Stubbornness and narrow minded. Not giving his team the best chance to win.
GAME 20 PENN STATE: A Disgrace
- Thread starter bac2therac
- Start date
The signal to noise ratio is just too low for me to justify committing to that word count
Are you for playing Gavin and JaMike to help for the future?
What if sitting Gavin is giving the team the best chance for the win? Are you for that?
Maybe playing Oskar was looking towards the future. I am pretty sure it was.
This all makes sense.
I always agreed with Hawk on this regarding Mag. People had convinced themselves that he was something he was not.
Problem is this refusal to look at objective reality here. When you try to go 100% eye test you get people saying things like "actually our offense is slightly better than last year" and complaining about defensive rebounding in games where we d-rebounded well (see Hawk / Michigan State) etc.
And yes the novel length posts and audacity to take a condescending tone while not understanding something that has been the standard metric for evaluation (adjusted efficiency) since the early 2000s is why I like to generally quote these and make fun of them rather than actually attempt to read them.
I don’t care if you’re mad at him about that, as upperclassman/senior leaders, you go over to your teammate. Frustration aside.
To try to get the point thru to Hawk , let’s try to be clear. We had Cliff , Cam , Paul and Caleb on the court with Mag. Some of those guys were the top 2 players on everybody’s scouting reports. So Mag was becoming a viable offensive option as he was driving more and perfecting his shot within 10 feet. Teams had to pick their poison , double Cliff or overplay Cam but now Mag was be coming an offensive force so they couldn’t him and his offensive confidence in games was at an all time high. We had a threat at 5 positions and that is why we were winning. Plus you had 3 of the best defensive players in the conference ( Caleb , Mag and Cliff) so no team was scoring easily against us. Guess what we were winning and dominating teams in conference.
Now Hawk can ignore all that because he will die on his hill. Trying to say Mag would have turned in 3 straight goose eggs at the point he was at when he went down , already 9 points in the first half against Michigan State , is just disingenuous and part of the hill he will die on. Guess what ? We are not better off. Plainly obvious to anyone with objective eyes.
I love that hawk throws enough hot takes out there that he can claim a victory no matter the circumstance. Is mag playing poorly? Say it was obvious, his injury last year really was no big deal. Is mag playing well? Say it was obvious, pike told Spencer to take a hike so he could spend the NIL piggybank on Mag.
What evidence to you have of that? In 7 games this season to date he is shooting 23.8%.
“We are excited to welcome Antonio Chol to the Rutgers basketball family,” head coach Steve Pikiell said. “In Antonio we get another big-time shooter, who at 6-foot-8 can do a lot of things on the basketball court. He’s a high-energy guy. Whenever you can bring in a high-flying, high-energy player who can really shoot the basketball, you’re excited. I am looking forward to getting him here as soon as we can.”
Is that enough for you?
I do wonder who the other big time shooters we have.
Is that enough for you?
I do wonder who the other big time shooters we have.
Some of the walk ons are pretty good shooters during warm ups .I think they could make 6/10 foul shots.
I am playing guys that earn the right and are not a liability on the court . JMike is working hard and deserves some time but that is not saying much considering Derek , Noah and Austin have been less than overwhelming.
Gavin has been much more active offensively , defensively and rebounding the last 2 games and he seems to have a skill set that if developed properly would be great for this year ‘s team and next year and beyond. Before the last 2 , he was doing nothing. I am playing Gavin because he gives us the better chance to win. You cannot win unless you score as was painfully observed last night . I am not necessarily doing it for the future.
Playing Oscar at the expense of Hyatt or Gavin or even Mag , can only be done when all 3 are giving you nothing. Oskar gets stripped at least 1-2 times a game whenever he ball handles , gives up offensive rebounds and put backs at an alarming rate , and his passing and dribble handoffs are adventures. His value is that he is a 3 point shooter when teams play zone and when we need another 3 point shooter , he can get minutes. But this year , we are not even getting 3 point shooting from him and he is missing wide open 3’s as well and not quick enough to get in position to shoot a 3 when he is passed the ball. Pike sitting Hyatt yesterday was idiotic , stubborn , and an argument could be made cost Rutgers a win.
If Oskar was even remotely or a little better than either of the 3 , then maybe he gets minutes but he is not . Not offensively , defensively or on the boards , not shot making.
Bro how shell shocked are you? The two prized recruits ain’t going anywhere. A down year and bad team having a bad loss isn’t making Ace nor Dylan run for the hills. Why do people on this board keep typing nonsense like this.
I had no enthusiasm going - but it’s only 25 mins for me and wanted to spend some time with my son before heading the sierras this weekend.
We should have just gotten some wings and watched at Chilis.
How has Gavin not earned the right to play after the last 3 halves?
Because in the last 2 games , more so the Purdue game against better competition he finally competed. He hustled , he crashed the boards , he played help defense with Cliff , he moved without the ball and cut harder and if his 3 pointer from the top of the key through the double screen goes down we probably knock off Purdue ( assuming Austin doesn’t make that terrible foul on Loyer with 3:28 to go. ) .
Now his engagement last night was not as good as the Purdue game but still more active than the first 18 games he has played.
He also did not look lost offensively or defensively like the first 18 games.
1 for 17 from 3.
11/22 FT
17/50 FGs
20 turnovers.
If those are good offensive numbers, I’m suiting up.
Perfect recap Bac. No sugar coating it. That was the worst performance of the Pikiell era - from coaching to effort to player performances. Absolute rock bottom. Hard to believe it was the same team that hung with Purdue and beat Nebraska and IU. Lack of team chemistry and talent are the major culprits. These guys don't play for each other and no one is talented enough for us to win with me-ball. Time to play Gavin and J Mike for extended minutes so they develope for next year.
I always saw the Mag arguments as missing the point entirely.
Mag wasn't some magic bullet player - it wasn't that we lost him specifically, but that we lost a key element to the "greater whole" of the team. What had been a humming machine started to grind loudly when a different gear was swapped into the engine.... but that would have happened if any of the five starters had gone down, because we had no redundancy in our depth.
It's like the difference between blackjack and poker. You swap out a 10 for an 8 in blackjack, the hand is weaker but still competitive. You swap out a 10 for an 8 in poker, and you can quickly go from a straight to a pair. Last year's team was like a Jack-high flush.... no Kings or Aces, but everyone was the same suit and together would beat a lot of other hands. We swapped out a 7 of clubs for a 5 of diamonds and ended up folding instead of taking the pot.
It wasn't about Mag as some great individual player - it wasn't about his stat line vs. the stat line of Palmquist. It was about how everything was working in sync, and then suddenly wasn't. On paper, you can look at the performance delta between Mulcahy and Davis, or Spencer and Fernandes and say it shouldn't be a huge dropoff.... but that misses the impact to someone like Omoruyi who suddenly isn't getting the same looks that he was before.
This
I thought most people understood this. Not sure where this new narrative came from
We lacked depth last year...thats on Pike poor recruiting which I keep mentioning. Yet our 6-7 man mainly rotation was working. All cogs spinning the wheel. Remove Mag it fell apart
This years team has nothing. Any greater offensive data is virtually meaningless
The arguments last year from certain corners were that the loss of Mag couldn't have possibly caused the downslide we saw, because he wasn't individually an elite player who performed so far "above replacement" that his loss couldn't be overcome... which morphed into the straw man that those who pointed to the loss of Mag as a turning point in the season must be claiming Mag was our best player or was some transcendent talent.
My feeling is that we'd have had the same spiral last year if any of our starting five were lost in the same game Mag was. We just didn't have any role redundancy where a bench player could fill the fundamental place in the team that the departed player had filled.
I don't want to spend too much time rehashing last season's arguments, but both the supposed straw man and what you claim to be the actual argument don't make a lot of sense to me.
Mag was playing the fewest minutes of any of the starters when he went down last season (on the order of 25mpg if I remember correctly) which suggests both that the staff did not feel he was some generational talent but also that they did not feel that the team could not function without him.
I supposed it is theoretically possible that the team was some beautiful but delicate house of cards and that the removal of any one piece was destined to bring the whole thing down. I certainly can't prove it isn't the case.
That said, it seems far more likely to me that a number of things started to go wrong around the same time. The most visible and obvious change was the absence of Mag so the entire change in the team's play gets attributed to that (or things that were supposedly direct consequences of that).
Mag's absensce hurt us, for sure, especially on the defensive end. But there is no obvious reason that going from 25 minutes Mag/15 minutes Hyatt to like 32 minutes Hyatt + slightly increased roles for Palmquist and other backups needed to kill us. At that time Mag was starting to edge Hyatt out for PT but they were still viewed as similar quality players and there were serious debates on this board about who was better.
Instead, what happened was Paul tanked, Hyatt tanked, and we were left with the shitshow we saw. Did Mag's absence reduce our ability to adapt to this bad play from Paul and Hyatt? Absolutely. Did it cause the bad play? There is no obvious mechanism for how it did.
I need to stop before I get in to Hawk level length territory so tldr a lot of stuff including Mag's injury went wrong at the same time. I don't think they're as connected as you and many others on the board believe.
Mag was going to be defensive player of the year in the Big 10, he was better than Caleb. People are forgetting how good we were defensively last year
He was splitting time with Hyatt but I believe he started to play more minutes as the season wore on. Hyatt was good as a 6th man not so much as a starter. Then with him starting who was coming off the bench...Spencer and yikes Oskar, Jalen, and Reiber had to chip in a bit more
We couldnt afford to lose anyone in the starting 5 because Pike recruiting was so poor, we had no depth. We lost a cog in the wheel, i dont know why you are even arguing this. Pike was threading the needle and it was working
No he wasn't. You think we were playing the DPOY 25 minutes per game? Come on.
After Mag went out, Hyatt's average mpg did not increase. He stayed at 22 mpg for the rest of the year. Mag's minutes went to Palmquist (+13 mpg), Simpson (+9 mpg), and Spencer (+4 mpg). None of those players filled his role, and the team had to adapt to a different style of play both offensively and defensively - and they were worse for it.
As the season went on, we struggled when McConnell was off the floor because there was no redundancy for the defensive versatility he could bring - Mag/Hyatt had been overlapping 9 mpg, with Mag backing up McConnell. We also struggled when Omoruyi was off the floor, because there was no redundancy in the post/paint, and Woolf was limited. We saw a lot less press and fewer traps, and when we did it was a different look without Mag's length. Palmquist's attempts came from the arc, not the post, which changed the dynamic/flow of the offense, and he didn't have the same ability defensively. With Palmquist/Simpson/Spencer taking Mag's minutes, we were playing 4 out and 1 in more often, which made it more difficult for Mulcahy to operate in the post without a PF occupying larger defenders.
Pike finally struck on a new lineup that found some success in the last few games, moving McConnell to the 4 and Mulcahy to the 3, running with 4 guards and a center. That's a completely different team dynamic than we started the year with, and it took a lot of growing pains to get there.
We had to reinvent ourselves to be a new kind of team - we didn't just slot in a similar player into the same role and keep playing the same style, because we had no one to slot in. What little depth we had were differently-shaped pieces, and had to be used to create a different puzzle entirely.
Coaches can't shoot for players but coaches can show Derek Simpson film of himself shooting a three pointer and help him understand that if he's off balance with his feet the shot is going to be off balance. Like... what is this? It's a wide open three pointer, what are you doing with your feet my dude? Splaying them out and then landing like THAT? And you think that shot has a prayer?
If the staff is doing this and Simpson isn't working on it, then yeah, that's on him.
I'm not sure this staff is equipped to work on those things or prioritizes it.
We all knew RHJs shot was low. For years it was never addressed.
It was blatant.
As soon as he turned started working on getting Draft ready - he immediately started working on raising his shot.
https://ftw.usatoday.com/lists/nba-draft-ron-harper-interview-rutgers-scouting-report
" I think that my release point has gotten so much higher. This is the highest my release point has ever been. I used to hit the front rim a lot. No one had ever told me to raise my release point. Even last year, I shot 40% on 3-pointers even with a low release point."
I agree with this but disagree with the part of your view that seems to suggest that the drop off was mostly chance based.
25 minutes is still 62.5% of the game that we had to replace Mag with Oskar level defenders. That’s tough to overcome on a D first team.
Mag did some great things on D that stood out (especially in the press). With Mag, we had the horses to run an effective press while Caleb resting on the bench. Without him, the press became totally ineffective. Suddenly - Caleb couldn’t rest at all without a big drop in D (whatever stretch per game we were pressing was where we took likely the biggest MOV hit - late first half of games usually). Even if Caleb could’ve replicated Mag’s role in the press - we couldn’t afford to risk him picking up fouls so that wasn’t even an option). Pike tried a number of different strategies and we got clobbered with all of them. The few minutes Caleb sat was always brutal on D and overplaying him ultimately hurt us too.
FWIW I don’t think it was chance based. I think Choppin (and you) are making a lot of good points. I also think there were some unrelated drops in performance, especially offensively, and especially Paul.
well said. Mag was an enormous loss last year.
My dude - you are mixing about 5 separate different debates all into 1 overall debate now and trying to make it all about Mag.
This is hilarious (but not surprising for you).
Let me make things really simple for you on some of the main conversations myself (and many others have had with you since about May).
1) YOU said Pikiell ran Paul and Cam out of our program (and dismissed that it was actually their respective choices to move on)
2) YOU said we would be a better offensive team this year without Paul and Cam
3) YOU said we would be a better team with guys like Noah, Gavin and JMike being a big part of the offense. And guys like Simpson and Oscar (yes Oscar!) having a much bigger role.
NONE of the above is even being close true at this point. You can spin anything whatever way you like through your 20 + paragraph posts but it will never be true.
Now when it comes to Mag:
- YOU said Mag’s injury had nothing to do with our collapse last year which basically started right after he got injured in MSU.
- I disagreed and thought both our team and Mag was playing some of our better basketball at the time he got injured at MSG. At that point - everyone basically thought we were headed for another NCAA tournament birth. Mag gets hurt, we rack of the losses against inferiors teams and we blow our NCAA bid.
The Mag discussion from last year is our opinions and we will never know what actually would have happened. I’m willing to admit that it is just my opinion.
Mag last year has NOTHING to do with the first 3 points above which you are 100% wrong about but will obviously never admit because you’re so damn full of yourself.
If you want to discuss Mag this year that also has NOTHING to do with the first 3 points. Mag hasn’t been as good as I thought this year (see I’m admitting this!!!….take note for yourself). Mag was excelling last year when he had a supporting cast around him more of a complete team. He didn’t have to be “the guy” but did a lot of things well. Fast forward to this year and he basically has 4 guards who can’t pass the ball and each play a good game about once out of every 5 + games.
I also had tempered expectations because he’s still less than a year removed from an ACL surgery. Any person with common sense would have known he wasn’t going to be 100% until maybe March (if even).
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Mag wouldn’t have gotten DPOY especially because he didn’t have the reputation that Caleb had built over the years.
But Mag was our best defender last year before he went down. Regardless of how many minutes he was playing (25 is still a good amount) he was our best defender. If he stayed healthy he probably would have been up to 27/28 minutes per game by the end of the season.
His minutes had already been trending up before he got hurt to be fair but I'm still not buying that he was better than Caleb.
To a certain extent, everything's related on some level, because it's a team game. For instance, removing Mulcahy/Spencer from the roster has negatively impacted Omoruyi's offense this year - because beyond their own offensive contributions, they were able to better get him the ball in a position to score. And Omoruyi's reduced touches has put more pressure on the other players to take more shots, etc....
Every change ripples outward. No player loss can be evaluated in a vacuum - you don't just lose them, you lose how the team functions as a whole with them on the floor.
Mulcahy had a lot of success last year backing down into the high post and forcing teams to react. Because Omoruyi and Mag were taking the attention of the opposing bigs, it usually meant Mulcahy had a size advantage on his defender. If one of the bigs slide over to help against him, he could dish to Mag/Omoruyi with an interior pass, and if one of the guards dropped in to help he could kick to the perimeter - and if neither happened, he could exploit his smaller defender and get his own points. Without a big body taking away a defending big in the paint, Mulcahy's pressuring in the post had fewer options for him to get his own points.
Plus, there was less time for anyone to rest or recover from any dings/etc because the rotations were stretched so thin - which begins to wear over time, as Mulcahy was playing 35+ min every night he wasn't limited by foul trouble.
So while Mulcahy's drop in performance can be looked at as normal performance variance - it's also not "unrelated" to the changes in the team dynamics happening around him. But again, it wasn't the loss of Mag specifically, but any key player in the thin rotation.... if Spencer or Omoruyi had gone down, Mulcahy's offensive effectiveness would have dropped, too.
Same - I saw Mag as being McConnell's heir apparent, but not better than he was. Those two were easily our 1a and 1b best (and most versatile) defenders, and Mag was growing better as the season progressed - an uninterrupted season would have seen still more development, and I'd have expected there to have been some preseason DPOY buzz for him coming into the start of this year.
But none of that happened. His progress was (again) paused by injury and he missed the next 19 games, which goes back to the maxim of 'the best ability is availability'. My hope is that he stays healthy throughout this season and offseason, and comes back next year as the anchor of our defense.
Mag was our best defender. Cliff was our most important defender. Caleb was known as our best defender.
Mag led the press and was a great onball defender. Caleb's defense took a small step backwards last year. Mag was a better on ball defender against most players. Caleb was more destructive in a help position in the half court causing turnovers. He definitely masked Paul and Cam's deficiencies with lateral quickness, bailing them out.. Gavin would have DEFINITELY benefited having Caleb.
Fair enough. I’ll buy that there may have been other contributing factors, but the drop off in historically elite D was the primary one. Green says it all the time and he’s right - that D was good enough to win us a Natty so anyone preaching now that D first can’t work must’ve had their eyes closed through the game Mag went down.
Starting with Indiana (first game both Caleb and Paul played) - we held 7 major conference teams in the 40s and 50s. OSU didn’t break 60 in regulation either (so really 8). In the other OSU game - you can’t really count it as our D giving up 67 points - since the refs gifted them that 3 after we intentionally fouled them (they had 62 with 6 seconds to go). NW put up 62. Purdue scored 64. So in a span of 14 games against major conf teams - only Iowa (twice) and Michigan State (once) broke 65 on our D. Yeah - I know we just finished explaining to Hawk about how points need to be considered based on possession count but our efficiency was incredible too (it’s just more laborsome to pull that data).
The bottom line is our D was still good but nowhere near as special after that. 7 of our 11 opponents scored 65+ on us following Mag’s injury. That included 88 vs Hofstra, 82 vs NW and 76 vs Minny. The dip from 2nd to 6th in KenPom efficiency doesn’t do drop off justice because we had a nice buffer - the top 3 teams were way ahead of everyone else.
No it’s not true. Mag’s great defensive plays stood out because they were flashy - mostly in the press. If he played for Bob Huggins perhaps he could’ve been a DPOY candidate. His halfcourt D is/was above average but not award worthy.
Caleb continued to do what he always did - quietly cover up for Paul and Hyatt’s shortcomings in the halfcourt in help D and yet miraculously still managed to grab the second most boards on the team (to this day I find this unbelievable because when your role is to help the way his was - your back is to the basket when the shot goes up more than everyone else). You have great perspectives on D but in this case I think your vastly undervaluing what Caleb did on that end last season. There is a reason he had to play nearly every second of the game when Mag went down and basically played every available non-press defensive possession when Mag was healthy.
Agree on all of this.
They all brought different abilities/skills to the defensive table and the combination of all 3 of them together made up probably the best (or one of the best) defending trio across the country.
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