trueblue32

19 minutes ago, UBinMD said:

AJ might have cracked it if he hadn't gotten hurt, but Sabol would have been the only other option and that would have been a stretch. 

Honestly don't think Boldin deserved it either. Ranks among the top 10 MAC freshmen in mins:

PRPG! (usage adjusted ORtg):
Sabol - 7th
Boldin - 9th

PER:
Boldin - 6th
Sabol - 8th

Box Plus/Minus:
Boldin - 6th
Sabol - 9th

Win Shares:
Boldin - 8th
Sabol - 9th

EvanMiya's BPR:
Sabol - 8th
Boldin - 10th

In a "rebuilding year" in the worst MAC in 20+ years, Halcovage brought in 5 freshmen and went 0 for 5 on all-freshmen players.

1 minute ago, UBinMD said:

So rock bottom is official. Buffalo got no post season accolades, not even MAC Honorable Mention for Sy. Not that I disagree, but there are basically 20 spots( 1st, 2nd, 3rd, Honorable) and we have none of them, truly embarrassing. Certainly All-Defense was out the window. Definitely not 6th man. Hopefully better things to come!

Notably no freshmen on the all freshmen team, which favors bad teams because freshmen get to put up numbers without veteran competition. The rebuild is going strong, look out for us in 3 years if nobody backs up the Brinks truck and steals our freshmen stars

39 minutes ago, UBinMD said:

Of note, Villanova is a bubble team this season, so is that pool as deep as we thought or was Jay Wright really good and his saplings aren't quite as good?

Jay Wright's had 12 assistants go on to become D1 head coaches. The most successful of the bunch is probably Pat Chambers whose resume is highlighted by 9 years at Penn State before getting fired with 0 tournament appearances. I think being from the Jay Wright coaching tree means very little at this point

14 minutes ago, enrique14150 said:

For me, the transfers who are already juniors and seniors don't get any better.  It seems like a shortcut to competitiveness but it's fleeting, and your turnover goes way up.  Once this was a "lost year" I didn't mind seeing the freshmen get lots of minutes because it may pay off down the line - provided they stay.  I fully recognize that didn't work out for UB with Skogman, Jones, Jack, etc.  But if the team is going to lose, I'd rather they lose with players with the potential for being good in a year or two.  Rather than "it's a bunch of random transfers, they aren't winning now and they're not going to get any better."

Lowest ranked MAC teams and what their freshmen did in their careers:
2022 - WMU (#329). Josiah Freeman playing D2. Owen Lobsinger junior on the #7 team in the MAC. Gus Etchison playing NAIA.
2021 - NIU (#337) had no freshmen contributors
2020 - WMU (#237). B Artis White, Titus Wright seniors on the #7 team in the MAC. Chase Barrs senior barely playing on a terrible Florida A&M team
2019 - WMU (#255). William Boyer-Richard finished his career at a school in Canada. Patrick Emilien transferred twice.
2018 - Akron (#255). Virshon Cotton transferred 3 times. Eric Parrish transferred twice. Torrey Patton transferred and contributed to some good Cleveland St. teams in the Horizon. Mark Kostelac transferred to a D2 school. Jaden Sayles transferred to Stony Brook.

I won't keep going but this isn't viable, not to mention that this team is starting from a worse place than any that I listed above. I think Sabol/Boldin/Wilson could be contributors on the next good UB team. I do not think they will be stars on the next good UB team. It's not the end of the world if we lose any of them. Building in 4 year cycles is not a viable strategy any more. It's not to say that we will not have 4 year players and we shouldn't aim to recruit and develop HS kids, but you can't build a program on a prayer that everyone stays. You need to replace transfers out with equal or better transfers in. We are also no longer above "shortcuts to competitiveness", we suck. We are two coaches and an AD removed from the good teams. This coach has no track record of leading a successful program in any way. It is going to be hard to recruit/retain players to a program coming off 4 wins. It's on the staff to identify underrecruited talent in any shape or size.

Sorted by PRPG! it looks a lot worse though. Usage and quality of opponent are important context when looking at ORtg and PRPG! bakes that in. Scoring is just one part of the picture anyway. BPM highlights that none of the freshmen were particularly productive in any secondary or tertiary category, which is to say that none of them excel at rebounding, assisting, blocking shots, or forcing turnovers. On top of all of that, Sabol's already strong shooting and limited size/athleticism, suggests that he likely has less room for improvement than the Graves/Reese/Jeenathans.

I also disagree with filtering down to just MAC play. 30 games is already a small enough sample and cutting it in half to only compare this year's freshmen against the worst MAC in 20+ years is needlessly adding noise to this analysis. For example, 750 3PA is a general guideline for meaningful sample in regard to 3P% stabilization. McVeigh's 42 3PA on the season obviously doesn't come anywhere near that, so cutting it even further into a 27 attempt sample means even less.

1 hour ago, bullsbball said:

Not sure I agree with this statement.  I'm so tired of people saying "bring in his type of players" (still).  GH3 had MANY opportunities to bring in his players through the transfer portal before the start of the season. But instead, he brought in a bunch of freshman guards.  I was under the impression that he "brought in his type of players" THIS season and look what happened.

You're right. Anyone saying otherwise is coping with the fact that this coaching staff sucks. Imagine actually thinking that Sy Chatman was the major issue on this team. Even if we pretend that he was, is Halcovage being so spineless that he can't just bench him really an excuse for Halcovage?
 

Halcovage's "Guys":

Fulcher - 83.2 ORtg on 22.5% usage
Sabol - 102.3 ORtg on 15.2% usage
Boldin - 101.0  ORtg on 13.7% usage
Wilson - 84.1 ORtg on 14.5% usage
Graham - 62.7 ORtg on 14.0% usage
McVeigh - 86.5 ORtg on 11.1% usage

Halcovage went 6 for 6 on bringing in below average (106.5) offensive performers and that's with them all having to carry small loads (with the exception of Fulcher). Not to mention Famakinde never playing and disappearing off the roster. When people complain about Adams or Chatman the extent of their analysis is "these are the guys that missed the most shots". Which of the Halcovage guys should Adams and Chatman have been deferring more to? The correct answer is none of them. This team was atrocious and the only players that were D1 caliber are likely to be gone next year. If you choose to be baselessly optimistic about transfers or whatever that's fine we can let it play out, but we don't need to do this BS revisionist history that Chatman and Adams were holding this team back from mediocrity, much less greatness.

56 minutes ago, everlast2504 said:

My downplaying wasn't so much as we don't need it. But more of we don't need a lot of money to compete. We don't need millions to compete with the top athletes because we aren't going to get them anyways. I feel the public looks at the top deals and thinks all deals are somewhere in that realm. When the reality is that at the top the money may be millions, but on average NIL deals are well well under 10k. That's if there is any NIL deal.

Agree with this and I also would imagine that the NIL deals people are hearing of in the first couple years are likely to the be the high end that gets offered at any point. If Akron supporters are paying $100k a piece to Ali and Freeman, are they seeing $100k in return for whatever business venture is paying them that? Akron reported an attendance of 2331 last game, and I'm supposed to believe those two are appropriately valued at a combined $200k? How many years of payments like that do Akron boosters want to make out of the goodness of their heart? Is the answer 0 if they don't make the tournament this year?

I do believe UB needs to get more organized on the NIL front, but I don't see any MAC school regularly posting a 6 figure salary cap. I think there's still a lot of settling to be done in the college landscape, with NIL and the portal being new, and kids still with extra years of eligibility from COVID. I don't think college sports will really ever go back to what it was but I feel like this is an NIL bubble that's about to pop, at least for mid-majors.

38 minutes ago, UBinMD said:

Better be careful blaming anything on players. Players are only responsible when they win. When you lose, the coaches need to be accountable. They are just kids after all.

This seems to be directed at me for my comment yesterday that Adams/Chatman/Smith are not to blame for the lack of organization anywhere on the offensive end, which is still true. I do think there are plenty of bad players on this team. I just don't think they're the ones that have proven D1 track records prior to Halcovage showing up, they're the ones that Halcovage brought in. Which again, is Halcovage's fault. If you care to break down the film and show me where those 3 are killing the boy genius' masterful offensive scheme I would love to watch it

5 minutes ago, MuchMany said:

Bryson Wilson is a reason to be excited for next season. His skill is catching up with his athleticism.

Hes already maybe the best defender on the team too. Never understood why he was chained to the bench in blowouts. Lets get him some experience

15 hours ago, UBinMD said:

I realize he may have been out of position at times, but I would not have said he was the primary PG in any game.

He was absolutely the primary ball handler leading up to his injury. His injury forced Sabol and Fulcher to gain more experience and they have since taken some of that load off of him

15 hours ago, UBinMD said:

Sabol, Fulcher, Sy and Adams all had times bringing the ball up.

This is an antiquated way of defining the point guard. At least when they aren't being pressed it's more about who you want as the ball handler in the first ball screen of whatever action you're running.

16 hours ago, UBinMD said:

One reason his shooting percentage dreadful were to poor shot selection, the rest was just poor shooting in general that should have been better assuming they practiced shooting.

His per possession 3PAs are up 6%. Almost all of his usage increase has been inside the arc which he has improved on significantly. He's taking 0.6 more 3PA per 100 possessions. If he's not forcing considerably more 3PA it's not a shot selection issue. There's an illusion of shot selection but we're the 336th ranked offense. How many possessions per game is Halcovage scheming up open shooters where Isaiah Adams is killing the ball movement before it gets to the open shooter by taking bad shots?

16 hours ago, UBinMD said:

His FT shooting has improved but it would have been hard to have been worse.

National average was 71.7% and he shot 66.7% (on a small 60 shot sample), this is an over exaggeration.

16 hours ago, UBinMD said:

I am not laying it all at his feet by any stretch, but he, Sy and Joe should have been the veteran guys looking to lead, they fell short of that and regressed into 1 on 3 basketball for much of the early season. 

Stop blaming the college kids for the failings of the guy getting paid $400k a year

20 minutes ago, MuchMany said:

Although not having a lead guard like Jones forced Adams to play out of position as a point forward (essentially a lead guard) and likely threw his game into the uneven state we see. Having an actual lead guard, while not worth ten wins, would have slotted everyone including Adams into a more appropriate position, role, and rank in the pecking order.

Exactly, the Adams bashing is super weird. Given the state of disarray on this team his switch from PF to PG has been as good as you could have hoped for.

-His assist to turnover ratio improved from 0.53 to 1.18
-His free throw percentage went up from 66.1% to 70.8%. This isn't super notable but suggests to me that his shot isn't broken and the 3P% regression is a result of decreased quality of opportunity.
-His 2P% at the rim increased from 54.4% to 67.1% despite the assist rate on those looks going down from 41.9% to 23.6%. Not to mention that the team's 3 point shooting has regressed which allows defenses to collapse on drivers.

So he's improved:
-His ability to create for others
-His ball protection
-His free throw shooting
-His ability to create for himself
-His ability to finish

It's weird that people think that a career 34% 3 point shooter steps onto the worst team in UB history and becomes a 22% 3 point shooter and it's a result of his regression rather than a product of the team context

12 minutes ago, Tee4three said:

Did you just not read the second part of my message? 

I did but it didn’t need to be dignified after the first sentence. I guess the discrepancy here is my interest in improvement is relative to the rest of the D1 landscape because improvement against ourselves is meaningless. I’m not going to clap because they throw the ball out of bounds slightly less often en route to still losing by 20. Nobody has shown me anything that rises above statistical noise that indicates that we have improved relative to other D1 teams. We were across the board ranked in the 340s a month ago and we still are today. I’m glad it’s slightly more palatable for you than it was a month ago.

Recruits care about winning, not about if UB's turnover percentage was down 2% in the month of February. Good luck with pitching them on Tee4Three seeing marginal improvement

44 minutes ago, Big 4 Hoops Blogger said:

With the way the transfer portal is set up, I think Halcovage needs to heavily target upperclassmen and JUCO's.

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)

19 minutes ago, Tee4three said:

The UB basketball team from say February 1st until today would beat the November team by 30+ 

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 

34 minutes ago, MuchMany said:

Why look at days when we're talking about four months?? 

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:

41 minutes ago, MuchMany said:

Pretty clear, if unimpressive, improvement. Matches the eye test of effort and organization. It's been marginal but the freshmen have matured and we don't look totally lost as a team anymore. 

A metric for a metric

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?

38 minutes ago, UB92 said:

I am sure we have improved some...in that there are parts of the game (for minutes at a time) we are playing better basketball than we were during the first several games.  Of course, other teams have improved as well.

 

If a student fails an exam with a grade of 10 out of 100...then...after studying/training...takes the exam again and gets 20/100...you can say they improved a lot.  But...it's still 20.

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.

12 hours ago, squire17 said:

UB is bad, but I think that they have improved from the start of the season at least.

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?

24 minutes ago, DooleyBull06 said:

We need to get our sh!t together in the two big sports. 

George Halcovage's first "first": 13th place in the MAC

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

58 minutes ago, MaineBull said:

His minutes can can be given to anyone.  What he is giving us is nothing but, terrible attitude, awful defense, no rebounding, no leadership, terrible shot selection and he limits ball movement as it stops when it gets to him always.  Anyone who knows anything aboit basketball knows hiw much he has let this team down. 

Offense so good we should remove the player with the best assist rate just to see what happens

5 minutes ago, TheCommish said:

Are you always so negative?

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

24 minutes ago, TheCommish said:

GH3 is not good but way better than Georgia southern coach. Hes very bad imo 

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

16 hours ago, TheCommish said:

Are you eating his contract? Do you want Alnutt hiring the replacement?