Wow.
We lost to Yale. We lost to Yale on a last second shot. We lost to Yale with a four-point lead with under 20 seconds to play. We're six games in and we're losing games to Yale.
The offensive is an absolute disaster. It's not Diaco-bad, but you can see Diaco-bad gaining in the rear view mirror. Can't shoot, can't take care of the ball, won't pass and appears to be completely allergic to trying to draw a foul. Complete disfunction.
We're 315th in the country in assists per game, 212th in field goal percentage and 227th in points scored. We're 122nd in rebounding which almost qualifies good news. (Tonight will knock us down in all of those categories...) We're -23 in first-half scoring. You actually cannot find a good offensive statistic for this bunch.
1) Ryan - It's hard to get too down on Ryan. In a lot of ways, he's playing the Kemba/Shabazz role but with less ability and far less help. That said, he's set the table for the past two losses with misses at the free throw line. He's likely exhausted from carrying the team for 37 minutes by then, but still...
2) The front court - Facey had a bad night...so be it. Nolan's Nolan which basically means empty minutes, a charge call or two and nothing else. Now Brimah...the kid is such an indifferent rebounder. He averaged three rebounds in 16 minutes last year. He's getting 26 minutes a game this year and hasn't managed to add even an entire rebound to his average. Three-point-six in 26 minutes?! We keep projecting him into the lottery - the NBA has no use for a raw seven-footer who can't rebound. The bad news - he's still so raw. The good news - he's not going anywhere.
3) Omar Calhoun - I have a theory. I'll let you know if I'm right in about ten days.
4) Does anyone know of a good Ferrari mechanic? We need one to report to Kevin Ollie's garage posthaste.
5) I thought it was a bad sign when KO let it drop that he wanted to see our players in the gym more. Tonight's comments were much more dire - not sure where this team's collective head is, but Ollie doesn't sound happy about it. Ollie seems like a good guy, but I suspect these guys are going to discover that he didn't get where he is simply by being nice.
6) We have three losses before heading to play Duke, Florida and Stanford. If this crew doesn't start to get on track, they could easily be sitting at 9-7 or 8-8 in mid-January and in this conference, we don't have a lot of runway to recover. "We're fine, we're UConn" is a great message board slogan, but I'm not certain the selection peeps subscribe to those.
