A reasonable question to ask is, if the talent level is as advertised and i truly believe there is individual talent at a high level. Why does this team show little or no improvement in terms of basic basketball fundamentals?
I'm beginning to worry that Lavin, while a great recruiter, is not up to Coaching at the level necessary. I hope I'm wrong because Steve is great for our school but, he needs to have his team show improvement this year.
Tonight's game was not the good start we all wanted.. At some point, these players and Coaches will have to show they can beat good teams consistently, not occasionally.
They played 1 game for crying out loud. I agree they could played better but they were an underdog against a program that went to 14 straight NCAA's.
Would you prefer them to open against Columbia at home and won by 25. OK.
The frustration lies with the fact that they have not gone to the NCAA's since 2011. I get it. So every loss is going to be dissected as if the world ended and they didn't improve? Come on. My point is they are not going to erase the bad taste after the last couple of years in 1 night, win or lose, so stop asking and making dumb posts after 1 game against a difficult opponent.
It's not the loss that is frustrating. We came out unprepared. That's coaching.
Oh everybody says that when you lose and another team plays well. It can never be that the other team plays well it has to be "you're unprepared."
It is just a ready made excuse to say if SJU got beat bad early on.
Tell me, what was our gameplan tonight?
Game plan was to run and dictate tempo. We just came out and got waaaay to far down for it to work. We got the game back within 4 which means if we were closer, we might have even have had a big lead at that point. Our biggest problem was our slow start, both on offense and defense. I agree that this is a recurring problem though. We figured out our game and played well for much of the game after we went down big, but it was not enough.
I didn't think they were amazingly talented. They have a team that simply makes shots though. They don't miss them. They come out and drill em. They work hard to earn those shots as well. This is a testament to Bo Ryan who runs a great system and recruits the appropriate plays to it.
I'm not down on our team. I think this is the best team we've had in a long while. We did quite a few things wring though. We should've pressed and trapped from the full court a lot more. I said this before the game. Make them use up shot clock and rush their offense as well as turn it over.
We also stuck with our matchup zone too long in the first half. It should have been yanked sooner. We played much better man to man defense down the stretch and the matchup send killed us. It wasn't working but we should have changed it sooner.
Our offense just started off atrocious. Not much Lavin can do about this. Jakarr started terribly as did Harrison and just about everybody else except Sanchez who got into foul trouble.
Very disappointed that we couldn't close out more when it got to 4 points. We should have had more awareness about us and learn to take over. Overall not a horrible loss, but could hsve been a signature win. Biggest issue is our horrible start. Wisconsin was able to keep it from there. Maybe Lavin should start by slowing the game down in the beginning and getting the player's relaxed before we turn up the tempo. Just a thought.