Hoosierfan2017

In your post you said you want to move on from Trayce, though, not that he isn’t coming back. Maybe Phinisee would hurt the future, I don’t disagree with you there. I’m had my fill of Phinisee. But having upperclassmen as good as Race and Trayce are what you want in your program. A 5 star senior like Trayce is basically the dream and it’s the model some very successful programs have used in the past.

And the second half of the year I stopped calling for him to get minutes. And I never called for him to get minutes over Xavier in the first place. Besides, whether you think I’m being hypocritical or not doesn’t change the facts at present. Plus, Lander isn’t even on the team anymore. In a roster projection thread, he’s the one guy we can say with a certainty won’t be on the roster. We had a gaping hole at the 3 this year and Geronimo couldn’t fill it. I hope all three guys are on the team next year.

So what? Boban Marjanović is a career 23/15 guy per 36 minutes. That doesn’t make him as good as Joel Embiid. I put far more stock in a player’s actual production than I do the per minute production of a player playing 10 mpg.. Geronimo is a per minute king, great. He wasn’t good enough to beat out Miller Kopp for a starting spot. He played well against Wyoming. That’s far more meaningful than his per minute/per 40 production.

So I’ve always hated per 40 minutes/per 100 possessions stats. They don’t measure your actual production. They just take your output during X minutes and extrapolate it out to 40 minutes. It doesn’t account for wear and tire and fatigue from playing more minutes. Boban Marjanović is a per minute god. There’s a lot to be said about a player being able to go out and produce for 30+ minutes a night. A guy who’s playing 10 mpg doesn’t have the same demands. I’m not even saying that he sucks or that he won’t improve or that I hope he leaves. I just think the idea of ‘moving on’ from your two best players because a role player might transfer if they stay is crazy talk. Our prospects next year are higher if we keep Trayce and Race, which in turn helps in the following years. We got 29 ppg and 16 rpg from the two of them last season. That’s a ton of production to replace for a team that, as the roster stands today, has Michael Durr and Logan Duncomb next in line for the frontcourt.

I would still much prefer another year of Trayce and Race over two years of Geronimo. We’re talking about a guy who played 11.6 mpg and averaged 3.4 ppg in conference play. Folks are projecting big improvements for him, but they said the same thing during last offseason. And even if he does have a big jump, chances are Geronimo will never be as good as Trayce is now. Those two come back and we’ll have a great chance of making the tournament and, if we have better guard play, being a much more competitive team in the conference. That keeps the momentum going for recruiting. They leave and we’ll likely take a step back next season. I’m rolling with Trayce/Race any day of the week. If that costs the team Geronimo, oh well. I’m taking the known entities. We’re a better team next year with those two on it.

Why would we want to “move on” from our two best players?

Larry Brown know$ how to recruit. Poach him from Penny.

It’s only a bad thing if he was good at his job, which all the rumblings say he wasn’t, so..

Bummer. I’ve been off the bandwagon since he got himself suspended when playing time was there for the taking, but I still think he’s talented. Hope he finds a good fit for himself.

I want Larry Brown

He played a lot off-ball with Xavier so I think that was a big part of being put in fewer situations to screw up. I really have no idea who Dan worked with position-wise, though.

Focusing on Rob’s defense is like focusing on Trayce’s dunking ability. Rob was already a good defender. Isn’t a coach there to improve a player’s weaknesses? If folks are going to say that Fife was a big help to the guards, it can’t be ignored when a player’s weaknesses get worse.

He had career lows in: FG%, FT%, TS%, PER, ORtg, eFG%, offensive win shares (had -0.2), ast%, and OBPM. Also had career lows/40 minutes in ppg and apg. His 3pt% was second lowest in his career at 26.4%. Maybe Fife helped him a lot on defense, idk. He was already a very good defender before Fife arrived, though.

Rob had the worst offensive season of his college career. So, whatever Fife was doing with him wasn’t helping on that end.

That’s what I want in an assistant too. The coaching is secondary, imho. Find a guy who can land elite talent. The rest will figure itself out. That wasn’t Fife, so adios!

I like this move. One of my biggest problems with Woodson’s coaching this season was his stubbornness. He stuck with rotations that didn’t work. He played players who weren’t playing well (Kopp/Stewart). So, I’m glad to see that he isn’t the same way with his staff. Getting rid of an ‘IU guy’ after only a year is a tough decision. It wasn’t working with Fife so he made the hard decision to fire him. Fife also rubbed me the wrong way in interviews/on social media, so I’m especially not sad about this.

At least now we don’t have to worry about him being our next head coach. I don’t think he landed any of our recruits. Ya seemed like he was making far more moves on that front. Not a big loss, imo.

You can pretend that I said Bates will suck all four years, but I never did. I said: “The players you mentioned would all have to take astronomical leaps during the off-season. Otherwise we’re going to be an undersized team that also lacks shooting. At this point in their college careers they’re JAGs.” Counting on players like Bates, Galloway, and Geronimo making big enough leaps to replace what we lose in Trayce is a very optimistic hope. Not every player has a Oladipo or OG-esque jump. Some players like Phinisee jump backwards. Trayce gets discredited by some and under appreciated because he isn’t Superman and has some flaws in his game. He carried us into the tournament. This team needs talent infusions, and everyone seems to agree with that. Call me a Debbie downer or whatever, but if we lose Trayce we’ll need big moves to just get back to the level we were at this season, let alone a higher level.

It is every year. It has a rep of a great conference, the voters buy into the rep every year by putting a bunch of B1G teams in the polls, and then they choke in the tournament. Houston over Illinois was a really easy pick earlier today because Illinois isn’t built for tournament ball. I picked Michigan to make the sweet 16 because they don’t really play a Big 1G style. Officiating needs to change. Tackle basketball isn’t played in any other conference.

This is the typical response I see when someone doesn’t return someone else’s blind optimism. You’re sitting here wanting to talk about high school stats for a player with a full year of college basketball under his belt. We’ve seen the ridiculous “we’ll be better without Trayce” argument all of the conference season. Then he carried us into the tournament and it stopped for a bit, but now folks are right back to it. Idk about you, but a Durr/Duncomb center rotation doesn’t give me the warm fuzzies.

I know some fans don’t like holding the program to a high standard. Apparently you’re one of them. A tournament appearance and 30 point blowout every now and then is the most we should expect from IU basketball. You’re right. I want to take our tournament appearance and build on it next year. Maybe make it to the round of 32, maybe even a sweet 16. Keeping Trayce is a key way that we do that. We have enough holes to fill this offseason without also having a 6’9 18 ppg hole on top of them. We lose him and we take a big step back.

What’s simplistic is using the Purdue game as evidence of us being a “more complete team” without Trayce. We beat Purdue because we got a once in a career performance from a bench player. I thought this narrative would’ve been out to bed after Trayce carried us into the tournament, but apparently not. The offense utilized the outside game just fine. It generated more open 3s this season that almost every other team in D1. Our players just missed them. Why do you want me to look at Tamar’s high school shooting stats instead of his college shooting stats? He shot well in high school, great. He’s not in high school anymore. He’s in the Big 10, and he shot horribly in the Big 10 last year. Could he improve? Certainly. But “we’ll be a good team next year if XYZ role player takes a huge leap” is a conversation we have every single offseason. More often than not it doesn’t happen. A mediocre team with a talent shortage probably isn’t going to improve when its most talented player leaves with no replacement lined up.

Sampson is an elite coach.. Whqt could’ve been.

We have a team full of golden retrievers. Lovely fellas. Friendly, likable players. But no one’s scared of them. No one hates playing against them. We need to add a few pit bulls.

We beat Purdue with good guard play. Xavier scored 18 pts and Phinisee had the game of his life, scoring 20 pts and shooting 62% from the field. That’s 2x his season field goal percentage and 4.5x his season ppg. Four years of Rob Phinisee shows that that game was an enormous outlier. But regardless, sure, if we could get that level of guard play every night we could be fine without Trayce. We just don’t have that. Some of our best games this season were when we got great play from both Xavier and Trayce. Michigan - 24 for Trayce, 17 for Xavier; Iowa - 31 for Trayce, 20 for Xavier. Tamar Bates has a long ways to go. He shot 33.8% from the field and 29.8% from 3. He shot 26% from the field in Big 10 play. Geronimo shot 31% from 3 and 56.8% from the free throw line this year. Galloway shot 21% from 3 this year. I certainly hope their shooting is better next year… Take away Trayce and you’re stuck replacing 18 ppg on 59% from the field. For a team that was so bad on the offensive end, that’s an enormous task. And losing your rim protector when defense is your calling card is also an enormous task. It’s not as simple as just sliding Race over to the 5 (if he even sticks around). He was a big beneficiary of playing next to Trayce. Trayce got a ton of the defensive attention. You’d be asking an undersized Race to essentially be our sole big in an incredibly physical conference.