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Message: [QUOTE="Bone Dog, post: 4693818, member: 12088"] I'm much closer to you on this than you might have thought. I didn't list Nika as a prime killer in my post -- for me that's Paige and Azzi, because they drop the daggers. I do think [B]she is a fierce competitor. But that's not the same thing.[/B] And I certainly don't think she's the best pg out there, much less on the huskies. [B]Nika is pretty much the player Geno wanted when he recruited her and has probably developed in ways he mainly anticipated[/B]. If I try to guess what he was thinking back then, it was that [B]he wanted a fighter to play next to Paige, someone who just had more in-your-face ferocity than Paige typically shows.[/B] But without Paige (or Azzi) in the lineup, like last season, Nika ends up being asked to do things that aren't exactly her strengths. She made the effort and surprised a lot of us by becoming the backcourt player to beat (next to Lou) on the huskies. When she floundered, the team as a whole floundered. [B]I hope she doesn't have to do that again this year because the team needs to be more than she can make it by herself[/B]. One instructive episode for thinking about Nika, and especially in her relationship to Lou is that Tennessee focused on denying the ball to Lou, and they lost. SC focused on denying the ball to Nika and they won. Obviously, there were other factors in both games, and in my view we had a shot to win the SC game at the end. But to me that says an opposing coach diagnosed the husky attack and recognized how important Nika was to it. But, as I said above, I hope she's not that important to it this season. [/QUOTE]

Verification: First name of men's bb coach