A couple thoughts.
We are overrating our talent a little bit. Our shooting percentages other than our two bigs aren’t very good at all and we’re about at the midway point. Sanogo is certainly as skilled on the low block as anyone we’ve ever had when he’s isolated one on one, and Hawkins is as dangerous a scorer as there is in CBB when he gets some space. But Sanogo isn’t guaranteed to get isolated one on one, and Hawkins isn’t guaranteed to get any space. Other that that, it feels like we have limited offensive talent - guys who have to scrap, are limited to a role of just knocking down wide open looks, or who are 7-foot-2. Was hoping Newton could be that get a bucket or make a play guy, like RJ was last year, but that hasn’t happened and at this point, I’m not sure it will.
The thing about the Alabama and Iowa State wins isn’t even so much the scouting report as the lack of practice time. At those tournaments, you have no prep time between games and basically just do a short walk through to go over strategy and then roll out the balls and play. In the rest of the regular season, you have a full practice to implement a game plan going full speed and the walk through reinforces those things at slow speed. Both teams are in the same boat, of course, but those tournament games don’t always give you full insight as to what might happen with time to really get a game plan in place. By March, you play conference teams super familiar with you and then teams that have been scouting you for five days (even if you advance to the Round of 32, an assistant has been doing deep dives into you for five days while the rest of the staff was working on the opening round).
In order to get back to a legit contender, the team has to have its late-game identity. Winning big was a good problem, but it never forced us to develop our late game pecking order of options, and we’ve been perfectly dreadful the last two games. A year ago, it was a lot of Cole and Tyrese in iso/high screen situations, Sanogo postups, and Polley looking for catch and shoots. They had an idea what they wanted to do - maybe they didn’t always succeed, but they had a checklist of options. Tight games, this team has been night at the improv, often regressing to AJ threes or Hawkins forcing something.
We have to ask ourselves - tie game, two minutes left: what are we good at? What’s our bread and butter? Is it Hawkins running around like Rip and getting him quick trigger looks? Ball movement and good decision making from multiple players? Attacking the basket and crashing the boards? Playing our best defensive team and scrapping for points? Our plan can’t be to just dump it into Sanogo, since that’s too easy to take away - we can’t spread the floor with four shooters around him so he’ll always see a double.
Somebody has to take a step forward. Can Hawkins be force fed and evolve as a multi-dimensional scorer a little more? Can Newton become more competent with the ball in his hands and make plays late in the shot clock? Can Jackson do something offensively off the dribble when teams play him to pass? Could maybe Karaban or Alleyne add another layer to their offense and have the ball more?
There’s hope for at least one of those things to happen. In our last two two titles, we saw Lamb and Daniels take a big leap at the right time of year - Lamb became a go-to scorer in his own right, and Daniels became a guy who could make iso fadeaways, adding another layer to our offense. In ‘04, Ben was certainly established but became even better when forced to handle more burden with Okafor out. The ‘99 team didn’t really have a surprise leap (other than the short term surprise of Ricky’s 13) but had been playing together for two years (three for most of them with El-Amin added) and their strength was cohesion at both ends.
As we stand now, i don’t think we’re good enough. But the key is to not stand as we are now and evolve forward in some capacity.
