Player stats appear too good to believed. Perhaps someone just made them up.
Rutgers vs. Senegal Select
- Thread starter NiTeKnight
- Start date
If Hyatt truly improves over last year and Mag stays healthy, this team will be multi faceted giving Pike a lot of options with lineups and substitutions. Without major injuries we will not fade during the second half of the season and the question will not be tournament, but at what seed.
Looking forward to a great season and a rockin RAC.
Looking forward to a great season and a rockin RAC.
It would be helpful to know more about the roster of the Senegal Select team. It seems from this article it’s possible some former D1 players would’ve been on the roster. This was the female roster for 2019. It mentions someone who played for Temple.
www.fiba.basketball
Senegal select final roster for #AfroBasketWomen 2019
DAKAR (Senegal) - Almost two months into their preparations for the 2019 FIBA Women's AfroBasket, Senegal head coach Cheikh Sarr has decided his final twelve players.
www.fiba.basketball
This team is completely different.
It does appear we will have depth and barring injuries or underwhelming play by some the "fading" shouldnt occur. I do think "fading" because of depth has been a huge issue the past few years.
Every year we come in to the season with valid questions and so far most work out and there have been positive surprises. We enter this season with the same list of question marks and unknown. Most of the questions are different this year.
My 4 most important questions, in order
1. Mag's health.....it is everything. Was last year and it will be this year
2. Do we have a point guard? Beside Mag last year our team went how our point guard play went. Good Paul led a top 10-15 team and bad Paul we were bad. I am not a believer YET of Simpson as a PG and is Fernandes a B1G point guard that can run an offense making players around him better. Good Paul made other players better.
3. Defense....we lose Caleb. Who is going to defend the opponent's best perimeter player. Can the newcomers pick up our team defensive philosopky? Length? We go from being a long team to being maybe below average length team
4. Gavin....will he have an equal or better positive impact offensively than Cam.
I can't even begin to guess the answers to these questions. Without knowing how these goes it is impossible to gauge if we are a 4 seed, a play in game or a Wednesday B1G tournament game. The margin between those can be very small.
The words length, long, and lengthy are used a lot these days to describe basketball players and teams.
Could somebody explain to me what these words mean? Is it simply wingspan?
Gavin seems to have similar length as Caleb, anatomically. But nobody is talking up Gavin’s defense. Cam appeared unlenghthy, but played decent defense.
Length is generally wingspan, specifically as it relates to narrowing passing lanes and bothering shot attempts.
Got it. So Mag has length. What is counting report on Gavin’s defensive length potential? All I read about is his offensive game.
I think Gavin looks quite a bit taller/longer than Caleb and dunks both a lot more and a lot easier than Caleb - I agree on the build - they look about the same height/weight ratio - even though Caleb was listed shorter/heavier.
He’s not going to defend anything like Caleb as a frosh. When was the last time any frosh was in the running for national defensive player of the year?
The question is whether we can be serviceable on D noting also that we lose some overall length compared to last season starters. Let’s see what we hear about the other games abroad. We’re using a lot of subs obviously but giving up 83 points to Senegal doesn’t exactly inspire a wave of confidence.
They were out earlier day with what was described as a 10 mile hike (probably an exxageration) so don't know what kind of legs they had for this game.
A 10 mile hike in 100 degrees up hill the whole way 🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣
Definitely some looking for way too much from one game in Senegal - it's August so just looking for anything I guess.
From the trip in 2019 - https://www.onthebanks.com/2019/8/1...review-barcelona-madrid-valencia-big-ten-ncaa
Looking for nothing, but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t have been an encouraging sign to hold a team (any team) to our usual under 65 in the first scrimmage. We don’t know the talent level we played against either obviously.
If your talking about defense only though, right now there’s no available data suggesting we should expect to be “good” at that end other than that Pike historically has coached defense. How could there be? We project to start at least 2 new starters and our best returning defender is coming off of a bad injury. Servicable is the bar.
Cliff is both a "better" and a more impactful defender than Mag.
Having a rim/paint protector like Cliff changes the things you can do defensively.
I think the overall disconnect that fans gave, are never being able to project forward where players improve, what roles become expanded and how that creates a pecking order in terms of offense, defense, rebounding and passing.
I know it sounds silly, but Hyatt is the 2nd most experienced Scarlet Knight in terms of minutes played behind Cliff. He is also the 2nd highest returning scorer, behind Cliff.
What happened last year with roles/responsibilities, has NO bearing on what fans should expect or not expect this year.
Last year's team was starved of any athletic abilities or lacked an ability to get transition baskets. That placed more emphasis on stationary shooting (Spencer) and the lack of scoring, made fans hyperfocus on any defensive lapse or breakdown by Hyatt, Mulcahy or others, to the point that if RU didn't smother everyone on defense, it was an issue.
Because this team last year was so reliant on Caleb and Mag to be all-B1G caliber defenders, it placed more focus on them, vs reality of the steep dropoff when one or both didn't play.
On the 2023-24 roster, the guard defense will be significantly more effective AND the guards will be able to get cheaper transition baskets (deflections, steals, etc). It reduces the need to Mag or a Caleb type of player, because the guards will be better in the 1st line of defense.
There's virtually no reason this year's roster won't score more points and it should still be a Top 3 B1G defense with the guards and Cliff and Ogbole in the paint.
I know it sounds silly, but Hyatt is the 2nd most experienced Scarlet Knight in terms of minutes played behind Cliff. He is also the 2nd highest returning scorer, behind Cliff.
What happened last year with roles/responsibilities, has NO bearing on what fans should expect or not expect this year.
Last year's team was starved of any athletic abilities or lacked an ability to get transition baskets. That placed more emphasis on stationary shooting (Spencer) and the lack of scoring, made fans hyperfocus on any defensive lapse or breakdown by Hyatt, Mulcahy or others, to the point that if RU didn't smother everyone on defense, it was an issue.
Because this team last year was so reliant on Caleb and Mag to be all-B1G caliber defenders, it placed more focus on them, vs reality of the steep dropoff when one or both didn't play.
On the 2023-24 roster, the guard defense will be significantly more effective AND the guards will be able to get cheaper transition baskets (deflections, steals, etc). It reduces the need to Mag or a Caleb type of player, because the guards will be better in the 1st line of defense.
There's virtually no reason this year's roster won't score more points and it should still be a Top 3 B1G defense with the guards and Cliff and Ogbole in the paint.
I always read and appreciate your posts because I think you actually know what you're talking about. But in this case, I'm not nearly as confident as you are in the potential of our guard play. They are small and inexperienced at B10 level of play. They could be liabilities on defense and even on offense may have trouble getting shots against B10 guards. Also, I think that you and others are overly critical of Paul and Cam's play overall and even defensively. They both were good imo on help D, and in understanding defensive concepts, as well as their basketball IQ in general. The current backcourt is a downgrade from them, imo.
+1
Caleb was an amazing defensive player. He will be missed. But Rutgers was able to be pretty aggressive on the perimeter knowing Cliff was protecting the paint/rim.
So true. If Andre can just focus on finishing (at the rim or from 3) if he is the beneficiary of a quicker, more creative guards.
Confidence is big in shooting
Could be guys that are gone were killing his confidence and with new guys getting him more space and not so many shot clock beating threes he could be much more efficient
You know there is always one poster you can count on to find rain on a sunny day. Avoid the Debbie Downer at all costs. He reads too much into everything. He's the problem looking for a play to happen.
He caught the ball having to shoot it to beat the clock a decent amount of time
Very rare either year during BIG play and we didn’t have an issue getting shots off against cupcakes or even when we were pressing more since we shot more in transition.
Last season - Caleb, Simpson (late season) and Cliff (on those awful fade aways) took most of those shots. Paul tended to avoid shooting except when he was wide open but late in the shot clock it was almost always a ball handling guard who threw up the shot or we forced the ball to Cliff away from the basket in a place where the defense let him get open for the pass because they knew he couldn’t do anything with it there.
