Well, it's that time of year again when I have pull on my crabby socks, hitch up my grumpy pants and give all you Husky fans the lowdown on the future misfortunes of your team.
I know a lot of you want to bury your heads in sun-drenched sands and be all cheery, but the truth is that all you pollyanna types with happy feet don't have a leg to stand on. DavidinNaples, why are you posting stats about a 40-game season when you know the Huskies are probably playing only 33? pap49cba, why are you rattling off encouraging posts when there's so little to be encouraged about? huskybill, stop already with all your deadly serious platitudes about UConn's strengths and start finding all the fun in Husky mishaps. And tonyc, I don't want to get all negative on you, but was there ever a UConn team in recent times that you didn't like? Get over it!
The problem with this year's team is that it isn't just one player we can all gang up on and pick to death on the BY like we could in other years. This year, it's everybody. And unlike the Cheerful Charlies above who just mumble nice feel-goodie stuff or use meaningless stats, I believe in using real numbers to show how bad bad bad everything is. Running the gauntlet:
[ ]Breanna Stewart. Okay, after last year's MOP we all just knew that Stewie would be giving us 30+ points a game. So what happens? She's done it ONCE, with 37 points against Temple. And she follows it up with a 12 point OMG yesterday. That's a 25 POINT DROP OFF, and if all the other players had followed her lead, they'd be in deep negative figures. Stewie's clearly no leader, and her coach says she doesn't know how to play defense. It doesn't help if Stewie scores 80 points and the other team goes for 81 against her in the paint. Doomed.
[ ]Bria Hartley. OMG! Can we see a little effort out of Bria, please? She's had 1 friggin' block the whole year. I mean, Odyssey Sims and her teammates give that many flops in 10 seconds. Long Island girls, geesh!
[ ]Stef Dolson. Some of the pollyanna types here might be happy with her 12 points a game, but she could be doing a lot better, and there's no reason for her to be underperforming. And that 30% 3-pt shooting? OMG! Maybe she's hit the senior wall, but she shouldn't be bricking'em like that.
[ ]Kaleena Mosqueda-Lewis. Last year we were all pretty happy with her 49% 3-pt shooting, but this year it's way down at 42%. That makes me mad.
[ ]Moriah Jefferson. We always make allowances for the little ones, and yeah her 57% FG shooting is pretty good, but she averages less than 1 offensive rebound every 40 minutes. MoJeff's gotta elevate her game big time.
[ ]Morgan Tuck. I know, I know, you shouldn't kick a player when she's down, but that's never stopped any of us real BYers before. If Morgan really cared about me, she wouldn't have got injured and got me all upset about it.
[ ]Saniya Chong. OMG, Miss Inconsistency. I know that after yesterday we can rest assured that she'll be giving us 4 three-pointers every game for the rest of the year, but she's so undependable. Yesterday no steals and 1 rebound. The game before, no points and no blocks. You cannot trust freshmen because they can never get over walls that are more than one brick high.
[ ]Kiah Stokes. Did she ever get a rebound that wasn't immediately snatched from her? As any football coach will tell you, if you don't hold onto the ball, you lose the game. And Kiah's already lost about a million of them for us this year.
[ ]Brianna Banks. There's too many (Brianna/Breanna/Briana)'s on the team.
[ ]Tierney Lawlor. Yeah, yeah, we love the cute story about the sub who can come in and shoot threes at a 42% rate. But in 16 games this season, she's made only 6 two-point attempts, and she's clearly paralyzed to take them. If Geno goes against convention and gives TLaw 20 minutes in a big tourney game, that kind of freeze-up could kill us.
[ ]Briana Pulido. I don't like to say bad things about track girls, who are all goddesses and supreme beings, but I did notice that Briana did not get into yesterday's game. I don't want to start baseless speculations, but that's a main pastime with us real BYers, so I'm just going to ask whether our walk-on has been taking a walk on the wild side in practice.
[ ]The coaches. They're just so inconsistent. One moment they're saying a player is defensively challenged and they've been worried about the defense, and in the next thing they're admitting that the team D is doing okay. And they really shouldn't be saying anything nice because that just makes the players complacent and they end up going into a 10-game tailspin because the starters are all out of joint and the bench is....just god help us. Obviously Geno and staff lost their touch years ago.
Sorry to break in on the celebration, but you jubilations elated type people needed to be told the truth. The only thing that can be done to maybe save the Huskies is for us all to post lots of messages about how bad and weak they are, and then maybe like in all those other years, they'll suddenly get much better and win an NC.
Let the negative nattering begin!
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