Previous Message

and distribute or score at the rim. We can play iso if need by--Andrej was bad tonight but is obviously an elite scorer at the rim. Wager will be a bumslayer until proven different, but hopefully finds his footing against real teams by March.

That said, it's obviously a little concerning that the trend so far seems to be the same as last year--spacing the floor with shooters who can't shoot. But at this point it is what it is--there are in fact proven shooters on this roster. Hopefully they figure it out because the shots will be there. The offensive rebounding doesn't appear to be as elite as it was a year ago, which helped mitigate a lot of the crappy shooting.

But defensively I have no idea what we're doing. Obviously matchups and personnel will dictate what we run--at times we're in the same shitty drop coverage as last year, which has been a complete disaster. Other times we switch everything 1-5, which has also been bad. We've seen a willingness to dig and double against elite post scorers at time, but very inconsistently. Other times we have shown a hard hedge, but have used it sparingly until the last 10 minutes today. Brad remains insistent that we don't get into rotation.....but we are finding ourselves in rotation fairly frequently.

Posted in the game thread below, but the most concerning thing to me is that for the last 5 years, even as the defense has been average overall, we have been consistently elite (top 10 nationally) at running teams off the three point line. That has dropped off a cliff this year (outside the top 100). Unclear if that is because of personnel or a shift in philosophy. If it is a shift in philosophy, I have no idea then what we're actually trying to do on defense.

I liked the pressure look in the second half today and it seemed to be effective. Maybe we run with that. But at this point we need a defensive identity. Not clear at all what Crocker was brought here to do.

Still early, and while the practice/injury thing is an excuse, it's also a thing that has happened. Will have a fair amount of practice time over the next month to figure things out, so let's see how things look when conference play gets here.