Talent level

[cncmin]

Wow. . .I can't believe how people talk of Tarver now. I can remember Tarver getting absolutely shredded because the guy blew more open lay ups than anyone I had ever seen, and barely anyone talked about his rebounding and defense. Now people talk about him like he walked on water, and no mention of the 30 missed layups per game.

I still to this day believe that three things cost us the '97 Final Four game against Kentucky:
1. Eric Harris being injured.
2. Courtney James being called for a terrible charge call at a critical juncture of the game.
3. Clem inexplicably playing Miles - Never Pass Me the Ball or it's a Brick or Turnover, Please - Tarver ~30 minutes in that game.

Miles was a sub-average decent player for the two years thereafter, but the '96-97 Tarver wouldn't sniff many minutes on this past year's team, as Paul Carter and DJ were much better versions of a similar player. The only thing Miles had going for him was a mean streak and some decent rebounding ability, but to this day I've never seen a worse D-1 offensive player. When he was in the game, we had to play 4 vs. 5 on offense.

I'm not sure what some of you are all remembering about the mid-90s era of Gopher basketball - some of you are giving some of those players (Tarver, Winter, etc.) way too much credit. Even big John Thomas was not a good player by any means his first couple of seasons until he got very good for that Final Four run...Clem had one very good team and a bunch of other quality teams that played around top-25 ball on a good day. They weren't Gods, and this past year's team was darn near as good as many or, possibly, most of Clem's teams. If I recall, Clem didn't have a huge number of Tourney teams. Without looking it up, Clem had a #11 seed Sweet Sixteen team in '90, a #6 seed Elite Eight team in '91, an early-season top-10 team that blew it come Big Ten season (was that the NIT-winner in '93?), a #6 seed second-round team in '94; a couple of teams that got robbed of NCAA berths on either side of these, the #1 seed Final Four team in '97, another NIT winner in '98, and the infamous #8 seed that lost to Gonzaga in '99 days after the academic scandal broke. Well, we were a #10 seed this year, and from my memory above, that would be a better team than all but 3 or 4 of Clem's teams...