skrabukes Posted February 28 Share Posted February 28 4 minutes ago, TheCommish said: Do you want us to have a whole new team? We need some pieces to stick around. Right now, I’m looking at my exodus yearly unless we have an NIL I honestly have no answer to this. As bad as our record is, I still say this roster is better than a 2 win and 3 win overall team. The problem starts there. That being said, the roster talent isn't going to be improved next year once Sy, Adams and Jo are gone, so hold on to your hats, it's going to be a bumpy ride. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
trueblue32 Posted February 28 Share Posted February 28 (edited) 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? Edited February 28 by trueblue32 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MuchMany Posted February 28 Author Share Posted February 28 I think we'd be best off keeping the five newcomers (Boldin, Fulcher, Sabol, McVeigh, Wilson), I guess Zaakir, and adding seven new players that fit the systems that GH3 wants to run. More shooters, more ball handlers, a good big. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MuchMany Posted February 28 Author Share Posted February 28 1 hour ago, trueblue32 said: 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. 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
trueblue32 Posted February 28 Share Posted February 28 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 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MuchMany Posted February 28 Author Share Posted February 28 3 minutes ago, trueblue32 said: A metric for a metric Why look at days when we're talking about four months?? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
trueblue32 Posted February 28 Share Posted February 28 (edited) 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: Edited February 28 by trueblue32 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
skrabukes Posted February 28 Share Posted February 28 I don't need graphs when a team has 28 turnovers against a .500 Robert's Wesleyan team, or has lost by double digits 11 times (versus 5 wins/single digit losses) since Jan 1. If that's "improvement", it's a scary thought. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tee4three Posted February 28 Share Posted February 28 The UB basketball team from say February 1st until today would beat the November team by 30+ And that's saying something considering UB was handled pretty easily last night against a very average Kent st team the last month or so was the first time I saw actual improvement, the improvement is there the question is in my opinion is it where it should be 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
trueblue32 Posted February 28 Share Posted February 28 (edited) 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 Edited February 28 by trueblue32 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Big 4 Hoops Blogger Posted February 28 Share Posted February 28 (edited) 26 minutes ago, trueblue32 said: 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 It's pretty obvious from a psychological perspective what's happening with the board. This team still had massive expectations during the Whitesell years which according to several people including myself, they didn't meet which led to Whitesell getting fired. Then after another sub-par coaching search, they landed on Halcovage III which people knew wasn't one of their top choices. Most fans had low expectations heading into this season. I predicted 5-10 wins. Early on, it was obvious they were even worse than that. So we're grasping at little things to hang our heads on. See the funny thing about expectations is, when you have none, it's easy to become apathetic and no longer care but when you have high standards, it's easy to be disappointed. That's what's going on with UB basketball right now. Edited February 28 by Big 4 Hoops Blogger Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
skrabukes Posted February 28 Share Posted February 28 37 minutes ago, Tee4three said: The UB basketball team from say February 1st until today would beat the November team by 30+ And that's saying something considering UB was handled pretty easily last night against a very average Kent st team the last month or so was the first time I saw actual improvement, the improvement is there the question is in my opinion is it where it should be While I don't completely disagree with the statement, the "improvement " isn't much, and reasonably every team "should" improve over the course of a season, in theory. Yes, Sabol is serviceable and even solid at times now as a spot up shooter (improvement) and Z isn't completely out of place on the floor now (improvement), but that's picking at straws in the overall scheme. Again, every team should be improving over a season, so even if this one has done so even marginally, other teams have as well. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
UBlearns Posted February 28 Share Posted February 28 (edited) 4 hours ago, trueblue32 said: 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? For what it's worth, Torvik shows trendlines for the reason that shows the team's averages over the season, moving averages over the last 5 games, etc. According to the metrics, UB is playing slightly better basketball, on average, as the year has gone on. That said, those metrics are very bleak and UB is still ranked 346th in the rankings. Edit - whoops, this has already been posted above. I didn't realize there was a second page of this thread, so I didn't see it before posting. My bad. Edited February 28 by UBlearns see above Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Big 4 Hoops Blogger Posted February 28 Share Posted February 28 (edited) I honestly think a complete re-start with the majority of their roster would be a good thing. I'm one of the people that gave them credit for battling against Georgia Southern and EMU but don't believe they've taken major strides. There's been "slight improvement" with this team but not what you would expect for a roster with a bunch of young players seeing time on the court. Imo, they would easily take care of our team from November but that's not saying much. With the way the transfer portal is set up, I think Halcovage needs to heavily target upperclassmen and JUCO's. College basketball isn't what it used to be. It doesn't take 2-3 years to build a roster. While I don't expect them to become a MAC contender overnight, there's no reason they can't do what Bowling Green just did and at least become a .500 MAC school next year with the right collection of guys. I think their next step is attempting to field a competitive roster and they'll need more experienced players from better cultures to pull that off. Edited February 28 by Big 4 Hoops Blogger 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
trueblue32 Posted February 28 Share Posted February 28 (edited) 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) Edited February 28 by trueblue32 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tee4three Posted February 28 Share Posted February 28 1 hour ago, trueblue32 said: 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 Did you just not read the second part of my message? The part that it is concerning that a very average Kent team handled this UB team? Even with the improvement? People that don't see improvement, I don't what to say Is the improvement good enough likely not but it's still there 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
trueblue32 Posted February 28 Share Posted February 28 (edited) 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 Edited February 28 by trueblue32 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chet Posted February 29 Share Posted February 29 6 hours ago, skrabukes said: While I don't completely disagree with the statement, the "improvement " isn't much, and reasonably every team "should" improve over the course of a season, in theory. Yes, Sabol is serviceable and even solid at times now as a spot up shooter (improvement) and Z isn't completely out of place on the floor now (improvement), but that's picking at straws in the overall scheme. Again, every team should be improving over a season, so even if this one has done so even marginally, other teams have as well. The metics don’t lie. UB MBB sucks. The MAC is historically bad and we are the the bottom of the trash heap. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chet Posted February 29 Share Posted February 29 4 hours ago, trueblue32 said: 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 Amen Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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