Couple of things that should be different next year besides overall wins. Be more competitive and win more on the road and be more competitive in your losses even though they should be fewer.
What I mean by that is SJU lost 11 league games, I think the only one they lost by single digits was Xavier at home and to be frank Xavier led a majority of that game by double digits especially before Sumner got hurt.
In other words how many losses did SJU have a decent chance at winning? I would argue none. They literally got outplayed and sometimes completely outplayed in all of them. That's a problem as weird as it sounds.
If they are going to make a leap next year to say 11-7 they need to be competitive in most of the games to simply give themselves more opportunities to win.
We had it within two possessions late last night. People can believe what they want, but to me the refs were clearly going to give Providence the benefit of the whistle for the sake of the conference. I'm fine with that too. A loss to us would have ended Providemce's chances to dance. Now, they are in.
That is why I do not put a lot of stock in the increase in the wins from last year. That is the easy part. The hard part is taking it to the next level. And then ultimately taking it Nova's level.
Again my point is its weird that essentially SJU won every game they had a realistic chance of winning. They maxed out. There really isn't a game in which you can argue, "Damn if Ponds didn't miss that one and one" or if "Yakwe had grabbed that rebound" I think SJU could've won that game. They literally got whipped for the most part in their 11 losses.
That needs to change. Marquette improved by 2 games this year over last but they will tell you they should've won 2 or so more. Blew 3 point lead under a minute at SHU. Up 7 under 5 minutes at Providence last week and lost. Up 9 at halftime at Butler and lost.
I see what you are saying. Close games can go either way and we have a few very close wins and next to no very close losses. I think a big reason for that is we are an exceptionally dangerous last minute team with a trio of good ball-handlers that shoot over 40% from three and 80% from the line and two of them are among the top 5 one-on-one offensive players in the conference.
As for the margin of defeat in losses, I don't put too much stock in it outside the nail biters because we weren't a complete team. We had some glaring holes. We didn't have anyone that could stay in front of a slashing 6'3-6'7 perimeter player. We had one guy who could body up in the post and he was only 6'8 and very rusty from not playing in a few years. Nobody could score inside. Gtown beat us by 28 the first game. I don't think they were 28 or even 10 points better than us. I think they were just a tough matchup and really exploited or weaknesses that night. We beat them in the second game and could have potentially blown them out if we had any semblance of depth and didn't have to turn to Ellison and AA in the court at the same time during their 17-0 run.
I look at it as wow, we won 7-8 conference games after Sima transferred without an interior scorer, with awful team defense (which can only improve), with our four best players being first year guys, without a defensive wing to stop ball and provide 4-6 easy fast breaks a game like Paris, and without any muscle whatsoever. And two of the best five guys on the roster didn't even play?!