So the big question as we all knew this year was going to be whether Curbelo could do with higher usage and more responsibility what he was able to do in spurts last year. And the spurts were on purpose, we saw the beginnings of his performance tonight lots of times last year and Underwood would just sit him down for whole halves. We didn't need to rely on him so we just took the good and discarded the bad.
You don't want to overreact to one game, especially when it's against an opponent who plays in the way best suited to induce a meltdown, but let's not mince words, that was a single handed game losing meltdown, the panicked out of control performance of someone who isn't capable of managing themselves on the floor at this level.
And compounding things is our lack of other options in that role. Trent was brilliant tonight, but he's not that guy. Plummer was nearly as disturbing as Belo, a total zero from him. Any notion that any of the bigs can supplement our initiating is a fantasy.
BU should not have let Belo finish that game, akin to a boxing ref not stopping a fight for a helpless fighter, but we can't pretend he had workable alternatives.
Teams with a lot of good players, which we have, can survive some flaws. We were on our way to a 6ish seed two years ago with a team that couldn't shoot to save its life.
Having said that, no one to reliably initiate offense is a very crippling flaw, as anyone who remembers the low points of Jaylon Tate or Sam Maniscalco or Khalid Lewis can tell you. You just lose the ability to tap any of your other strengths (see: Cockburn, Kofi)
Belo will have better days, but again, nights like tonight were regular occurrences for him last year and should be expected until proven otherwise. Which means we're nowhere near a top 10 team, and depending on how well teams that aren't built to Shaka Ball incorporate the film they're about to get, look out below.