re: The lack of a big man is killing us

Alt I have seen you go in on the defense and WW's coaching of defense in multiple threads. (justified as it has been bad)

BUT, it seems to me that this shouldn't be looked at as if it is football. By that I mean football has been a consistent winner for 20 years now and has set the bar to a point where anything short of playoff contention gets us upset.

With Basketball, we are not even 3 years removed from going 2-16 in SEC play, we haven't made back to back tournaments since the early 2000s, and like it or not the current roster was affected by the Wade suspension.

I understand being frustrated that our team is poor defensively but should we not, as a fan base, take a step back and realize where we are? We have a team that is probably going to make the tournament for the second year in a row. We have a really good recruiting class coming in for next year. We have team that is competitive in every game and doesn't quit. (they easily could have rolled over last night but didn't).

Sure there are things that we could be doing better and WW shoulders some of the blame but this program is so much better today than it was when he took over.

I'm not trying to say that Wade is above criticism, I am just trying to convey that our program is better than it has been in a long time. While Wade may not be perfect, he is the guy that has gotten us here.

IDK what I'm trying to say other than if I told you 3 years ago that WW would have us int he tournament almost every year with the occasional run then pretty much everyone would have been over the moon.

quote:

---

Alt26

---

Alt you’re looking at this from the wrong perspective. The issue isn’t really opponents 2pt FG% in the paint as much as it is our lack of ability to defend the drive and kick and our tendency to get caught in rotation because of how our defense tends to crash hard when we give up dribble penetration. Now some of this has to do with our players attempting to compensate due to our lack of a true rim protector, some of it has to do with laziness or fatigue, and some of it has to do with coaching philosophy. But I do think that if we had a KBW type player it would greatly help our defense by discouraging deep drives into the paint and it would free up the other 4 defenders to worry about their own assignment rather than helping in the paint. So it wouldn’t fix all our woes but it would help tremendously. I mean just look at least season. Our 3 point defense wasn’t incredible by any means, but 147th in opponents 3pt % is way better than 288th. Especially because our opponents shot a similar number of 3s a game last year against us as they have this year (23.8 in 2018 vs 25.7 in 2019/20)