trueblue32

56 minutes ago, enrique14150 said:

There's a difference between the games where you sat back and saw a team that was trying but just wasn't nearly as good as their opponent, and a clown show where they miss all their foul shots down the stretch and one guy throws a shoe in a loss to an equally bad opponent.

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.

8 minutes ago, Bluebird96 said:

When your 6’9 offensively-challenged F/C is making them at a higher clip than your leading scorer, that’s a problem.

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.

34 minutes ago, Bluebird96 said:

I’m no basketball genius, but that seems like something they should be emphasizing by now with 3/4 of the season in the rear view mirror 

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

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

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.

2 minutes ago, TheCommish said:

JW is almost 20 years older than BH or NO. Talk to me in 5 or 10 years. We all slow down with age. Energy? I don’t find bill self and his bench coaches as energy coaches. The bench has a few towel wavers at the end.

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

3 minutes ago, MuchMany said:

Crazy. They got the leading JUCO scorer in the nation in Marcus Hill and he's averaging like 25/game in MAC play. But I guess that's like us getting a newcomer like Sy. They got Jason Spurgin, a starting senior center from Utah St. We didn't get anything like that. 

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.

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

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

18 hours ago, DaBulls99 said:

You paying that 4.5 year buyout? Sit down. 

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

48 minutes ago, enrique14150 said:

Show of hands who ACTUALLY thought this was a bad hire last summer. People wanted a young, ambitious coach.  The buck stops at the top - but Halcovage looked great on paper and exactly the kind of guy who you want to take the next step at this level. The AD is ultimately responsible for how things are going, but based on what we all read at the time, I would've hired this guy too.

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

31 minutes ago, Tee4three said:

I believe it was said that he needed a vet, an NBA player and the third seat could be whoever he wanted 

I miss having an AD with a vision

The only pro I can see for not firing Halcovage after year 1 is that it would mean we don’t have to watch Alnutt flub another hire. Alnutt has to go before MBB opens again. Don’t know where all that money comes from though

2 hours ago, DocCas86 said:

Looking at the seasons for the UB transfers from last year:

The only players that would have made a meaningful impact on team this year would have been Jack, Jones and Ceaser.

Powell and Hardnett also would have? I feel like people aren't fully grasping how bad this year's team is. Powell was a player everyone complained about last year and he'd be the best guard on this team by a mile and a half. Like many things, college basketball talent is normally distributed. Last year we were somewhere in the middle of the pack where most teams fall and it felt bad. Now we are nearly at the very tail end of the college basketball talent distribution with no sign of water meeting its level analytically, as we are still underperforming projections and still falling.

Per KenPom we are closer to the worst team in the country this year (+15.06 AdjEM) than we are to last year's team (-15.25 AdjEM), a performance that got Whitesell fired and was UB's worst in ~20 years. This team would be a 10.5 or 11 point underdog to last year's team.

Edit:
EvanMiya's BPR is the best all-in-one CBB stat I've found. A BPR of 0.0 is D1 average with a BPRof 1.0 meaning that the player is 1 point per 100 possessions better than an average player. This year's team has 1 player that is considered above D1 average (barely). Shawn Fulcher is rated as the 5th worst player in the country who has played at least 250 possessions. Change is since the preseason.


The transfers' current ratings:
Jones: 4.70 BPR
Hardnett: 1.69 BPR
Jack: 1.46 BPR
Powell: 1.02 BPR
Ceaser: 0.85 BPR
Mading: -1.92 BPR
Blocker: -2.82 BPR

2 hours ago, UBinMD said:

So we dodged a bullet on that one??

Without knowing what he did, we have had two players disappear from the team and neither averaged 17/5/3 while they were here so I'd still have taken him lol

1 hour ago, DaBulls99 said:

Ah yes. So the coach will play scared and not want to recruit over the current pile of dog crap to continue to be bottom 15 in the country. Makes sense. 

"Please join my team that won two games last year and lost 50% of its production. If you don't excel despite being surrounded by a complete void of talent you will be finding a new school this time next year." is a hell of a recruiting pitch.

It's funny that you think he'd be able to fill 13 scholarships with talented players when he went 0 for 7 in year one (save me the Sabol and Boldin talk, they're fine but they are hardly contributing to winning games at this point in their career) and he couldn't beg anyone with eligibility to take the 8th one that he had open

11 minutes ago, DaBulls99 said:

We could literally cut the whole team and start fresh if we wanted. To say right we’ll be worse is total BS. At least wait until we have a finished roster. 

Parents of prospective recruits love it when a coach has a history of running off scholarship players

43 minutes ago, eyjee said:

I think there's a lot of revisionist history happening on Whitesell in here.

I won't speak for anyone else but I'm fully aware of what transpired in the Whitesell years.
All I'm saying is that it was a lot more fun when in his worst season he had 10 wins on January 24th instead of 2. It was a lot more fun when in Whitesell's worst seasons we were still participating in the MAC tournament, not trending towards elimination by February.

You also highlighted all the talent that you felt like he underachieved with, it's a fair point, but getting talent on the roster and keeping it is still part of being a coach, and Whitesell was generally successful at it. Do you think you can say the same thing about Halcovage? Chatman/Smith/Adams/Kanye were all stuck here due to NCAA rules so who is the most talented player that Halcovage recruited or retained? Where would you slot them into the rotation on the Segu/Williams/Hardnett/Mballa/Skogman/Jack/Brewton teams?

My defense of Whitesell was always that UB is a lot closer to falling off the map *broadly gesturing at the current situation* than becoming the Gonzaga of the East or a perennial top 25 team or whatever Nate Oats tricked half this board into believing. UB's path forward was maintaining competitive relevance and hoping to get scooped up into a better conference in the next round of realignment (that ship has sailed). We're now two coaches removed from our top 25 football and MBB teams. I'm now over pretending that we're destined for something special and I would just like to see a competitive product at a minimum.

1 minute ago, skrabukes said:

.500? Are you watching the same stuff that I am? They will be lucky to win 5 next year in total. This team will be worse next year, if that's possible. Losing Sy, a 1st team mac caliber guy is very big, with nothing in the pipeline. 

To be clear I'm very much on your side. I was giving an optimistic projection since I was asking what the optimistic people are thinking. Smith and Adams are also likely going to be in position to graduate and get a free transfer regardless of whatever happens with the NCAA's two time transfer stuff. It's very likely that we will have at most 40% of the scoring production returning from what is currently a two win team.

22 minutes ago, Tee4three said:

Never said that had we kept whitesell we would be better currently.....I mean that's pretty obvious 

Maybe if we're still paying him we can eat Halcovage's contract instead and bring Whitesell back.. I'm only half joking

41 minutes ago, enrique14150 said:

I think there's a sense of, Halcovage is in his first year and he gets some patience from people for that.  But no one thought it would be THIS bad.  They were a .500 team last year.  I thought it might be a little ragged but not THIS bad.  You're not wrong to cut the guy some slack in his first season - you're also not wrong to say, you came into a program that has some standards and expectations and those are really not being met.

My stance on it is that "not being bottom 15 in the country" is a reasonable bar for a first year coach. He didn't add the talent to avoid that and he's not doing anything Xs and Os wise to elevate the talent above that. On top of that the roster is unexplainably shrinking in size as well as fan support. I'd like to know what exactly people think he's bringing to the table. 

What are the patient people hoping to see next year? .500 in the MAC if we're lucky? The same record that got Whitesell canned?

39 minutes ago, DocCas86 said:

I had to look up the program rankings as it was a new one to me.   Here are details from Kenpom.

https://kenpom.com/blog/program-ratings/

Here is a view of the MAC - UB would rank 5th in the MAC.

Let's hope that GH3 is able to turn things around.

 

 

Important to note that the program rankings don't update until after the season. There's a decent shot we drop below at least Miami after this season. IUPUI was the biggest faller last season (among non-recent transitioners), dropping 23 spots after finishing ranked 360.

These are all made up numbers so who cares I guess, but they help quantify what a disaster Halcovage has been. Somehow it feels like this board was more pessimistic when Whitesell was here than when Halcovage is actively running this program into the ground. I guess all but the most optimistic have just stopped caring, and I counted myself in the more optimistic group during the Whitesell years.

14 minutes ago, MuchMany said:

Wow. We're such an outlier in that consensus list, as a large flagship state research university. Especially considering the success we had within the past five years (I'd love to see the high water mark for each school in that list). Appreciate you taking the time to lay out this perspective, bitter as it is.

KenPom does have that data. Here is the whole program ranking page for these teams, sorted by best season:

With ratings updated, here are the complete list of teams that major rating sites have rated below UB (out of 362 D1 teams):


They all agree on only 14 teams being worse than UB (3.8% of all D1 teams). If UB was an underfunded HBCU, a service academy, or a recent D2->D1 transition school then Halcovage would be doing pretty well!

Edit: and for fun the consensus teams and their KenPom program rankings:

6 minutes ago, RapidsFan said:

“Guys keep coming back, thinking we got to get better the next day.”

Rich given that he couldn’t find anyone willing to take the 13th scholarship and two other scholarship players have disappeared.

Shoutout to Lenzi though since she’s the only person left on a once full media row