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Message: [QUOTE="oldhusky, post: 4367065, member: 9844"] I think a better way to look at it is we have certain players who can approach some of Paige's skills, but nowhere close to all of them. Looking at Nika and Lou is interesting from that standpoint. Lou appears to be a shooter comparable to Paige and she has some of Paige's ability to create her own shot and be scorer not just shooter. That's the good news, but she is nowhere close as a passer, defender, rebounder etc. Nika can cover some of those traits because she is a great passer, defender and pretty good rebounder. That is the good news from her standpoint, but of course she is miles away from Paige as a shooter or scorer. So you can get passing and defense from Nika, or shooting and scoring from Lou, but you can't get all of those traits in one player like you can with Paige. We can be pretty darn good at most statistical categories, and fill her spot with a good player, but nowhere close to Paige. That is "if" we don't get more bad news at the wrong position. Last year we had six guards and yet for several games had no backup guards with three of them out. We were terrible by Uconn standards during those games and clearly did not have a good answer as to how to compensate for that rash of injuries. This offseason it looked like we would head into this season with five guards, hardly excessive, but at least it meant if one was injured we could use a carefully structured substitution pattern and milk the minutes at the 1-3 between mostly the four remaining players, with maybe just a few spot minutes by someone who was not a guard. We had a cushion for one injury, but that is gone with Paige's injury. If Nika, Azzi, Caroline or Lou miss "any" games we will be without a true guard backup for the three guard positions. Having Aubrey back could solve the issue on the defensive end, but we will be an entirely different team on the offensive end, and the guards that are available will often be out of position (anybody other than Nika at the point) and overworked and tired. So many of us look at the loss of Paige and figure we have plenty of good players on the roster, and while we won't be the same, we can still see us being a very good team. I see that too as long as nothing else happens at the guard position, but isn't it pretty unrealistic to assume our four guards don't miss any games. If there was an over and under on the number of games those four would miss in total, I would guess it would be at least a half dozen or so (1.5 each). Lord knows we are due for some good luck on the injury front, but I feel many of our fans are looking at the difference between Paige and our other available options, and forgetting that reducing our available guards from 5 to 4 leaves no insurance. In some ways an injury to any of our four healthy guards could be more devastating than the injury to Paige. We had one spare quality backup for Paige (with 5 guards), our backup plan for another guard injury is our best choice among players best suited for PF. For that reason I still hope Geno comes up with something from the Foreign Under 18 Tournament prospects that at least could provide some insurance at the guard position. [/QUOTE]

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