random thoughts from last night's game

Posted on: November 19, 2021 at 12:38:32 CT

Good to get back in the win column, even if it was shaky and marginally impressive at best. Certainly better than a home loss to a lower caliber opponent whichy NIU demonstrated earlier this year they are capable of delivering.

Attendance was announced at 6,300 and it appeared less than that on the broadcast. Maybe more indicative there was less in game threads and postgame follow up on the board than I can ever remember in any prior era of MU basketball, and that includes the Kim Anderson era.

MU closed the game out decently, but with 3 minutes remaining in the game the score was 43-37. That is 1930’s style basketball. The notion that this team was going to get out and run is proving absurd, this is one of the slowest MU teams I can recall. Similarly the notion that we would have around a 9 man rotation is proving equally absurd, this team has maybe less depth than about any MU team. There is almost no bench at all, and none of the freshman appear poised to be able to contribute in any kind of meaningful fashion.

Gordon did good work out there, we haven’t really had a perimter stopper since Barnett and he basically shut down what on paper was a rather tough assignment.

In Kobe Brown, Ronnie Degray, and Javon Pickett we have three players who can thrive via hustle and doing the dirty work and cleaning up garbage baskets. They are all three good at that. Unfortunately those garbage baskets is basically our offense at this point when opponents don’t allow us to get in transition.

Coleman and to a greater extent Davis have really been underwhelming at this point. The only shot we had this season was those guys games translating to a higher caliber of competition, and thus far against weak competition they appear to be marginal. Davis has got to be giving us 15 ppg on a pretty consistent basis, and it doesn’t seem like there is much we can rely upon from him offensively at all right now. Coleman is definitely not a pg, and although he has size to play at this level he is slow and doesn’t appear to be very adept at breaking down defenses or putting any kind of pressure on opponents.

Good to Wilmore being effective, even if its mostly by default. When he is on the court it almost forces us to deploy some traditional basketball sets and generates some actual basketball angles and spacing and cuts simply by having someone inside the 3 pt line and having the defense moving and collapsing and adjusting. He did a good job of stepping into those seams and finishing without bringing the ball down or putting it on the floor. As fans we have to remember he is soooo early in his development process and a guy his size would normally never be counted on to be actually productive. When he wasn't on the court we really had some ugly possessions.

The team defense was good, although NIU started trying desperation 3s to get back in it about half way through the second half and basically were no threat to score from the field at all. Their starters shot an abysmal 18% from the field and combined had 1 total assist.

It was really ugly, but it was a win. Luckily I don’t think many people saw it and at the end of the year it will just be viewed as a victory. Unless our transfers start considerably demonstrating potential they haven’t shown thus far there just isn’t much top end potential on this roster, this year or at any point down the road. We are poorly coached, but there isn’t much there to work with either.

Edited by FIJItiger at 12:41:44 on 11/19/21