80% of the teams that UConn will play throughout the regular season will be no better than the teams in the Big East that Butler competed against AND DOMINATED. She's coming to UConn where she will have a year to integrate into the program, get appreciably better coaching and weight training and competing every day in practice against some of the most talented kids in the country. She has a marvelous work ethic and good physical skills (running the floor well, soft hands, etc) and somehow you speak of her as being a fine player as long as she's only playing against mid-major (Big East) teams but suggest that she'll lose minutes because you somehow feel that she won't be able to cope against better teams?????? It seems in reading some of your posts that you are all over the map with your opinions and there is a weird inconsistency. One minute you speak as if you have consummate knowledge of every scope of women's basketball and the next you're relying on opinions of a couple of posters who I had never heard of or read about before as if they brought the tablets off the Mount! You seem to suggest that you'd prefer smaller players playing the front line like we had with Task Force (2001) when we had multiple players playing the center and forward spots that were in the range of 6'1 thru 6'3. It obviously worked out well but had Geno had an accomplished player or players with size like Rebecca or Kara or Tina or Stef, I doubt that he would have used that smaller lineup as extensively as he did. Geno is undoubtedly going to have a lot of options with incoming talent and he loves flexibility and multi skill players but you act as if Stef would have have struggled for minutes if she were the transfer center coming into Storrs next season instead of Butler. You must remember that as a freshman, Stef didn't put up anywhere near the numbers that Butler did against primarily the same level talent though I know a couple of the stellar teams that Stef played against (Notre Dame and Louisville) were no longer in the Big East. Even if you feel Butler would have been completely shut down against these teams (which is unrealistic), her overall numbers wouldn't have changed that drastically. Why don't you and others give this girl some slack???? She has talent and yet you and others suggest that she is just some journeyman talent, competing against mediocrity to attain numbers. Evidently you assume that Geno's buddies and whose opinion he revers who coach DePaul and Villanova don't know anything about basketball skills and abilities when they see it???? They raved about Butler but still many here question her skill set or her ability to improve. If you had played and coached basketball all your life and had seen Butler play on numerous occasions and saw her exposed against talented teams, maybe, just maybe, I'd put a little stock in what you have to say but that isn't the case, is it? You are just making assumptions based on second hand information from WHO?????? If you are going to speculate, why don't you try and speculate in a positive manner instead of denigrating someone who you aren't even familiar with. The people around her can't say enough about her work ethic and her willingness to push herself continually to get better and better even when she was the UNANIMOUS winner of the freshman of the year award in her conference. Instead, there's bashing of a conference that we just left. Did you think the Big East conference sucked last year when we were in it???
)
