As a new poster here, I've been an IU fan dating back to the '90s. I've been reading Peegs and this board for about 10-15 of those years and have never posted. I felt the need to do it now because of what another poster said earlier tonight. This is not verbatim, but to the effect that it's a weird season. We beat Marquette (#10 currently), Louisville (#15 currently), and a solid but not overly talented Butler team and then beat most of the teams we should have beaten aside from the loss at Arkansas. I get that the first two were at home, but still good wins. We squeaked by some Big Ten opening games, but have had 7 straight losses with at least 4 of those being games we were capable of winning. We follow it up with a win at Michigan State (#6)????
My take is that we have overall average talent for a Big Ten team with one player in Langford who will be a lottery pick who is not ready for that but will be drafted on potential of which he has a ton of it. He's got a lot of things to work on in his game though. We have one guy who will be a very good player overseas in Morgan. The rest currently have significant weaknesses aside from Durham who just needs to be more aggressive in my opinion, but will continue to get better. We have been an undersized and often injured team to boot (It's not because of the practice time or intensity.... I don't buy that at all.... I do have some experience with this game). Lastly, we don't shoot the ball well enough to compensate for the deficiencies that we have, but part of the reason for that is the lack of a legitimate low post presence that draws defensive attention. Morgan is not that guy as much as I love him as a player. He is not going to score enough to beat you on the block so they don't have to double as much which doesn't leave players as open and the outside shots aren't clean looks in the flow of the game. And we goes out of the game, we usually have nothing unless Deron is healthy and ready to play and we're willing to feed him. There are other ways to get clean looks, but we don't have those types of shooters in my opinion.
What I saw tonight was a Michigan State team that played very poorly. They played hard, but didn't execute very well and missed so many free throws that it gave us a chance. To our credit, we did make enough plays (and some boneheaded ones though) and played well enough on defense to win the game in the end. We did have more intensity than I've seen in a while as well. The shots we hit in the second half were in the flow of the game more often and came in a game when we had a true inside presence adding a little bit more balance and necessitating attention from the defense.
This win doesn't change my outlook, however. We're not capable of beating these types of teams with the deficiencies we have in our personnel unless they play poorly, and we didn't play well enough for us to say we were responsible for that... they did that themselves. I do believe the last 7 games should have gone much differently in terms of wins and losses had we played with this type of intensity with / without a true low post presence. Some of that is on the coaching staff, but I do believe he is the best coach we've had since Coach. The improvement I saw last year from the beginning of the year to the end of the year is the trend I expected from the this team as well, but that hasn't taken place for multiple reasons. However, everyone should take a deep breath and given him 4-5 years. Anything less than that is ludicrous. Who is going to take a job when your fire people so quickly? The Crean era was excessive given the quality of play.... that was ridiculous. I expect eventually competing late in the tourney on a regular basis and winning a national championship every 10 years or so to be very reasonable at IU. That wasn't going to happen with that style of play.
Done
My take is that we have overall average talent for a Big Ten team with one player in Langford who will be a lottery pick who is not ready for that but will be drafted on potential of which he has a ton of it. He's got a lot of things to work on in his game though. We have one guy who will be a very good player overseas in Morgan. The rest currently have significant weaknesses aside from Durham who just needs to be more aggressive in my opinion, but will continue to get better. We have been an undersized and often injured team to boot (It's not because of the practice time or intensity.... I don't buy that at all.... I do have some experience with this game). Lastly, we don't shoot the ball well enough to compensate for the deficiencies that we have, but part of the reason for that is the lack of a legitimate low post presence that draws defensive attention. Morgan is not that guy as much as I love him as a player. He is not going to score enough to beat you on the block so they don't have to double as much which doesn't leave players as open and the outside shots aren't clean looks in the flow of the game. And we goes out of the game, we usually have nothing unless Deron is healthy and ready to play and we're willing to feed him. There are other ways to get clean looks, but we don't have those types of shooters in my opinion.
What I saw tonight was a Michigan State team that played very poorly. They played hard, but didn't execute very well and missed so many free throws that it gave us a chance. To our credit, we did make enough plays (and some boneheaded ones though) and played well enough on defense to win the game in the end. We did have more intensity than I've seen in a while as well. The shots we hit in the second half were in the flow of the game more often and came in a game when we had a true inside presence adding a little bit more balance and necessitating attention from the defense.
This win doesn't change my outlook, however. We're not capable of beating these types of teams with the deficiencies we have in our personnel unless they play poorly, and we didn't play well enough for us to say we were responsible for that... they did that themselves. I do believe the last 7 games should have gone much differently in terms of wins and losses had we played with this type of intensity with / without a true low post presence. Some of that is on the coaching staff, but I do believe he is the best coach we've had since Coach. The improvement I saw last year from the beginning of the year to the end of the year is the trend I expected from the this team as well, but that hasn't taken place for multiple reasons. However, everyone should take a deep breath and given him 4-5 years. Anything less than that is ludicrous. Who is going to take a job when your fire people so quickly? The Crean era was excessive given the quality of play.... that was ridiculous. I expect eventually competing late in the tourney on a regular basis and winning a national championship every 10 years or so to be very reasonable at IU. That wasn't going to happen with that style of play.
Done
