Just so disappointed at the way guys are getting so much worse. We now have only 3 guys who can really score, and the ones who aren’t scoring aren’t giving us anything else. Hawkins had an outlier of a good game to his credit - but truth be told SJU lost focus on him a lot early on defense. Other teams have been locked in on not giving him good looks for the full 40 and SJU took a while to sharpen their defensive focus after he had 16 quick points, and then things got harder for him. He worked hard for another 15, but tightening up the screws was the one adjustment that SJU had to make, and that was basically that.
Karaban has been steady to his credit. There will be freshman wall games where his shots don’t go, but he’s been pretty reliable - but his points should be a bonus not a necessity.
Sanogo still takes so damn long to decide what he wants to do that the offense bogs down. He has a lot in his arsenal, and sometimes a deliberate approach makes sense - but everyone knows that approach now, and they just wait to bring the double until late in his move and then he’s off balance and the accuracy of his passing is poor, resulting in us trying to salvage something late in the shot clock when we aren’t in an offensive set. They always say that raw post players need to develop a go to move and a counter. Sanogo isn’t raw but in a backwards way he needs a ”counter move” where he just simply goes right into his attack off the catch in the deep post and doesn’t wait to survey the landscape. Make teams come with the double sooner if that’s their plan and we don’t kill the shot clock waiting for him to solve quadratic equations.
I mean, his stats look ok today - but he got two of his buckets just cleaning up under the rim after his teammates scrapped and kept offensive rebounds alive (and he tipped in a wild Diarra miss). Those points count the same as any others, but ideally you want your POY to not just be a garbageman looking for scraps. You want him making plays - for himself and others.
We can’t put a team out there right now with five guys who can competently put the ball in the basket, the way the teams ahead of us can. But we've hit a point where we are lucky to have a day when we even have four.
