On to next year

[UCfor3]

Just to follow up on this, Jermaine Samuels played a total of 132 regular season minutes his freshman year at Nova. Colin Gillespie played a lesser percentage of his teams minutes in his freshman year than Hawkins did this year. Most freshmen are not immediate impact players, much less in good teams.

This. People see a couple dozen freshman contributing and think it's the norm. What they don't see is the hundreds of them waving towels on the sidelines for amost every team. It's usually talked about how a player gets impatient wants to move on after not playing a lot his freshman year. Now the fans are just following suit and are as impatient as the players if not more.

 

[Deleted at users request]

I don’t care about stars. How many of those have produced? Hawkins Ajax and Sanogo and that’s the list. The two guards averaged less than 7 points per game.

We had 4 seniors on a team that likes to go 7-8 deep. There wasn’t much playing time to be had.

 

[HuskyHawk]

Why do you think that is?

Because Hurley had two super seniors and two senior transfers in Cole and Martin and like most college coaches he values experience over talent. He also values defense over offense.

 

[HuskyHawk]

exactly the point.

if they are not good enough to log a minute of playing time in any meaningful game, how could we possibly rely on them to fill a critical role on next year’s team?

so either:
1. they were good enough, but hurley didn’t play them
2. they aren’t as good as their recruiting ratings
3. they needed time to develop and will make a significant jump next year

1&2 would be very bad. let’s hope it’s not that.

3 is a hope based strategy. i wouldn’t rely on that for consistent success.

Sure. Well my other team has a 3 star local boy who starts now as a Junior. He played 18 mpg as a freshman, mostly because the other guards were injured. Like Vital did at UConn. The best player, Agbaji (who is a POY candidate) is a sr who went from 8 ppg to 19. McKormack managed 10 mpg as a freshman, now starts and plays 26.

#3 is the only way to succeed for any school other than Duke and Kentucky, and even they are figuring out that relying too much on freshmen is a gamble. I would say in UConn’s case #1 also comes into play. Hurley has trust issues he needs to get over. But honestly, if not for Covid, we have no Whaley and Johnson plays a lot. With no Polley Hawkins plays a lot more too.

 

[giddyup]

Can’t fret over the situation. Hurley gets paid $3M to solve the problems he created. He played this out with a senior stacked team to build a 20+ win season when he knew there were giant holes. He could have brought in some 3 specialists from another school and we would have been in much better shape. If we had a kid like Ferguson from Colgate who can hit big time 3s in his sleep, the outcome would have been much better.