Our problems begin there. Jalen is young and Gibbs is really a 2. Hamilton stopped doing what he does best: getting in the lane and hitting a floater or passing to Brimah for a dunk. We stopped trying to go inside and turned into a 3 pt. shooting team; a bad choice because we are not a good rebounding team. We got killed on the boards. Too much lateral dribbling. Too many turnovers.
We can still make a run in the tourney assuming we get by UCF and win a game or 2 in the conference tournament. We don't have to win the rebound battle, we just can't get demolished on the boards.
Given how unpredictable this team is, they have the look of several really bad problems. A#1 is coaching, and I'll get back to that. #2 is lack of a floor leader. #3 is lack of chemistry, as in, do these guys like and trust each other. It might help in the AAC tournament that SMU isn't there and this team is capable of beating and losing to almost any of them, so who knows. Even if they make the NCAAs. I can't see them getting very far. He does look to be having good recruits coming in, but 5 years is plenty for a coach in our program to have to show better stuff and if they under perform again year, I don't know that having a youthful team is an excuse, because they look to have a pretty big group of veterans staying in school.
To A1# - We all want KO to succeed, but we more want UConn to succeed and if he's not the guy, then we can't afford to play many more years of mediocre to bad basketball. At the time Calhoun pretty much forced Manuel to hire Ollie, I felt JC was doing a major disservice to the program. I wasn't against Ollie, I was in favor of what our program deserved - a national search - and if at the end of the day, Ollie still was considered to be the top choice, fine. I get too much of a Paul Pasqualoni feel about Kevin's selection.
As I said in another post, there has been one constant in his tenure, and that is totally inconsistent play not only from game to game, but within long stretches of games. It seems to me that the coaches don't have a scheme or message that gets the ball into the hands of the right players in the right position and cuts the dribbling act that gets us into late clock heaves or uncontrolled drives. He really had two get out jail passes. The first year when the team was banished, and the NC year, which I think really was his savior. I don't mean to discredit him, but that team was not superior during the season. If Brimah doesn't perform a miracle at the end of game one, the rest never happens and last year and this get looked at a lot differently. I do think he did a great job of designing excellent defenses over the rest of that tournament, but he had one kid play out of his mind great. I can't say how I know, but I know that the ticket office has already been told to be ready to host an NIT game. Oh well, spring and bad golf is on the horizon.