ul vs fau

[CajunRed]

I applaud you "Z" on your observations of the team and the game against FAU. That was a pretty extensive write-up. And, yes, Gradnigo has now become my least favorite player. He is down right LAZY.

The only thing I might disagree with is the comment about winning the conference. I just don't think we do the fundamental things (primarily rebounding) well enough to win. If we had more talent than the other teams, that would make up for it... but we don't. At best, we have about the same.

[zephyr]

_ I applaud you "Z" on your observations of the team and the game against FAU. That was a pretty extensive write-up. And, yes, Gradnigo has now become my least favorite player. He is down right LAZY.

The only thing I might disagree with is the comment about winning the conference. I just don't think we do the fundamental things (primarily rebounding) well enough to win. If we had more talent than the other teams, that would make up for it... but we don't. At best, we have about the same. _

Well, I probably look at the word "talent" a little differently than some. I look at potential. Obviously its hard to know the mental makeup of an athlete if you only go by what you see on the court so I typically look at physical attributes and gauge what you can possibly expect from them in the future. From that standpoint, I think we are as talented as most teams in the Belt. We have shooters, we have guys that can get up and down the court in transition, we have athletes who can play really long and you also tend to see the potential for their play to improve as they get more mature and their bodies develop. Such players that come to mind are those like T. Johnson, Bureau, Gradnigo, Roberson, Javan Mitchell etc.... These are some dynamic players in terms of how many positions they can play on the floor and potential matchup problems they pose for teams. We all know that team defense and rebounding are not things that necessarily rely on "talent" but rather a will to compete and is an overall attitude that a team needs to have rather than a few individuals. This team's struggles, as I mentioned in my opinion, is not talent but rather lack of fundamentals in the team defense and rebounding categories. If you watched the game on Saturday, the last ten minutes of the first half, to me, showed that this team has talent and what they can do when focused. Again, I'm not saying that I expect this team to win the conference but I do feel that they have the physical talent to do it, especially when the injured players come back. We will likely be outrebounded in almost every game this season in our conference but most SBC teams have the same size disadvatage we have. If you saw FAU, they were no bigger than we were and were actually a very small team. On the flipside, we were a very big team last year at times depending on personnel on the floor and we were still grossly outrebounded. It has nothing to do with talent but fundamentally learning how to read when and where the ball will come off the rim and having the toughness to establish position and go after the ball. We don't have that.

Shot selection has also been an achilles heel of ours over the past few years with poor offensive scheme and guys not creating enough open opportunities for their teammates. This year, our assists have gone WAY up and I thought we did a good job Saturday of creating an actual offensive scheme and moving the ball around to open shooters. When they did this, they were lethal from the perimeter and showed what can happen when we run an offense.