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Post by professorhoya on Jan 25, 2024 1:05:08 GMT -5
The legend of Akok grows by the day. Currently averaging 4.4 points and 3.5 rebounds per game for a bad West Virginia team. And people want us to believe that if he was getting Massoud or Fiekder’s minutes, we’d be way better. 1.4 blocks per game. 3.2 blocks per 40 minutes (2nd highest of his career) We certainly could have used his rim protection at the end of the Xavier game where Xavier scored 3 straight unimpeded layups at the basket. And they just beat Kansas which I believe is top five in the nation.
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SSHoya
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"Forget it Jake, it's Chinatown."
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Post by SSHoya on Jan 25, 2024 6:40:16 GMT -5
How about if Dante Harris was our PG? I don't know if Cooley tried to keep him but I believe he'd be an upgrade for our current situation. I won't say "way better" but only "better"! Dante Harris' numbers at Virginia: MPG: 18.2 FG: 10-36 (.278) 3FG: 2-10 (.200) FT: 8-15 (.533) REB: 21 AST: 15 TO: 8 STL: 7 PTS: 30 (3.3) Tonight vs. NC State: 19 min., 0-5 FG virginiasports.com/boxscore/vs-nc-state-111/Yup, the Hoyas surely couldn't use an experienced quick on-ball defender PG. Not at all. Is he a starter ahead of Beekman? No, but he's a more than capable backup to him. Hence, Bennett plays him 18 minutes a game and I've even seen him at PG with Beekman at the SG on occasion. Dante is one of the quickest on-ball defenders that I’ve coached,” Bennett said. “And look, I’ve had Kihei [Clark], Reece [Beekman] is a terrific on-ball defender, and then a guy named Jontel Evans when I first took over the job who was tenacious.” That’s a high level of praise from Bennett, and it speaks to how Harris fits the mold of a player that the Wahoo staff prioritizes in its rotation. “Dante brings a level of quickness and toughness on the ball that is certainly helpful for us,” adde Bennett, also noting that it’s beneficial “that he’s played, and he’s a guy that can touch the paint and [be] very competitive.” www.streakingthelawn.com/2023/10/27/23935193/virginia-cavaliers-uva-basketball-dante-harris-tony-bennett-reece-beekman-quickest-defenders
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TC
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Post by TC on Jan 25, 2024 7:37:17 GMT -5
I'm sure Cooley knows he made a number of recruiting mistakes that put us in a hole. What if this was all intentional and not really a mistake - and I mean by this, what if we signed who we could to serve as a returning core, pivoted to 2024 because we knew we had limited traction in the grad transfer market, possibly saved some NIL designated for 2023 to push it off to 2024, and decided to take the hit year one? I don't have any knowledge of our NIL situation, but my basic read of the situation is that if you had enough NIL money to compete for Hunter Dickinson for 2023-2024 in mid-April when you had Styles/Brumbaugh/Epps all committed, we probably didn't exhaust all of that with Cook/Massoud/Bacote. I don't know how NIL at Georgetown works/worked this year - whether you have money sitting in a bank account or whether there is a donor out there that's willing to fund things conditionally based on how things look competitively - but my general sense is that if we had or could have had the money to sign Hunter Dickinson, there's another level that we can go to this year in the portal. The major conference schools in our situation - kenpom 200+ in 2023 : California (7-12) and Louisville (6-13) aren't any better than us in terms of conference wins. We are in a much better place than either because California's big recruiting wins after hiring Madsen were grad transfers who leave after this year. Louisville is a disaster. We recruited a core (Epps, Styles, Cook, Brumbaugh) that can return - California did not. California has the #126 2024 recruiting class, we have the #17 (247) class not counting Drew McKenna. Notre Dame (2023 kenpom 166) took the same strategy as us by spending their efforts on the Class of 2024 is also 7-12, 2-6 in conference. They have the #25 class (247), we're #17 (not counting Drew McKenna). Keeping Patrick Ewing after that 0-20 year is the mistake that we're paying for right now - if you switch up the program one year earlier when it was patently obvious you needed to do so, we're competitive today.
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guru
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Post by guru on Jan 25, 2024 8:01:04 GMT -5
I'm sure Cooley knows he made a number of recruiting mistakes that put us in a hole. What if this was all intentional and not really a mistake - and I mean by this, what if we signed who we could to serve as a returning core, pivoted to 2024 because we knew we had limited traction in the grad transfer market, possibly saved some NIL designated for 2023 to push it off to 2024, and decided to take the hit year one? I don't have any knowledge of our NIL situation, but my basic read of the situation is that if you had enough NIL money to compete for Hunter Dickinson for 2023-2024 in mid-April when you had Styles/Brumbaugh/Epps all committed, we probably didn't exhaust all of that with Cook/Massoud/Bacote. I don't know how NIL at Georgetown works/worked this year - whether you have money sitting in a bank account or whether there is a donor out there that's willing to fund things conditionally based on how things look competitively - but my general sense is that if we had or could have had the money to sign Hunter Dickinson, there's another level that we can go to this year in the portal. The major conference schools in our situation - kenpom 200+ in 2023 : California (7-12) and Louisville (6-13) aren't any better than us in terms of conference wins. We are in a much better place than either because California's big recruiting wins after hiring Madsen were grad transfers who leave after this year. Louisville is a disaster. We recruited a core (Epps, Styles, Cook, Brumbaugh) that can return - California did not. California has the #126 2024 recruiting class, we have the #17 (247) class not counting Drew McKenna. Notre Dame (2023 kenpom 166) took the same strategy as us by spending their efforts on the Class of 2024 is also 7-12, 2-6 in conference. They have the #25 class (247), we're #17 (not counting Drew McKenna). Keeping Patrick Ewing after that 0-20 year is the mistake that we're paying for right now - if you switch up the program one year earlier when it was patently obvious you needed to do so, we're competitive today. Haha. This is a new one at least. Bottom line, if putting an unwatchable product such as what we’re seeing this season was intentional, then that’s an enormous mistake. If your theory is correct, I don’t think any of us are enjoying “Major League: Georgetown edition” - even if, yes, they’re “still s——y.” And, the “returning core” theory is a canard. First, aside from Epps we don’t have many players on the current roster who would be more than spot contributors on a winning Big East team. Maybe Fielder develops into a core guy on a winning team, but we haven’t seen much advancement in his game this season. So this core we have returning would be the 8-10 players on a team that can contend in the Big East. Second, in the current climate of college hoops, assuming that all the players who make up this “core” will return next season is simply folly. That’s not how it works anymore - and it will be fun to read the backtracking on here when the inevitable portal announcements from our current roster start rolling out. I’m not begrudging these players for it, but I realize it’s going to happen. So, we will essentially be starting nearly from scratch again. The incoming class looks great, and hopefully Cooley knocks it out of the park with some portal signings, but those things won’t change the sense that his first season is a lost one. And yes, the Ewing stuff is true. He should have been fired a year earlier. The administration handled it extremely poorly. But this has still been a failure of a first season for the new staff, “intentional” or not.
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Post by professorhoya on Jan 25, 2024 8:07:23 GMT -5
Yup, the Hoyas surely couldn't use an experienced quick on-ball defender PG. Not at all. Is he a starter ahead of Beekman? No, but he's a more than capable backup to him. Hence, Bennett plays him 18 minutes a game and I've even seen him at PG with Beekman at the SG on occasion. Dante is one of the quickest on-ball defenders that I’ve coached,” Bennett said. “And look, I’ve had Kihei [Clark], Reece [Beekman] is a terrific on-ball defender, and then a guy named Jontel Evans when I first took over the job who was tenacious.” That’s a high level of praise from Bennett, and it speaks to how Harris fits the mold of a player that the Wahoo staff prioritizes in its rotation. “Dante brings a level of quickness and toughness on the ball that is certainly helpful for us,” adde Bennett, also noting that it’s beneficial “that he’s played, and he’s a guy that can touch the paint and [be] very competitive.” www.streakingthelawn.com/2023/10/27/23935193/virginia-cavaliers-uva-basketball-dante-harris-tony-bennett-reece-beekman-quickest-defendersWhy do you keep bringing this up. Cooley had nothing to do with Dante leaving. Cooley wasn’t even here when Dante left. Dante left because he didn’t want to come off the bench, didn’t want reduced minutes and didn’t want to take a backseat to Primo.
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Post by professorhoya on Jan 25, 2024 8:23:55 GMT -5
What if this was all intentional and not really a mistake - and I mean by this, what if we signed who we could to serve as a returning core, pivoted to 2024 because we knew we had limited traction in the grad transfer market, possibly saved some NIL designated for 2023 to push it off to 2024, and decided to take the hit year one? I don't have any knowledge of our NIL situation, but my basic read of the situation is that if you had enough NIL money to compete for Hunter Dickinson for 2023-2024 in mid-April when you had Styles/Brumbaugh/Epps all committed, we probably didn't exhaust all of that with Cook/Massoud/Bacote. I don't know how NIL at Georgetown works/worked this year - whether you have money sitting in a bank account or whether there is a donor out there that's willing to fund things conditionally based on how things look competitively - but my general sense is that if we had or could have had the money to sign Hunter Dickinson, there's another level that we can go to this year in the portal. The major conference schools in our situation - kenpom 200+ in 2023 : California (7-12) and Louisville (6-13) aren't any better than us in terms of conference wins. We are in a much better place than either because California's big recruiting wins after hiring Madsen were grad transfers who leave after this year. Louisville is a disaster. We recruited a core (Epps, Styles, Cook, Brumbaugh) that can return - California did not. California has the #126 2024 recruiting class, we have the #17 (247) class not counting Drew McKenna. Notre Dame (2023 kenpom 166) took the same strategy as us by spending their efforts on the Class of 2024 is also 7-12, 2-6 in conference. They have the #25 class (247), we're #17 (not counting Drew McKenna). Keeping Patrick Ewing after that 0-20 year is the mistake that we're paying for right now - if you switch up the program one year earlier when it was patently obvious you needed to do so, we're competitive today. Second, in the current climate of college hoops, assuming that all the players who make up this “core” will return next season is simply folly. That’s not how it works anymore - and it will be fun to read the backtracking on here when the inevitable portal announcements from our current roster start rolling out. I’m not begrudging these players for it, but I realize it’s going to happen. Exactly. At any moment any player can pull an Akok if they have credits to graduate from some other school in the US. And two time, three time transfer can play immediately. I said this would happen from day 1 when Rothstein brought up the new two time transfer rule. But TC insisted that because the NCAA made a rule that they weren’t gonna play. If Cooley and TC had listened to me instead of Georgetown compliance we likely have Devin Carter and Bryce Hopkins (and Bryce doesn’t get injured since he’s no longer at Providence in that time line) Georgetown compliance also dropped the ball on Akok finding a loophole. Cooley was too nice in letting all the players who claimed they wanted to stay at Georgetown stay. Pitino was cutthroat and got rid of almost all the players from that losing culture who were not Soriano and avoided a Benedickt Akok situation off the bat.
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SSHoya
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Post by SSHoya on Jan 25, 2024 8:38:55 GMT -5
Yup, the Hoyas surely couldn't use an experienced quick on-ball defender PG. Not at all. Is he a starter ahead of Beekman? No, but he's a more than capable backup to him. Hence, Bennett plays him 18 minutes a game and I've even seen him at PG with Beekman at the SG on occasion. Dante is one of the quickest on-ball defenders that I’ve coached,” Bennett said. “And look, I’ve had Kihei [Clark], Reece [Beekman] is a terrific on-ball defender, and then a guy named Jontel Evans when I first took over the job who was tenacious.” That’s a high level of praise from Bennett, and it speaks to how Harris fits the mold of a player that the Wahoo staff prioritizes in its rotation. “Dante brings a level of quickness and toughness on the ball that is certainly helpful for us,” adde Bennett, also noting that it’s beneficial “that he’s played, and he’s a guy that can touch the paint and [be] very competitive.” www.streakingthelawn.com/2023/10/27/23935193/virginia-cavaliers-uva-basketball-dante-harris-tony-bennett-reece-beekman-quickest-defendersWhy do you keep bringing this up. Cooley had nothing to do with Dante leaving. Cooley wasn’t even here when Dante left. Dante left because he didn’t want to come off the bench, didn’t want reduced minutes and didn’t want to take a backseat to Primo. I appreciated TC's correction on my chronology of Harris's departure so I recognize that. I'm simply responding to DFW's inference that a Dante Harris-type player with those offensive stats would not make the Hoyas better because of his acknowledged defensive prowess. That's all. Would a Harris-type on the ball defender be an improvement for this team?
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EtomicB
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Post by EtomicB on Jan 25, 2024 8:45:52 GMT -5
In the context it's being discussed I do not think it matters much. All the family obligations the Gtown staff had to deal with after taking the job, and all the obstacles you brought up that hindered them on the recruiting trail did not affect them enough to not out-recruit(on paper) Thad Matta's Butler staff. As I've stated multiple times now both programs were dealing with revamped rosters at the start of the season. The discussion I'm trying to have is why is Butler so much better than Gtown at this point? I would contend that Butler is much better because Matta got to shop for the groceries he wanted this time not the ones he was "stuck with". It's no surprise that year 1 he started 2 sophomores and a Junior no longer with the team. And had 2 senior transfers that had flaws and ended up being underwhelming (sound familiar?). Now he has a top 6 with 5 seniors. I have zero issues with this theory but it's a different conversation than the one we're discussing. Also, the new Gtown staff got to shop for its groceries as well. As flawed as the roster is it shouldn't be ranked 290 defensively.
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TC
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Post by TC on Jan 25, 2024 9:48:28 GMT -5
And two time, three time transfer can play immediately. I said this would happen from day 1 when Rothstein brought up the new two time transfer rule. But TC insisted that because the NCAA made a rule that they weren’t gonna play. If Cooley and TC had listened to me instead of Georgetown compliance we likely have Devin Carter and Bryce Hopkins (and Bryce doesn’t get injured since he’s no longer at Providence in that time line) Georgetown compliance also dropped the ball on Akok finding a loophole. Cooley was too nice in letting all the players who claimed they wanted to stay at Georgetown stay. Pitino was cutthroat and got rid of almost all the players from that losing culture who were not Soriano and avoided a Benedickt Akok situation off the bat. a) "Georgetown Compliance" is an office that makes sure that Georgetown follows the rules, has nothing to do with any of this. b) Devin Carter and Bryce Hopkins were not coming over this year given the rules that were set at the beginning of the season. It wasn't in either of their best interests to sit a year or, as it turned out from the court cases, half a year.
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hoyazeke
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Post by hoyazeke on Jan 25, 2024 13:40:57 GMT -5
Currently averaging 4.4 points and 3.5 rebounds per game for a bad West Virginia team. And people want us to believe that if he was getting Massoud or Fiekder’s minutes, we’d be way better. 1.4 blocks per game. 3.2 blocks per 40 minutes (2nd highest of his career) We certainly could have used his rim protection at the end of the Xavier game where Xavier scored 3 straight unimpeded layups at the basket. And they just beat Kansas which I believe is top five in the nation. Can yall really not understand how having Akok would add 3-4 more Ws to this team right now? It's not that he is so great. It's that he is a legitimate big and could give us depth at a position of need. He also plays D better than any big on our current roster. He is by no means a superstar but we are lightyears better if we had him. His affect on our team would be much greater than his affect on WVU.........
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thedragon
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Post by thedragon on Jan 25, 2024 14:46:17 GMT -5
What if this was all intentional and not really a mistake - and I mean by this, what if we signed who we could to serve as a returning core, pivoted to 2024 because we knew we had limited traction in the grad transfer market, possibly saved some NIL designated for 2023 to push it off to 2024, and decided to take the hit year one? I don't have any knowledge of our NIL situation, but my basic read of the situation is that if you had enough NIL money to compete for Hunter Dickinson for 2023-2024 in mid-April when you had Styles/Brumbaugh/Epps all committed, we probably didn't exhaust all of that with Cook/Massoud/Bacote. I don't know how NIL at Georgetown works/worked this year - whether you have money sitting in a bank account or whether there is a donor out there that's willing to fund things conditionally based on how things look competitively - but my general sense is that if we had or could have had the money to sign Hunter Dickinson, there's another level that we can go to this year in the portal. The major conference schools in our situation - kenpom 200+ in 2023 : California (7-12) and Louisville (6-13) aren't any better than us in terms of conference wins. We are in a much better place than either because California's big recruiting wins after hiring Madsen were grad transfers who leave after this year. Louisville is a disaster. We recruited a core (Epps, Styles, Cook, Brumbaugh) that can return - California did not. California has the #126 2024 recruiting class, we have the #17 (247) class not counting Drew McKenna. Notre Dame (2023 kenpom 166) took the same strategy as us by spending their efforts on the Class of 2024 is also 7-12, 2-6 in conference. They have the #25 class (247), we're #17 (not counting Drew McKenna). Keeping Patrick Ewing after that 0-20 year is the mistake that we're paying for right now - if you switch up the program one year earlier when it was patently obvious you needed to do so, we're competitive today. Haha. This is a new one at least. Bottom line, if putting an unwatchable product such as what we’re seeing this season was intentional, then that’s an enormous mistake. If your theory is correct, I don’t think any of us are enjoying “Major League: Georgetown edition” - even if, yes, they’re “still s——y.” And, the “returning core” theory is a canard. First, aside from Epps we don’t have many players on the current roster who would be more than spot contributors on a winning Big East team. Maybe Fielder develops into a core guy on a winning team, but we haven’t seen much advancement in his game this season. So this core we have returning would be the 8-10 players on a team that can contend in the Big East. Second, in the current climate of college hoops, assuming that all the players who make up this “core” will return next season is simply folly. That’s not how it works anymore - and it will be fun to read the backtracking on here when the inevitable portal announcements from our current roster start rolling out. I’m not begrudging these players for it, but I realize it’s going to happen. So, we will essentially be starting nearly from scratch again. The incoming class looks great, and hopefully Cooley knocks it out of the park with some portal signings, but those things won’t change the sense that his first season is a lost one. And yes, the Ewing stuff is true. He should have been fired a year earlier. The administration handled it extremely poorly. But this has still been a failure of a first season for the new staff, “intentional” or not. Time will tell - no disagreement that were in the wild west and there are no guarantees. But I think at a minimum Epps, Styles and Fielder will return. Even if everyone else left that's still only 6 roster spots to fill, not 8 to 10. And I think that # will likely be closer to 4 or 5 with an intent to keep 1 spot open. So now we'd be talking about 3 to 4 transfer spots. There's a big difference in filling 3 to 4 spots vs 10.
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hoyarooter
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Post by hoyarooter on Jan 25, 2024 20:49:22 GMT -5
What if this was all intentional and not really a mistake - and I mean by this, what if we signed who we could to serve as a returning core, pivoted to 2024 because we knew we had limited traction in the grad transfer market, possibly saved some NIL designated for 2023 to push it off to 2024, and decided to take the hit year one? I don't have any knowledge of our NIL situation, but my basic read of the situation is that if you had enough NIL money to compete for Hunter Dickinson for 2023-2024 in mid-April when you had Styles/Brumbaugh/Epps all committed, we probably didn't exhaust all of that with Cook/Massoud/Bacote. I don't know how NIL at Georgetown works/worked this year - whether you have money sitting in a bank account or whether there is a donor out there that's willing to fund things conditionally based on how things look competitively - but my general sense is that if we had or could have had the money to sign Hunter Dickinson, there's another level that we can go to this year in the portal. The major conference schools in our situation - kenpom 200+ in 2023 : California (7-12) and Louisville (6-13) aren't any better than us in terms of conference wins. We are in a much better place than either because California's big recruiting wins after hiring Madsen were grad transfers who leave after this year. Louisville is a disaster. We recruited a core (Epps, Styles, Cook, Brumbaugh) that can return - California did not. California has the #126 2024 recruiting class, we have the #17 (247) class not counting Drew McKenna. Notre Dame (2023 kenpom 166) took the same strategy as us by spending their efforts on the Class of 2024 is also 7-12, 2-6 in conference. They have the #25 class (247), we're #17 (not counting Drew McKenna). Keeping Patrick Ewing after that 0-20 year is the mistake that we're paying for right now - if you switch up the program one year earlier when it was patently obvious you needed to do so, we're competitive today. Haha. This is a new one at least. Bottom line, if putting an unwatchable product such as what we’re seeing this season was intentional, then that’s an enormous mistake. If your theory is correct, I don’t think any of us are enjoying “Major League: Georgetown edition” - even if, yes, they’re “still s——y.” And, the “returning core” theory is a canard. First, aside from Epps we don’t have many players on the current roster who would be more than spot contributors on a winning Big East team. Maybe Fielder develops into a core guy on a winning team, but we haven’t seen much advancement in his game this season. So this core we have returning would be the 8-10 players on a team that can contend in the Big East. Second, in the current climate of college hoops, assuming that all the players who make up this “core” will return next season is simply folly. That’s not how it works anymore - and it will be fun to read the backtracking on here when the inevitable portal announcements from our current roster start rolling out. I’m not begrudging these players for it, but I realize it’s going to happen. So, we will essentially be starting nearly from scratch again. The incoming class looks great, and hopefully Cooley knocks it out of the park with some portal signings, but those things won’t change the sense that his first season is a lost one. And yes, the Ewing stuff is true. He should have been fired a year earlier. The administration handled it extremely poorly. But this has still been a failure of a first season for the new staff, “intentional” or not. Did you think we were unwatchable and ____y after the Seton Hall, UConn and Xavier games? Certainly Tuesday's debacle was unwatchable and totally awful. Does that mean we can expect to see that for the next 10 games? Perhaps, but I think much more likely is that we will have a few more giant turds like that last one, and a few more games where we perform way better. Time will tell.
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hoyarooter
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Post by hoyarooter on Jan 25, 2024 20:52:10 GMT -5
The first part is more a history of Providence basketball which you can skip. I suggest you hear/see it on 1.50 speed or go to minute 39. I can’t imagine any scenario where watching that “documentary” is anything other than an enormous waste of time. I also don't have time to watch this, but if I did, I would be interested in the first part. After all, they had this big center who played there and went on to join the Celtics. I forget his name. And then there were the Ernie D/Marvin Barnes teams, which were fun to watch.
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