Reply to thread

Message: [QUOTE="Gurleyman, post: 5201199, member: 175"] I didn’t watch St. Mary’s last year - but he averaged 2.6 assists a game which is ok, but sorta meh for a guy with the ball in his hands a lot. You get that just swinging the ball around the perimeter to shooters and not really making plays. Marciulonis averaged 5.3, and another guy (Logan Johnson) was more of the primary ball handler when we played them. Mahaney didn’t seem like he had all that many point guard responsibilities. Doesn’t mean he wasn’t capable (Castle didnt play much point last year but clearly can). But what I have seen from Mahaney in a UConn uniform are two glaring fundamental offensive weaknesses - at least as it comes to our offense - the inability to come off screens looking/wanting to shoot and the inability to pass/make reads on the drive. So he doesn’t work well with us either on the ball or off the ball. He can shoot and yet he doesn’t even try to run off screens looking to get shots up, and it infuriates me because he doesn’t make himself a threat or make the defense work, react, or overcommit. He runs around screens and gets the ball and starts dribbling and surveys the landscape, and the defense just gets back set and matched up every time. So our entire set is just wasted time and wasted energy. Spencer (and Hawkins before him) created shots for other people without even touching the ball because defenses were worried about him coming off screens and over helped. Mahaney’s threes are of the spot up variety or self-created and that doesn’t open up the floor for anyone else. And when he drives, he‘s thinking like a scorer, and he can be crafty finishing. But his passes are often turnovers, since he just doesn’t have many point guard instincts on when and where and how to deliver the ball. Joey C was basically just a gunslinger and he was a lot better at the drive and dish (granted he was paired with Clingan a lot, who is a nice target). When you look at our last two title teams and the different guards we have had in our system, Mahaney just doesn’t remind me of anyone. He can’t fill Tristen’s role, he can’t be Cam, he can’t be JoeyC, he can’t be Diarra, he can’t be Hawkins, he can’t be Castle, he can’t be Alleyne. How does he fit? Maybe with another year if he comes back, we can figure something out - in a perfect world, he does look like he can be an unpredictable 3-level scorer. But if everything has to be self-created off a high screen and roll, then we are really talking a square peg situation because that’s not what we do. [/QUOTE]

Verification: First name of men's bb coach