Stuhoo

I’m missing dog washing night for this?

JINX Three turnovers in the next four possessions.

Two turnovers and one team foul at the under 8:00 timeout. Good stuff. Long way to go.

It really helps to play a lesser opponent. Loooong way to go in this one though.

We are getting great shots. The passing has been excellent. When they score it has mostly been by making a tough shot. Keep it up boys.

J Reed is a nice player. Quick and very strong. Can’t shoot from distance tho.

^^ From last game. ^^ He was the best choice for the role. By far.

Devries looks down bench for a good choice to guard Martinelli, "Alright Conor... Give it a shot!"

For sure. But Tyson doesn't wear teams out physically or draw two defenders often - Martinelli does.

I think it's very likely that more than three or four players return. We currently have seven low priced players that can return. Five seems about right. Even if we needed to pick up six, I'd expect at least two of them to be very low-priced options. So your $7.5 M for six players would turn into $6.5M total for the top three signees. Something like $3.5M, $2M, $1.0M for our top three.

And this time we should have over half of the roster budgeted for before we go portalling. I'm guessing Sisley, Drake, Miles, Dorn, and Acimovich. Drake looks very connected mentally and Acimovich joined the team with a redshirt year expected. Add in the three freshmen and we only need four or five portal additions.

Say we keep four current players + the three freshmen. That's maybe $2.5 million for seven players at $350k per on average. That leaves approximately $10 million for six players. Bring in four of them at an average of $750k each, and that'd leave seven million for two players; a $4m and a $3m. That's a ton of budget if we can get the lower priced ones in the fold.

At the five spot defensively? Yes. But Martinelli is a warrior and a far bigger challenge than anyone on Minnesota's roster.

With Arrinten Page out this is the type of game that Sam Alexis should be featured. He isn't big enough to operate against full-sized, defensive bigs, but against Tre Singleton and Tyler Cropp he should have a big night. Page is a major loss for NW.

We gonna win? Yes. We gonna win.

I want the coaches that see Dorn, Sisley, Miles, Drake, Harris, Ristic, and Acimovich every day to make smart decisions about whether they are potential winning pieces for next year. Continuity is a very good thing so I’m hoping many of them are worth keeping.

They have two freshmen starting and playing back to backs, Page is a terrible matchup for us and is still out, and PSU made Martinelli work hard tonight (and boy does he ever work hard). More importantly, the IU team leaders have cited the prior NW game as the one single game they wish they could do over. Well here’s their chance; for all of those reasons I like our chances tomorrow quite a bit.

I’m not into “excuses” why this year didn’t go especially well; I’m interested in reasons. The primary reason I can identify is that Devries miscalculated what a winning B1G roster looks like. And believe it or not, even though that’s on Devries, I’m hoping that’s the reason, because unlike crappy player development and coaching, that can be fixed.

FWIW, Brian Evans, who tends to be very much an IU cynic on podcasts, says he personally knows Ryan Carr well and speaks to him regularly, and also says that Carr is absolutely excellent in pretty much every way that matters.

Losing to IU on a neutral site's effect on Purdue's tournament seeding:

And #18 would play out to a five seed. Seems like they'd be a four seed and hopefully would run into UF or Duke if they won their first two.

^^YES!^^ People treat new leaders as if they are some kind of ready-made savants. That is very rarely how it works. As I said yesterday: Bad leaders: Acknowledge when they make mistakes, and It's merely lip service to keep the barking dogs at bay. Good leaders: Acknowledge when they make mistakes, and Make appropriate changes to improve based on what they've learned. At IU we have the ultimate ready-made-savant new program leader, Curt Cignetti, as a vivid extreme outlier example. But Cignetti (and Dusty May) are not the norm. The norm when coaches succeed greatly are guys like Underwood, Golden, Hurley, or Gard; whom their fanbases pretty much hated early in their tenure. Of course, for every Golden or Underwood, there is an Archie Miller or Ben Johnson; guys that were meh early and never figured it out. So the primary takeaway? After one season a new program leader can learn and be fantastic, but it's far from a given that it will turn out that way. One would think that isn't a revelation, but human nature fosters impatience and early summary conclusions. I completely understand that, especially at IU where the all-time outlier thrives with an undefeated football national champion in year two, and a series of meh basketball coaches never did get it right.

Bad leaders: Acknowledge when they make mistakes, and It's merely lip service to keep the barking dogs at bay. Good leaders: Acknowledge when they make mistakes, and Make appropriate changes to improve based on what they've learned. Archie and Woody fell squarely into the first category; hopefully CDD will fall into the second category.

And the 2024 IU Football NIL budget was significantly less. My point is that money came only once winning happened. Rich people largely got that way by being smart and not investing in losing propositions. While it may not seem that way to less affluent folks, rich people do not have unlimited money to throw at two IU sports. And I assume that most will choose to throw their money at football until and unless basketball also begins to thrive. But not until it does.

I was more focused on offense, which has sucked for eight years. Better spacing, more movement, emphasis on open threes/inside out when available. But for an offense like that to succeed there needs to be a lengthy, physical big that rebounds long misses outside of his immediate space, and there needs to be a guard that can get in the lane and finish, thereby opening up kick out opportunities. When Enright penetrates no one leaves their man.