What is the best win at LSU for Will Wade?

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What is the best win at LSU for Will Wade?

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not getting the death penalty?

Tennessee without Waters.

Being honest, that was probably goaltending.

I love the people who come here and act like Wade is just a terrible coach. He took over a shite program. A program that went 2-16...

He then went to the NIT, then the sweet 16, then had a solidly built squad last year and could have made a run.

Newsflash: every coach has flaws. LSU is in the midst of a semi-slump while playing extremely good teams. LSU should have beaten Texas Tech, but just because we lost doesn’t mean our team or our coach suck. I really don’t understand what is going on on this board the last couple days. Y’all have literally lost your minds.

Vanderbilt 3/9/19

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@UK in 2018.

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This or Tennessee 2018

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These games were in 2019.

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Newsflash: every coach has flaws. LSU is in the midst of a semi-slump while playing extremely good teams. LSU should have beaten Texas Tech, but just because we lost doesn’t mean our team or our coach suck. I really don’t understand what is going on on this board the last couple days. Y’all have literally lost your minds.

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As with everything on this board (and in today's culture) opinions can only lie in the extremes. The reality is that while he has done really well at LSU in his career, he was not the infallible demi-god many had made him out to be prior to the Alabama. He had a weakness (terrible defensive philosophy) that has been there all 4 years and he has stubbornly refused to fix.

On the other hand, he's not "horrible" just because they have lost 3 games recently (two vs. top 10 teams).

The good has far outweighed the bad (investigation still pending). But that doesn't mean he should be beyond criticism either. The defense vs. Alabama and Kentucky was absolutely pathetic. And that level of poor defense wasn't an anomaly. It's just those two opponents grossly exploited it and LSU's generally good offense couldn't keep them in the game. The finale vs. Texas Tech was a complete meltdown at all levels after playing a solid 39 minutes of basketball.

The program's potential for greatness is still there. But Wade will have to change the way some of the things he does to get there.

You gotta throw in Houston from 2017 too. Houston finished 27-8 and lost by 1 to the eventual national runner up in Michigan in the NCAAT. Crazy win when you consider how devoid of talent that team was.

I thought the Texas tech win on Saturday was great!!...oh wait, never mind. I forgot about the last 59 seconds.

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He had a weakness (terrible defensive philosophy) that has been there all 4 years and he has stubbornly refused to fix.

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I was curious about something, I wanted to see how this years defense lined up against previous years. Interestingly enough, we’re actually 94th in the country in FG% defense. We’re 140th in effective FG% defense. But we’re 203rd in defensive efficiency. But we shouldn’t be anywhere near that bad just looking at our FG% defense. We even force about 15 turnovers a game. Just looking at these numbers you’d think we should be middle of the road to slightly below average on D. Here’s the kicker though. We are absolutely TERRIBLE at securing the boards. Like worst in school history type bad. We are an abysmal 338th for opponents OREB%. We allow them to rebound their own shots almost 33% of the time. The last 3 games teams have been getting their own misses 40% of the time. So we do we pretty well on first shot defense, we force a solid number of turnovers, but it’s all wiped out by our inability to rebound the damn ball. We give up a lot of live ball turnovers which doesn’t help either. To really sum it up, all you gotta do is look at our OEPR, or opponents effective possession ratio. This is a number you get by adding the number of your opponents possessions and their offensive rebounds then subtracting your turnovers and dividing by the total number of possessions in the game. It’s apparently one of the most accurate predictors for team success. Our OEPR is 316th.

Now I don’t know if it’s a philosophy issue or if it’s more related to our personnel, it’s probably a nightmare marriage of both. We’ve never been a tremendous defensive rebounding team under Wade, but we’ve never been anywhere near this bad as well. Wade preaches pace, getting out and running the floor for easy opportunities. Obviously the downside to this is we have less bodies to send to the glass. This can be mitigated by having athletic, strong rebounders like KBW, Naz, or Emmitt. This year we don’t have players like that, but we’re still breaking at pace off every miss. If Wade wants to win this year I think he has to commit himself to slowing the pace and sending 3-4 bodies to the glass every possession. I believe our defense would improve tremendously.