Reply to thread

Message: [QUOTE="EricLA, post: 3220717, member: 26"] I love me some [USER=73]@Tonyc[/USER] , but do have to disagree a bit. I don't think most were second guessing him - we knew we had a great shot at Bueckers, Fudd, and Deberry. Going back even 6 months, we knew we had/have a tremendous core group (Danger, Walker, Williams, and ONO), but before the avalanche of verbals, options for the 5th starter were realistically between Griffin, Camara and Irwin. Then came Makurat, Adebayo and Westbrook. Suddenly we have options AND depth. We also landed Muhl in there, and then Bueckers, McLean, and now Poffenbarger. But really, the core question still remains - where are the post players? Honestly, I love adding McLean and Adebayo but one is 5'11 and the the other about 6'. Geno has missed out on every other post player he's gone after, including the recent high profile Prince, who went to an Oregon team loaded in the front court (2 Sabally's (I know one is more a wing), Hebard, Giomi, Gildon, and 6'2" forward Boley (also more a wing I guess)). Honestly, both UCONN and ND had way more room in the post. At any rate, the post problem still exists. Not sure how great a shot we have with Cardoso. Rumor was she's a package deal with Hunt (no idea if that's true). Who else is out there we are looking at for 2020? I know he's looking overseas too, but the big 6'6"+ post player that was supposed to materialize this year has gone up in a puff of smoke. I find it completely mystifying that teams like Baylor can land Brown/Mompremier, and more recently a plethora of front court players. Baylor, SC, Stanford, Oregon, OSU, and several other teams seem to be loaded in the posts. UCONN literally has 1 post player over 6'1" and yet can't seem to land anyone else, in spite of the HUGE amount of PT opportunities for that kid who chooses to come. There have been 2 times in our recent history where we had more than enough - back in 1998+ where we had Hansmeyer, Schuey, Rigby, Jones, Williams and Cash. And then again in 2012 or so when we had Stewie, Dolson, Stokes, and Tuck. Other than that, and now recently, it's back to slim pickings. Last point - Geno has proven he's not only the best coach ever, but also that he's able to change with the times. Back in the dark years (right after DT when UCONN lost 8 games in 1 season), he was of the mindset that UCONN wouldn't recruit kids till their junior year in HS. Strother, Wolff, Turner, Crocket and Goring was the last class that this worked for. The following year he lost out on all his top choices and had to settle for Sherwood, Robinson and Wright. All transferred. It took a few years to recover from that. More recently, we've heard most every coach that recruits against UCONN says "don't go there unless you want to sit in the bench". Geno's pretty much proven that by letting bench players sit until the last 4 minutes of games, even in monster blowouts. I have no doubt he's aware of that criticism and as a result, he had to add 1 grad transfer, 2 foreign kids, and 1 regular transfer. I sure hope this season is not a repeat of past low bench minutes because it's pretty clear opposing coaches have used this strategy successfully against UCONN. That still doesn't explain why we have been unable to land more than just 1 tall post player in the past 6 recruiting cycles (2016-2021 but there's still kids on the board for 2020-2021), but I have no doubt Geno is well aware and I hope he has a strategy. Our recruiting of wings and guards is off the charts and 2nd to NONE in the entire country. Post players, not so much... [/QUOTE]

Verification: First name of men's bb coach

Forum statistics

Threads: 164,422

Messages: 4,395,702

Members: 10,209

Latest member: gemini*trvl