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Message: [QUOTE="oldhusky, post: 4280497, member: 9844"] Seems to me the main questions are the bigs and at least one more quality guard for depth. Paige and Azzi are exceptional now and Azzi in particular should improve next year. Caroline whether you call her a guard or a wing is a good fit at the 3, her natural position, her first year was very promising, but with areas where further improvement is quite likely, particularly fouls and 3pt shooting where her success in 3pt contests suggests she is way better than what we saw this year. In short we have championship caliber players there, one backup we can count on in Nika, but injuries happen so getting one more guard that could fit in will be a significant goal in the portal. The issue is upfront, where we have lots of potential contributors, most of which we feel will be good, but whether they are good enough to battle with the SC's or Stanford's of the world is another question and a very high bar indeed. Liv, Aaliyah and Dorka were all way above average college bigs. But with Aubrey out, and Amari and Piath deemed not yet ready for prime time, the 3 big rotation survived for most of the season but was an accident waiting to happen. We had no margin of error, could not afford injuries, sickness, or foul trouble, and of course being thin there killed us when Dorka missed the last two games. The floor for our bigs was pretty high, but the ceiling was significantly below teams like SC and Stanford. We tended to feast on mediocre competition, but were at a distinct disadvantage against some (not many) of the very best teams. I expect Dorka to start and be better than last year, mainly because she played about half the time at PF and next year she can concentrate on C. Aaliyah was a huge disappointment, a major drop-off in every way from a freshmen season I thought hinted at an All American future. Mainly she needs to regain her freshmen form and improve upon it. She also had to play some completely out of position as an emergency wing, when we only had 3 guards. Then we have many talented question marks. Somehow from Aubrey, Amari, Piath and the two freshmen we need to have at least two emerge as very high quality players in the rotation (4 bigs) so we are not vulnerable with only 3 again. I suspect that will happen, but fear their ceilings will still fall short of some of our championship competitors, think SC (Boston, Cardosa) or Stanford (Brink, Betts) not to mention their other very good bigs. A couple of the very best teams will probably be better than us at the 4/5. In that case we need to beat them because of our superior guard play, but we have to at least get close and be competitive with the best bigs. We can't be dominated there and expect to win a championship IMO. [/QUOTE]

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