Hoosierfan2017

What’s the “massive improvement”? The defense has been better but we’re just as bad offensively.

Saying that Race and Trayce are the only starter-level players on the team isn’t disparaging anyone. It’s just reality, At least on a decent to good team. That’s the state of our team. No one on the roster has even played in an NCAA tournament game. And five of our players were just suspended, so not only are they not taking care of business on the court, they’re screwing up off of it too.

His stubbornness is a huge issue. When things are clearly not working he’s so hesitant to change them up.

He says all the right things - culture, discipline, accountability, etc., and he’s a former player, so fans really like him. I don’t even disagree with them. He seems like a very likable guy. But I agree with you completely. His in-game coaching this year has left so much to be desired. He’s not a good enough coach to win without elite talent, and he’s not recruiting at a high enough level.

I mean honestly Trayce and Race are the only starter-level players on the team. The rest are bench guys.

Geronimo is from Newark, I don’t think Hall wants the smoke.

Gonna be hard to get things going in the paint today. MSU has four guys with a foot in the paint whenever Race or Trayce get a touch.

Maybe he does. Galloway isn’t an ugly kid. He’s fine in a supporting role, and he plays with energy which isn’t a given for the rest of the team, but the idea that our hodgepodge of role players will improve enough to make us better without Trayce is completely ridiculous to me. He’s an excellent college player. We have no one at present coming in to replace the 18/9 on excellent efficiency + great defense he gives us. If we’re lucky we won’t have to find out.

You think that Galloway is attractive so you think he’s going to be a superstar, we know. Right now he’s averaging 7 ppg and shooting 29% from 3. He’s a role player. Geronimo averages 4 points and 4 rebounds per game. If Trayce “is what he is at this point,” what he is, is a dang good college basketball player. You’re doing everything you can to downplay his importance to the team while gassing up a bunch of middling role players.

I’m not nearly as upset at Trayce for not developing a jumper as I am our guards and wings for not developing jumpers. Your center being able to shoot is a plus but it’s not a necessity in college basketball. We’re 12th in the conference in 3 point percentage. We’re shooting 32.2% from 3 in conference play. That’s worse than last year. You don’t get points for having a pretty form. Galloway’s ‘improved form’ has him shooting 29% from 3. That’s fine if you ‘value them more than mediocre,’ but that’s what they’ve been. Galloway, Geronimo, and Bates put together don’t equal Trayce’s production. Bates is averaging 2.7 ppg on 24% from the field during conference play. On the whole season he’s averaging 4 ppg on 35% from the field. He was a top 30 recruit. “Mediocre” is putting it nicely with him. Instead of hoping that a bunch of mediocre role players take big leaps, why not hope that our star comes back? Talent is in short supply on this team. It’s much easier to figure out the rest of your problems when you have a player of Trayce’s caliber than not. Star power is what wins.

Fans say this every year. “XYZ will take a huge leap during the off-season and we’ll be way better.” On one hand you’re talking about how TJD hasn’t improved and then on the other hand you say “we have a staff now that will help develop players.” You’re counting on a bunch of mediocre players making big improvements. You’re discounting our all-Big 10 center averaging 18/9 with 3 blocks a game as a guy who just “runs and dunks.” It’s preposterous.

There are only a few teams on our schedule that he struggles with. When we play those teams it’s on the staff to adjust the game plan. Of course a guy Trayce’z size is going to struggle against a 7’0, 285 pound behemoth like Kofi Cockburn or a 7’1 guy like Dickerson on Michigan. He’s giving up 4-5 inches (depending on how tall you think Trayce is) and 20+ pounds. We recruited Michael Durr for matchups like those. Trayce is still a guy that can dominate against most teams. We beat Ohio State in large part because of the 27/12 and 5 blocks he gave us. In an ideal world we wouldn’t need him to dominate every single team we play for us to win. Other guys would step up. On occasion that does happen. Phinisee did that against Purdue and we won. But when that doesn’t happen, well, we get games like Illinois. I just can’t get on board at all with the ideal that we’ll be better without him or that our losses are his fault. He’s the reason we’re still a tournament hopeful.

We have no big men coming in as freshmen who could replace him. Kaleb Banks is a 6’8 tweener, and the other two recruits are guards. That means we’ll be relying on the portal for a big and we’ve seen this season how the portal can go. We need all the talent we can get, and Trayce is the most talented guy we have. He’s asked to do everything for us because our roster has so many holes. In an ideal world he’d be able to do less and would be able to play his more natural position, but that’s not this team. So, he’s left banging with 7 footers, leading our team on offense, and anchoring the defense. It’s not his fault that we have poor guard play and poor shooting. Sure, we beat Purdue when he barely played, but that was because Phinisee played out of his mind and had the game of his life. If we got the guard play we’ve had for most of this season we would’ve been blown out. Trayce is not a perfect player, but if he leaves he will leave an enormous hole on both sides of the ball. As it stands right now, we have no one who will be able to fill that hole.

Thinking we’ll be better without TJD is one of the most ridiculous takes I’ve ever seen on here. He’s our best player and it really isn’t close. Without him we’d be dwelling at the bottom of the conference with Nebraska and Minnesota. But hey, maybe we’ll be better next year trotting out Michael Durr as our starting center.

He posted on Instagram a few months that’s he going to be having a kid in March. The post is no longer on his page, for whatever reason.

The teams you named are the teams that win. I want IU to be a team that wins. The top 10 is a who’s who of skirting the rules. Auburn, Arizona, UK, Houston, Duke, Kansas, Baylor. Of the top 10 right now, you’ve got Gonzaga, Purdue, and Texas Tech as the arguably ‘clean’ programs, and Gonzaga gave their coach a slap on the wrist for a DUI. I want the team I root for to be a winner. I’m tired of hanging our hats on being a program that “does things the right way” while we miss the tournament year after year. Fans are left to talk about our program being virtuous because it’s all we have. And not even that is really true when you look at some of our recruiting under Archie and Crean.

Maybe. We’ll certainly need him to. This season he’s looked more like a guy ranked outside the top 100 than a guy ranked in the top 30, and he’s been making poor decisions off the court as well.

IU fans are mild, imho. We’ve made 4 tournaments in the past 13 years. Conference record over .500 three times in the past 13 years. Two sweet 16s. Zero elite 8s. How do Kentucky fans handle that? How do Duke fans? Kansas? UNC? We all know the answer. No blueblood program would put up with what we’ve put up with for more than a decade. We pride ourselves on “doing things the right way,” but there’s little honor in losing. Our team’s at home watching most years while the big boys flip the NCAA the finger and reap the rewards.

The most recent coaching search tells us where the brand is at now. We hired someone no other team in the conference would’ve hired, and someone we wouldn’t have hired if he didn’t play here 40 years ago. Some will cite his ‘experience,’ but it’s not like anyone in either college or the NBA was beating down his door to make him their head coach. Woody doesn’t look like the kind of coach who can win with mediocre talent. Most coaches can’t, so he’s not unique in that regard. But he’s not recruiting at a high enough level to make up for it. JHS looks nice, but Bates did too. He’s been a dud. In conference play he’s scoring 2.7 ppg on 24% from the field. Definitely not what I was expecting. JHS better be ready because the team will need him from day 1. We’re a middling team this season and have been a middling program for the past 15 years. Some will blame the fans, but the program should be happy that it still has fans at this point.

And hey, I’m not even saying that Michigan sucks. They’re probably not your average 8-7 team, but they’re still 8-7. They’re not a juggernaut. And they came into Assembly Hall and blew us out.

You’re hunting for likes here with a snarky comment. You know what I mean. We won our past two games, one of which was over the #4 team in the country. Things were looking up, we were feeling good. Win today and we had a shot at getting ranked. Our next two games are against Penn State and Maryland, so we had a good shot at 5 in a row. Instead, we didn’t show up and got blown out at home by an 8-7 team.

It was an 18 point home loss to an underachieving, 8-7 Michigan team.. That’s a bad loss, especially when you’re trying to build momentum.

Story of the past half decade. Just can’t put together any momentum.

Michael Penix is a player whose career was upended by injuries. 4 season ending injuries in 4 seasons. Maurice Creek is another player whose college career was upended by injuries. Fractured kneecap in one leg, stress fracture in the patella of his other knee, torn Achilles. Those are players who physically just couldn’t do what they used to do anymore because of injuries. Phinisee has suffered a few minor injuries. Did you disagree about a concussion being a minor injury, ok, I understand that. But it’s not like a concussion or an ankle injury only affects you on one end. He doesn’t have injuries that affect him when IU has the basketball but go away completely when the other team has the ball. If anything, a concussion would make you more hesitant on defense because defense is all about aggression and physicality. But it hasn’t. He’s just fine physically and nothing has kept him from being a very good offensive player. So, I don’t buy the injury excuse for his poor offense.