher level over the next two weeks. Winning ten games would have made me very happy after losing four non-conference games. We lead the league in fewest turnovers. Our struggles at the line have been discouraging after being so good last year. Our rebounding has not been too bad. We are 1-2 off per game. The North Carolina game throws the stats off because we were down 20. I expected to shoot the ball a lot better, especially against Oregon and Georgia Tech when we faced a zone. We’re not a great team but that doesn’t mean we can’t beat pretty good teams….We lost to ACC teams in our last two NCAA tournaments.”
Tom in Syracuse called in, saying he’s followed the team since Fred Lewis was coaching in Archbold Gymnasium. (Actually Fred never coached a game in Archbold Gym- his first year was the year Manley Field House opened. ) Tom: “I like the kids- they’ve got a lot of heart.” He felt our defense in the first half against Virginia was ”the best defense zone I’ve seen”, (even though we gave up 8 three pointers). He suggested to Jim that Jalen Carey and Robert Braswell could play 5 minutes a game and our starters would be more well-rested. JB: “It’s hard to give them that five minutes in a close game when 5 minutes can knock you out of games.”
They talked about Duke and North Carolina. Matt noted that UNC Coach Roy Williams was dealing with vertigo while Duke Coach Mike Krzyzewski was dealing with the loss of Zion Williamson. Jim felt that Coach K would be “extra cautious” with Williamson and that he probably won’t play until the ACC tournament. “North Carolina is playing at a very high level and it will be hard to beat them without Williamson, who is a force of nature. The ACC tournament will be more interesting. There will be three national championship contenders in Duke, North Carolina and Virginia and Florida State was an Elite 8 team last year and they are better this year… I don’t think Kentucky, Tennessee or Gonzaga have the firepower to deal with Duke, North Carolina and Virginia. Virginia has t overcome the fact that they haven’t done it yet. They’ve won the ACC 4 times.” (They won the unofficial regular season title in 2014, 2015 and 2018 and the tournament in 2014 and 2018.) I remember when Connecticut had a reputation for great regular seasons and NCAA failures. Then they won 4 national championships.
The SU women are trying to nail down a 4 seed for their national tournament. If they can get it, they will host two games in the Carrier Dome. “They showed when they played Oregon, Minnesota and Florida State that they can beat a lot of people if the three pointers are falling. Notre Dame Connecticut, Louisville and Baylor have separated themselves.”
They wondered who would be on the ACC all-conference team. Virginia’s DeAndre Hunter, Kyle Guy and Ty Jerome, Duke’s R. J. Barrett and Zion Williamson, BC’s Ky Bowman and our own Tyus Battle. “it’s going to be almost impossible to pick five guys.”
We are going to win the attendance title from Kentucky. “The fans have been great, 24,000 per game for the conference games. We haven’t played as well as the fans have deserved. We’ve played better on the road and not as well as usual at home. “
Clemson is 2-13 in one possession games over the last 3 years, one of which we won on Tyus Battle’s shot when he was a freshman. Remembering our 61-53 win over them in the Dome two months ago, “ We did a good job on Marcus Reed”.
What will be Tyus’ legacy? “He’s played great for us – very consistent. He made the big plays to get us into the tournament last year and to get us to the Sweet 16. He was great against Texas Christian and Michigan State. He’s taken 19 credits per semester and will almost have enough to graduate and he can make that up in the summer. “
How is Marek Dolezaj, who went down hard in the Virginia game, (but came back to play later in that game)? “He’s had normal practices. We’ve got tough guys who bounce back. These guys are doing everything they can to get there. it’s a tough league.“
NC State is 116th in RPI and 35th in the NET ratings. Go figure.
DI Men's Basketball Rankings - NCAA Men's Basketball NET Rankings | NCAA.com
NCAA College Basketball RPI Rankings (updated today)
Gomez came on for the second hour. he said that this was the 22nd year of this show, (which means they have been doing it since 1997-98). He said it’s been a “quick season”. JB didn’t think so and who can blame him? “We keep starting earlier and earlier. We begin in September. The exhibition games are in October. It’s been 4 months with a lot of basketball left to be played….we started slow without Frank. We played some really good basketball games and 2-3 really bad ones. Ohio State was a really big win and Duke was a monster one. We won at Notre Dame, Pittsburgh, Boston College and Wake Forest. Sometimes you lose one of those but we didn’t. Our free throw percentage went from 77% to 66% and you don’t think that’s going to happen. Oshae was great in his freshman year but not as good this year. Frank has never regained his ability to get to the basket. Overall our defense has been good, except for a couple of bad games. Our offense has been so erratic. We hit 45% of our threes in some games, 15% in others.”
Gomez quoted Gerry McNamara as saying that when he first watched the Virginia game, we seemed to have many defensive lapses but when he re-watched the game, we had guarded the shooters better than he realized. JB: “they made 5-6 shots you wouldn’t think they could make. We’d still have lost but it would be a 10 point game. Sometimes fans don’t want to give the other team credit. We fouled them on a couple of shots and they still made them….There have been a lot of positives this year and I think we can play well during the tournament season.” Some research established that we will play at 7 or 9PM Wednesday, which surprised JB, who thought it would be Tuesday. Hopefully Jim won’t miss the game because he had the wrong night. I think we need him to be there.
Pat called in and said he hadn’t seen the strategy of having a guard dribble into the high post, where Chukwu couldn’t figure out whether he was supposed to cover him or not. JB: WE want the guard to bump him off of that. We matched up a little more in the second half. People think we can’t change our zone but we change it all the time. The problem is, Jerome can back up and attack before the guards get set. And he has two shooters in the corner.” Pat said he had high expectations for Oshae this year but has been disappointed by his play. “His percentage gets cut in half in the losses….he didn’t win his match-up.” JB: “Jerome is physical and smart. Oshae is not going to have a big game if he doesn’t hit form outside. If he had shot the same percentage as last year he’d be scoring 15-16 points a game.” (He’s scoring 12.5.) “Virginia had two big guys inside plus Hunter. Oshee isn’t taking a lot of shots. Hughes isn’t doing anything off the dribble. Howard isn’t scoring. Marek hasn’t been shooting well and can’t score on the big guys. Who gets shots if not Tyus? Tyus has to score and we aren’t giving him enough help. Oshae has a good grip and a good release. He shoots 400-500 shots in practice. Sometimes when you’re in a slump you can’t quite find a way to get out of it. He doesn’t finish well but he didn’t last year either. He may be a little better this year. He only takes 1-2 three pointers a game. He’s missed his two pointers as well.”
I called in my second question about why we haven’t done as well in the ACC tournament as we had done in the Big East tournament. Jim jumped right on that but not in a defensive posture. “It’s because we don’t have as good players! We’re in a downturn. We’ve struggled for the last 4-5 years. You have to be one of the top 3-4 teams in a conference to win the tournament, normally. We’re not in the Top 8…..we’ve lost three close games.” (we lost by 3 to NC State in 2014, by 1 to Pittsburgh in 2016, by 5 to Miami in 2017 and by 19 to North Carolina last year after beating Wake Forest by 9). “We’ve got to get to the top 2-3 seeds.” I asked how we do that. “Get better players. Develop them better. Coach them better.” I knew it- JB is “Alsacs”!!!!
Gomez asked if he’d ever watched the 6 overtime game in its entirety? He thinks he did it once on ESPN Classic. “The first 30 minutes were not all that good. Very sloppy.”
A caller (I think my scribbling says “Breadon in Syracuse) quoted an anonymous NBA scout as saying “Tyus Battle can score but not a team player.” Firstly, don’t quote anonymous people who criticize Jim’s players. “They are anonymous because if they put their name to it they’d look stupid. I asked him to score. He’s really improved his passing. He is a team guy. We were not a great team last year but he propelled us into the tournament and into the Sweet 16. We aren’t a great team this year….you can say that about a lot of players. Cam Johnson of North Carolina. Cam Reddish of Duke. They are supposed to score. If Tyus had a little bit better shot, he’d be a lock for the NBA.“ I’ve always said that if your primary skill is rebounding, nobody complains when you got after every rebound you can get. If your primary skill is to score, shouldn’t you be expected to do it as often as possible?
Rodney in East Syracuse asked if we will do well in the ACC tournament. “I hope so” said JB.
Amir Hinton of Shaw, a DII team, is leading the division in scoring with 29.4ppg. he may be the first DII player drafted since 2005 when Robert Whaley of Walsh was drafted 51st by the Utah Jazz, for whom he played 23 games. The Walsh coach from 1980-83 was Bob Huggins. Wikipedia: “Huggins directed the Walsh 1982–83 team to a perfect 30–0 regular season mark and an eventual 34–1 mark.”
Gomez was trying to remember who was shorter: Spud Webb or Muggsy Bogues? It’s Muggsy:
Muggsy Bogues Stats | Basketball-Reference.com
Spud Webb Stats | Basketball-Reference.com
Jim marveled at how fast Bogues was. “A really good player.”
Lebron James “has got himself into a really tough situation. Guys are hurt and he needs help.” Gomez said the fans seemed to “undervaluing the moment” when James passed Michael Jordan in all-time scoring. They were booing him when he missed free throws. JB: “he’s lost his touch from the foul line.” Lebron is now fourth in all-time NBA scoring behind Kobe Bryant, Karl Malone and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar:
NBA & ABA Career Leaders and Records for Points | Basketball-Reference.com
JB said he might catch Jabbar in 3-4 more years but “Michael Jordan is the best player I’ve ever seen and it’s not close.”
And, with that, Thursday becomes just another night of the week...
