BananaShampoo
Captain 'Paign
- Phoenix, AZ
And that's exactly why you need more than one player who can shoot the ball. Make the defenders pick their poison and invariably with enough ball movement one of them becomes open enough to get a decent look.
Wisconsin 75, Illinois 50 POSTGAME
Agree. I’ll also add that JCL needed very little space to get a shot off and could catch and shoot on the move much better than anyone on this roster. And, even though he wasn’t particularly great at it, he could create off the bounce every once in awhile. I honestly believe he was feeling the effects of his injured hand for a good portion of last season. He just didn’t look like the same type of player that he did his freshman year. Also, who knows what kind of improvements he would have shown this year. I don’t know how he would fit in this system defensively, but offensively I think he would give us something we sorely need.
Ransom Stoddard
Ordained Dudeist Priest
- Bloomington, IL
"Talent" means different things to different people. I personally don't put as much weight on recruiting rankings as other people do because I prefer a combination of the eye test and the actual numbers the kids put up in NCAA games. It's subjective, but so is recruiting rankings because some kids don't get seen as much due to where they play, AAU ball, etc. Some kids, like Ebo and Smith, come to basketball late and may have boatloads of talent but little exposure.
But back to your original statement--what teams do you think are getting more out of less talent than UIUC?
I don’t disagree with anything you are saying. I mentioned recruiting rankings as a way to compare relative talent level of players coming in. Once you get to their play and numbers in college how much was talent and how much was effective development... I guess my feeling is we haven’t developed what we’ve been able to get as well we should for various reasons. Not just this year but, for quite awhile now. I agree we need better talent coming in overall but, doesn’t seem like we should have as bad of results as we have.
Rankings really fail as a predictor when you have the kind of lineup Illinois has. If your more highly ranked players all play the same position, it really doesn't matter that they are higher ranked. It doesn't matter if we have three 5-start guards, if we have no front court players to support them. Iowa beat us simply by having really tall bad basketball players reach over the backs of our substantially smaller front court. We absolutely must find at least one big to be an obstacle on the defensive end and to be able to get to the basket without being blocked on the offensive end. Rankings don't tell you that is an issue.
Agreed.