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trueblue32

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Everything posted by trueblue32

  1. I think JUCO is the answer. It's long been a recruiting "market" inefficiency and especially now if you don't have NIL money, it seems like a space you can compete without money. The issue is Villanova doesn't offer JUCO kids and we have nobody on staff with JUCO background. The staff has no offers out to JUCO kids this year. Last year they whiffed on Greg Gordon, and got Fulcher who has gone on to be one of the worst players (receiving minutes at least) in all of D1. Nobody on this staff has any proven track record of getting creative with piecing together talent. That's another failure by Alnutt and Halcovage that shows their misunderstanding of what has to be done to be successful as a mid-major. I probably don't need to remind most people here, but all of UB's MAC Championship teams had major JUCO contributors: 2015: Justin Moss, Rodell Wigginton, Raheem Johnson 2016: Blake Hamilton, Willie Conner, Rodell Wigginton, David Kadiri 2018: Jeremy Harris, Dontay Caruthers, Montell McRae 2019: Jeremy Harris, Dontay Caruthers, Montell McRae, Tra'Von Fagan (small role)
  2. This actually made me LOL. You are out of your mind. So what's your line for the WMU team (#301) we just lost to by 19 against November UB? 50? Too bad we didn't make all this improvement earlier or we'd be contending for a final four!! JMU only beat us by 15, Bonaventure only beat us by 15, Butler only beat us by 13. This current UB team has to be a lock for at least a Sweet 16 then if we'd win by 30 I truly can't believe the flip this board has done where I was on the optimistic side of posters during the Whitesell years and now people are taking moral victories (that are based on??) from a string of double-digit losses to 3rd and 4th tier MAC teams
  3. It doesn't have date ranges. It has change from preseason, 30 days, 10 days, 1 day. Preseason change is a lot bigger decrease but isn't particularly valuable in my opinion other than highlighting that the quality of our recruits were overrated. The game score line graph isn't particularly interesting to me because it does no accounting for who was on the floor. We look good in the Georgia Southern game because their best player/leading scorer didn't play. We look worse for a chunk of the beginning of the season when Isaiah Adams was out. The marginal "improvement" means basically nothing to me given the noise. Look at Georgia Southern for an example of a more meaningful trend of improvement for a first year coach. We can start at the Richmond game when Isaiah Adams returned from injury, Graham debuted and the first game without Kanye: If we want to be fair and just look at the period before Boldin got injured, this was the 10 game stretch with the most roster continuity:
  4. Pretty good endorsement of Halcovage that people just want to run back the 4 win roster (minus Chatman) rather than let Halcovage hand out any more scholarships lol. I don't know what people are afraid of if we lose Sabol/Boldin/whoever, 3 wins?
  5. On other teams improving: we have a first year coach, 283rd in minutes continuity, 305th in D1 experience. We had a multi-time transfer get eligibility mid-year. We should have had far more room for growth than most teams. I guess my question is do we really believe we're scoring a 20% now? I don't know what result is leading people to that conclusion. We've gotten a few D1 wins, which maybe leads people to think we're improving, but I think that's much more a product of the strength of schedule falling off a cliff due to entering conference play in the worst MAC in ?? years. For reference, Niagara was probably our second worst OOC opponent, we lost by 6 to them. Analytics would slot them in as the 5th best MAC team this year, notably ahead of our best win, Central Michigan.
  6. Do we really think this? We started the season by beating Daemen, a strong D2 team that has even given some of our good teams trouble. Then we lost a close one to Fairleigh Dickinson who isn't an uber-talented team but retained a lot of the core that was last seen beating Purdue in the NCAA tournament. At the time, given the turnover, I was optimistic about being at least a middling MAC team as everything came together. Since then we've seen individual improvement from Sabol and Boldin, and Graham got surprise eligibility and on-court results for the team have gotten worse. We lost by 19 to a terrible WMU team two games ago and people are saying we're improving?
  7. George Halcovage's first "first": 13th place in the MAC
  8. Losing here would essentially eliminate us from the MAC tournament (4 losses back of Kent with 4 to play and a 31 point loss H2H) Gotta be pretty rare to get eliminated from March Madness in February
  9. Offense so good we should remove the player with the best assist rate just to see what happens
  10. TBF my two aren’t getting renewed if halcovage is still here. So at worst they are only 498 off. If halcovage turns it around I’ll buy some single game tickets and buy back in two years, but I see that as low probability so I’ll save myself the money next year. They’re 0-10 with an average losing margin of 14.4 points against D1 opponents on their home court. They are going to hemorrhage season ticket holders. Idk how many there were to begin with but only losing 500 seems optimistic honestly
  11. I don't have a strong opinion on this because I don't watch GSU basketball but GSU's coach inherited a similar caliber team/lesser program, they returned a smaller percentage of their minutes, and they have 5 D1 wins to UB's 2. It took Halcovage OT to beat GSU by 1 without their leading scorer. I'm baffled by the benefit of the doubt that people are giving Halcovage who has tanked a program legitimately as fast as I have ever seen
  12. I sound like a broken record but the issue is that NIU isn't an equally bad opponent. We are closer to the second worst team in the country (Mississippi Valley St. is far and away the worst) than we are to NIU. We are rated as the worst MAC team in over 20 years. We lost to a 2-8 MAC team and moved UP (slightly) in the rankings. This team is atrocious and Halcovage needs to be gone.
  13. Jo has nice touch and the luxury of only taking the open ones. I'd image if you held a 3 point contest in the practice gym Chatman would beat Smith. Some of it is to blame on Chatman's shot selection but it's often that he's given the ball and needs to get a shot and he doesn't have the ball handling ability to beat a defender so he's stuck jacking up a contested 3 off the dribble which isn't a skill many college big men have. I don't fault Chatman at all. It's on the coaches for not giving him playmakers to help him and also for not having found any way to create offense with the players that we do have on the roster.
  14. The issue is that it's not as simple as "just shoot less threes", there is nobody creating better shots inside the arc off the bounce or in the post and Halcovage isn't scheming them into easier looks. Shot selection hasn't been great but the 3P reliance is much more out of necessity than anything else. This coach and team is just terrible, no amount of shot selection tweaking is going to fix this team. 3 point shooting should be a strength of this team. Coming into this season Adams, and Graham's career 3 point shooting numbers are above national average (33.7%). Smith, Boldin and Sabol are all shooting above national average from 3. The team total 3 point shooting numbers are much more indicative of the general dysfunction of the offense than poor shot philosophy imo. They could start trying to move late clock offense inside the arc, but then turnover rates would spike and 2 point percentage would drop and people would say we need to shoot more 3s. It's trying to balance a scale that has a pile of shit on both ends
  15. Halcovage improves to 1-4 against teams with other first year HCs As long as EMU and WMU are missing their leading scorer we might be able to backdoor 5 wins
  16. One good thing: This list is getting easier to put together. 4 of the top rating sites and the teams they rate below UB: The consensus list is down to 7 teams from 14 when I did this after the Ball State game 4 games ago.
  17. I feel like UB fans have a skewed perception of what type of energy a coach should have. Nate Oats and Bobby Hurley (and his brother) are some of the most caustic coaches in all of college basketball. Run down the list of top teams this year and tell me how many others behave like them on the sidelines (not Kelvin Sampson, not Matt Painter, not Rick Barnes, not Scott Drew, and on and on). I think energy is just an easy thing for average fans to critique because it is obvious to everyone. I don't think it's a requisite attribute of a good coach
  18. Main difference is Halcovage didn't evaluate/recruit Sy. Hill signed in May more than a month after Halcovage was hired, that's why I don't give Halcovage a complete pass on needing a full recruiting cycle. TBF on Spurgin he came from Southern Utah with BG's new coach. That needs to be a consideration in today's coaching carousel. You can make a hire and not restart. It's shady but it happened to us when Leipold/Oats/Jack left.
  19. Bowling Green had a worse season last year, has less minutes continuity from last year, also got a new coach and we’re 12.5 point underdogs lol
  20. Frankly at the time of hiring I wanted a head coach with more experience on their resume than Hodgson, but then we whiffed on all of those guys. We just ended up with the inexperienced coach with no connection to UB instead. Now I'd take Hodgson in a heartbeat lol
  21. Halcovage is getting paid the next 4.5 years regardless. He is not required to lead the basketball program for 4.5 years. The relevant questions are: 1.) How much money does the department have in their couch cushions? 2.) Can we hire someone who will do better with that amount of money? 3.) Do we think Alnutt will actually manage to hire someone better? My answers would be: 1.) I have no idea, but if it takes Alnutt running a lemonade stand in the Student Union himself then so be it. 2.) Yes, almost irrespective of the answer to #1. There are roughly 10 teams worse in the entire country. Given our recent success, and conference affiliation (the MAC isn't the Big 10 but it also isn't the SWAC or the MEAC*) almost anybody should be able to avoid putting a bottom 10 caliber product on the court. Nate Oats was a high school math teacher a handful of years before leading our top 25 team. There are qualified (albeit unknown) people out there who would coach this team for $75k. Even if it doesn't work out what's the worst thing that happens? We have another 2 win team? 3.) No, so where does that leave us? Do we wait 4.5 years for the top 25 year to be in the distant past as we try to dig out of a hole greater than what SUNY laughing stock Binghamton** has seen in their basketball program? Do we wait two more years? Do we give Halcovage extensions until Alnutt retires? *UB is currently rated #349 in the country on KenPom. There has literally NEVER been a MAC team rated that low. KenPom goes back to 1999 when there were 315 D1 teams. **Binghamton bottomed out at #344 3 years after a scandal forced out their coach and most of their roster. Their best player this season was Jimmy Gray, a Binghamton High School product who started his career at the school as a walk on. He would have been the best guard on the current UB roster
  22. I disagree. Halcovage was a complete unknown, it’s extremely risky to just hire a young guy off a high major staff when you have no visibility into what role he actually played in their success. Bucknell interviewed Halcovage, for whatever reason he didn’t get the job, and even they have 9 D1 wins now. This is really not excusable for Alnutt. He fired Whitesell too early implying that he had some plan that he clearly didn’t and cost UB extra money. He then very publicly got dunked on by like 10 candidates that turned us down. Then hired the Bucknell rejectee and has since watched our program spiral to uncharted depths. I was willing to be optimistic because high major assistants are unknown and maybe he works out. He very clearly has not. It literally almost cannot get any worse. People seem to be taking the stance that there is no performance that is fireable in year 1. There’s nothing to suggest that this will get any better after the few D1 caliber players from Whitesell disappear off the roster. We’re going to run this program into the ground for another season just for the prayer that he somehow magically puts it together in year 2? We’re painted into a corner here financially but I’d truly pay a top Buffalo high school coach whatever to be the coach. We know Halcovage isn’t the future so let’s start playing the lottery, even if it’s the $1 scratch offs until he and Whitesell off the books
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