Cal Baptists point guard is a kid I'd take anytime. He reminded me of John Stockton with his poise and his decisive play. He didn't wait for Minnesota to dictate the terms, he decided what to do and he attacked. That kid is a tremendous college basketball player.
Exactly. They could have closed out the game in reg if they would have fed the ball to PP as a first option rather than keep jacking up low percentage threes.
They may want to reconsider their strategy for this game...
Let's maybe wait until conference season is underway before we start ranking teams by efficiency metrics.
Agree most of the stuff is too out of whack at the start of the year because one game can influence the data too much. A lot of promise on the defensive side of the ball so far though. They do get after it and much of the weaknesses in positioning can be fixed.
This is what worries me the most with this team. I really hope that the style of basketball we played last year wasn't just because Ben thought it was out of necessity.
As a Gopher fan who wants the numbers to make us look as good as possible, I strongly disagree with this idea.
Our asst coach won a hs championship as a coach. That right there is the living room speech.
Yep. Get it into him until the double him. When they do that you get open shots instead of forced ones.
I don’t think we are behind Penn State this season yet. Long season and a lot of games left to improve
I'm honestly content with being 4-1, given that we've looked atrocious in every single contest thus far, including the exhibition.
Their recruiting class is better than ours? They returned guys from a bottom 4 team. KenPom is worthless until a month in. Pomeroy himself has said as much. Colorado State win is worth noting.
Ben’s really strong offensively knowledge wise. Thorson is also very strong offensively in all motion concepts. Jenkins worked under Mooney (really good offensively) at Richmond for 5 years. I don’t think knowledge is the issue. Our offensive efficiency was better than our defensive efficiency last year.
Your first two sentences describe Illinois, too. 2 returning players, 3 transfers and 4 freshmen in the rotation. Learning to play together and playing against top competition cost them against Virginia. Led with 3 minutes to play but inexperience caught up the last three minutes. Surprised they handled UCLA, another veteran team, the game before. Illinois has a long way to go to be cohesive as a team. Getting better.
And yet Penn St is still ahead of Minnesota.
On most (all?) sites yes their class was ranked higher. Kebba Njie was a higher 4* guy which none of our guys were on most sites. Now again, thats just rankings, Njie is at 12min per game this year, Payne has been much better but just off rankings we were worse.
I get the rankings were in favor of Penn State, but those were awful and very skewed because of covid. So many players didn’t get seen and ranked appropriately. Anyone who watch MN high school basketball last year knew Payne was the best player in MN and it wasn’t close. Carrington was easily on the same level as Holloman. I’ll judge the freshman on production and play for this year and I typically like rankings as a measure.
Yeah I'd argue the Illina certainly have a higher floor and ceiling than the Gophs for this year. With them we are talking about two proven All Big 12 guys and a five star freshman PG, but none the less they'll have moments like the UCLA win and in conference play they'll probably lose to a team like Rutgers on the road because the Big Ten is a grind.
We added two high level transfers too. I like Pickett and think he and Battle are on similar levels. Lundy is nice too. I don’t believe the others are head and shoulders above us yet is my point. It’s too early to say. Penn State will look more together earlier because they’ve played together more, plus haven’t been without their best scorer.
Agreed Carrington had a better year than Tre and thus won the Mr Basketball award. Payne missed half the year, but would have certainly been in the mix had he not. As far as the 2022's go, in the spring I would have ranked them as
I agree with your rankings. Carrington wins the intangibles over Tre and was better coached in high school as well.
It was a tough call Carrington vs Tre, I think Carrington is a more consistent defender, a better shooter and certainly has a better frame, but Tre also a PG and he did some incredible things in his 10th and 11th Grade year, leading Cretin despite having the rest of the roster turn over on him multiple times, but he needs to improve his shooting and IMO give a more consistent effort on defense, not just when his guy has the ball, but Izzo wil fix that last issue, and maybe part of it was not wanting to come off like a homer with the rankings. I can definitely see why someone would put Carrington ahead of Tre and honestly spots 4-8 you could argue those either way as well.