Disagree, but I can see your point. The only true reason to catch Frank's eye on that play is to applaud him. As a program, we should want that transition opportunity as often as we can get it. I am just not certain that 72 y.o. JAB jibes with 52 y.o. JAB. He's gotten so much more conservative with age. We all do, but it's almost like JAB is consumed by defense now. It's as if in his mind, they cannot score while we have the ball, so let's hold it for 23 seconds and then see what we can make happen (paging Tyus!). So anytime we "shoot early" in the shot clock, it had better work or else JAB's going to have to correct someone.
I'm not sure -- I mean, JB was 71 last year and we were a pretty decent offensive team especially considering we still had some limitations. I mean, some of that had to do with how horrendous the defense was, but we were only held to less than 70 five times in 18 ACC games and one of those was a win over UVA, so hard to knock that. Conversely we were at 80+ six times and we were 5-1 in those games. If you include the BC game as part of our What pre-conference season, we were perfect in those games. And much of that was with a good but not dominant offensive team. Lydon never really figured out his role, Frank/Roberson/Gillon had a few moments here and there, but it was basically Lydon playing decently with Battle and Thompson adding a bunch in the second half of the season and White being a constant threat to put up 20.
I have to believe that -- let's just say something crazy happens -- and you had a backcourt of Frank/Battle/Hughes/Carey next season with a healthy Sidibe/Chuckwu combo at C and Bazely teaming up with an improved Brissett and Dolezaj -- That team's going to average in the high 70s for the season and maybe even get into the upper 70s in conference play.
That doesn't make JB an offensive wizard, mind you, but I think he's generally fine with early offense and quicker tempo. Probably not what we'd all love to see with that team, which is a super up-tempo team that pressed for stretches to take advantage of depth, etc. But I think you'd see that team playing pretty quick and creating a bunch of mismatches that led to pretty consistent scoring outside of an off game here and there and the occasional battle with a knock-down, drag-out defensive-minded team like UVA.
Look at the lineups during the brutal offensive stretch (outside of last season):
17/18 -- three on five with Frank and Brissett asked to do more than they should have to
15-16 (mediocre year) -- G with a great year, Richardson up and down, but solid, Cooney -- decent year from three, not a lot else, Lydon solid for a frosh. That's it.
14-15 (brutal year) -- Rak comes out of nowhere (never averaged more than 6 ppg) to put up a huge season, cooney is OK but not terribly efficient, G is decent and once mccullough goes down that's all you have
Hard to say on 2013/14. PPG was pretty ugly (68 ppg, 259th in ranking, but offensive rating was actually pretty good since we played at a glacial pace). Feel like that team deliberately played slow because Cooney played pretty well which gave them four scorers in Ennis/Fair/Grant/Cooney. Probably could have pretty easily been in the low 70s but didn't play that way.
Anyway, I'm not sure I feel like JB is suddenly averse to offense, but we do need to have enough scoring threats on the floor particularly since we don't run a super-imaginative or up-tempo style.
