It‘s early, and this may or may not be a sign of things to come. Not every team we face will move the ball and shoot as well as Colgate did against us. Even when they were missing early and we were up comfortably, i was thinking they really did execute passes well and had a great scheme. Very well coached team, that recognized its personnel, its capabilities… and they didn’t go outside of their lanes. When their big guy was working us over with slo-mo Celtics moves, it wasn’t by accident. They know how to play. How they have already lost two games—that’s a shocker.
So, no, our season isn’t over, but we have been exposed. To the rest of our schedule and to our own forum membership. This should serve as a wake up call to those who imagined us lighting everyone up from three, with four different bombers, and Jesse playing the Olajuwon role, and Benny as senior John Wallace.
We have Swider who has talents but didn‘t see a sufficient role at a better program, and Symmir who was a reserve at Marquette (not sure where they rank), and they were supposed to be saviors/significant contributors/better than the pieces we lost to transfer. Reality is setting in. Benny really is a 4-star, not the undervalued because the recruitniks hate us 5-star. He has talents, but needs a lot of work. He may surprise us with how quickly he develops but he’s not the answer.
We keep signing 4-stars and lower, and magnifying them and re-ranking them because they’re ours. But every other team has their own kids with similar stories. The rankings aren‘t absolute truth, but there‘s no conspiracy against Syracuse.
JBDad has a great resume, but I’ve never felt he was a great coach. Seems like we sometimes have a very good passer (too infrequently, now that I think about it), but we don’t often have a gray passing team. “Unselfishness“ is nice, but it’s not the same thing. He installed a sometimes effective D system, but it’s a song with one note and it got old a long time ago. It works when we have the personnel to execute it, but we are unbalanced right now, and not built for that one scheme. There will be many nights like this when we aren’t entirely unconscious from the outside and can’t overcome the scheme’s liabilities, but we’ll also have games where we can. What we need is a more effective playmaker, more power/athleticism at power forward, and for Benny and Frank to grow up and into their potentials more quickly than we should realistically expect.
