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Message: [QUOTE="August_West, post: 5128533, member: 1047"] We will be ok. It was pretty easy to see this coming. The Memphis loss at least. I was ok with it. I admit the Colorado loss left me a tad surprised. We can't play worse. If we continue to play like this we will continue to lose to really any team in the top 125 , but we can't play worse. It's been a while since I remember feeling like we can never get a stop. It just looks so easy (and is so easy) for other teams to score on us. They are able to get whatever they want. They want to run a set for an open 3? They get it. They want to isolate down low and bang to the rim? They get that. We offer little resistance other than fouling. We are totally lost on the defensive end, I haven't seen a worse high major defense in all the teams I've watched this year. The effort is there. The intelligence isn't. Everything is a scramble. Speaking of fouling. I don't want to hear anything about the refs, including, and especially, from Hurley. I love coach Hurley, but if he doesn't realize that he made his bed with referees I don't know what to tell him. Were there bad calls in these games that could've gone the other way? Sure. It still isn't in the top 10 reasons for either loss. We were out played. Our offense isn't quite as atrocious as our defense but that isn't very good either. We are getting some good looks. But it's often disjointed. I'm afraid the staff is a little too in love with the deserved lauding of our offense the last couple years, and it seems this particular team at this particular point with these particular pieces is not ready to run the advanced calculus equations needed to get a hoop. Sometimes (as our opponents have proven) the best play is the simplest one. We look like a monkey trying to hump a football when teams switch 1-5, and if that is all it takes to blow up our fabled sets, and we dont have a counter, it is going to be a long year. the counter to that is to have guys take it off the bounce and make them pay for the overplay, but we continue to try to run through sets that are already blown up. That needs to change NOW. And you can't spell NOW without NOWell ;) . I understand the complicated reasons why it isn't happening, but I do believe that any team that is sitting their best PG on the bench (and a top 35 in the country recruit) is possibly making a mistake. If we are getting this type of play out of our PG spot: Mahaney has been atrocious on both ends, and Hass has played with a lot of heart but is making some head scratching turnovers. Nowell being the PG of the future might as well be now because while he will have some growing pains too it wont be any worse than what we currently have, and the upside of who is as a player is much higher than what we've been doing or what we would get. This can (and I believe will) absolutely turn around. We will be a force by the end of February. We have too much talent. In fact right now at this point in the season I think that is actually a big part of the problem. We have too much talent. Too many pieces. Trying to mix and match all of them together to this point has brought on a "jack of all trades, master of none" scenario. The staff is going to soon need to settle on some definitive rotations and let them meld together so we can have some floor cohesiveness on both ends. Especially the defensive one. There is a lot of room for improvement. Luckily we have players that will improve and the best staff in the country to make it happen. Lets hope it starts sooner rather than later. [/QUOTE]

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