HookEm

I think he is a player you want to keep and develop. He was a national top-50 player coming out of high school. If he sticks around, I wouldn't be surprised if he was a contributor next year.

He is athletic and someone I thought might end up getting minutes by the end of his career. But really, we will be able to find better players through the portal. Best for everyone for him to move on to somewhere he can get minutes.

I have zero doubt we would have lost last night with Shaka coaching.

I think of Avery Benson.

Yes, I agree. I think Westbrook is his best comp. He is going to be unstoppable if he can add 10-15 pounds of muscle, gets more confident with his 3-ball and gets his free throws up into the mid 80s.

This is exactly why he is coming off the bench. Would you rather have a second lineup with Horton, Brock and Shedrick? That group is slow footed AF. Weaver provides a great spark to the second unit, and it isn't really needed on the first unit with Dillon Mitchell out there. He still doubled Horton's minutes and was in the closing group. I can't understand why people can't see that the composition of the different lineups matters tremendously, and Weaver is better in the 2nd unit (also going against the other team's second unit).

Man this dude balled out yesterday. Has me wondering about his maximum upside. At 6-3, he has NBA point guard size. And he definitely has enough athleticism to play at that level. Most of his efficiency stats are up this year, despite playing better competition. Last year he was a 40% shooter from 3 on reasonable volume. In conference last year, he shot 45% from 3 on 2.7 attempts per game. I think the game will slow down for him over the next year and he is going to be really, really good.

Let me just repeat that CSU was ranked higher than us on KenPom prior to the game. And CSU just beat the ever loving shit out of Virginia. I mean, beat them so bad that it may actually set their program back by a few years. And Virginia was the 3rd ranked team in... wait for it... the ACC. NC State finished 10th in the ACC for reference. The Virginia game was in hand for the entire 2nd half. If CSU wasn't rested, that is on them. They could have pulled their starters with 15 minutes to go in that game.

Part of Disu's frustration was caused by the fact that their bigs were lowering their shoulders and offensive fouling constantly. Then he gets called for ticky tack fouls and is sent to the bench. He could never get in a rhythm either inside or from the perimeter. We won, so nobody it talking about it much, but I thought the game was called in a way that favored CSU bigtime. The ending foul disparity didn't look so bad because of all the intentional fouls at the end. Tennessee is going to be an even more physical matchup, unfortunately.

This year to date: Overall - #25 AdjO - #27 AdjD - #39 Chris Beard (2022): Overall - #15 AdjO - #26 AdjD - #14 Shaka Smart (2016-2021): Overall - #43 AdjO - #77 AdjD - #26 Rick Barnes (1999-2015): Overall - #25 AdjO - #38 AdjD - #39

Beard absolutely didn’t overachieve in his first year here. He won a single tournament game. Woo hoo. Throw a parade. He deserves credit for reloading with some players who had already won 1st Team All Conference honors in Carr (Big 10), Allen (PAC 10), Tre Mitchell (A10). But he also lost a lot of talent when he got here. And ultimately won a single tourney game. I expected more out of that group honestly. And it looked like we were on our way in 22-23.

If Aggy can blow out Tennessee, I’m pretty sure we can beat them.

Remember when there was a lot of talk about Texas hiring Calipari? I would rather have RT at this point. Dude is doing nothing with the most resources in CBB.

CSU sucks. I mean, yes they beat 3-seed Creighton by 21. And yes they beat 5-seed SDSU by 8. And yes they blew the fuck out of Virginia. And yes they beat Nevada and Colorado. But trust me they suck.

I am not the biggest Horton fan, but I really like bringing Weaver off the bench. His energy really brings a spark and helped us with the 25-3 run. Rice gave a similar spark last year off the bench. Weaver is in the closing 5 and that is what matters. Also Horton had a pretty good game. His 7 rebounds were big. Played good defense too. In the end Weaver got double his minutes which is about right. This was the fewest points CSU has scored in THREE years. They aren’t scrubs. At one point they were ranked 13th. You could make a case that they should have been an 8/9 seed.

It is much more tiring to play good defense than good offense. I also suspected that some of Barnes' players were simply worn out and it impacted their free throw shooting. You can especially see it at the end of the games when players leave them short.

BTW, on the subject of free throw shooting, this is the best free throw shooting team we have had since at least 1997, maybe ever. And not by a little bit, by two whole percentage points. Previous best was 73.6% with Durant. This year... 75.7%. The 2010 Barnes team shot 63.3%. Holy hell.

I don't HATE the strategy, but one of the critical elements of that strategy is that you MUST MUST MUST have good free throw shooters. And far too often we would be a very poor free throw shooting team. Now I have this data courtesy of my new KenPom subscription... UT's Free Throw rank under Barnes: 00 - 264 01 - 269 02 - 177 03 - 77 (Final 4) 04 - 190 05 - 142 06 - 57 (Elite 8 ) 07 - 36 (Durant) 08 - 189 09 - 246 10 - 326 11 - 282 12 - 47 13 - 270 14 - 272 15 - 70 There are some REAL stinkers in there. And it really hindered some of those teams.

I've got no ill feelings towards Barnes. Someday hopefully he gets a statue at Moody. But he has nobody to blame but himself for losing his fastball while at Texas. Everything he has done at Tennessee could have been done better here. Oh well, sometimes you need a reset. It is going to be funny if RT ends up being the most successful coach of the last 15 years while at Texas. Beard, Barnes, and Shaka are all better coaches, but they each had their issues here. Beard's were off the court. Barnes couldn't quite figure out how to get the super elite recruits to buy into his hard ass approach for a full season. If he could have targeted a different player and adopted a Michigan State approach of taking top 20-50 guys and developing them, I think he would have been better off than with all the one and dones. And Shaka just went away from his bread and butter. Every so often we would press and look incredible. Nope nope nope, his stubborn ass had to change his style and we sucked for it. Every one of those guys had an ego and stubbornness that got them into trouble here.

I appreciate the honesty. I however will have zero mixed emotions if we lose to Barnes. F that. I'm hoping he gets upset in round 1 and we don't have to play them.

I assume you are rooting for us to beat him tho.

Yep. For continuity, FAU is #1 (and also #41 in Experience). I would NOT want to play them in the tourney. Wisconsin is #8 in Continuity and #48 in Experience. Creighton is #40 in Continuity and #8 in Experience. Also a team I wouldn't want to play.

We forget that Beard had a similar style to Bennett at Tech (and to a lesser degree at Texas). Incredible defense and extremely slow pace, boring but efficient offense. If he got to 50 points, good chance they were going to win. And if they were ever up by 10 points, it was game over. But... his offense could be really painful to watch at times. I personally liked Beard because he wins AND because I really like watching a smothering team defense. I enjoyed the Virginia vs. Tech national title game quite a bit, but it got a lot of negative press prior to the game predicting it would be a slow, difficult watch.

Another interesting chart... ranking the current teams by experience. I knew we had to be one of the most experienced teams in the country, and turns out we are.