Shooter

Yea he's been great. Big guys always play harder when they are getting touches and buckets. We are playing through him, and he's playing really hard.

Agree he's playing hard and competing defensively. Here's my observation on Carlyle. What percentage of his shot attempts would you classify as "good shots"? Maybe 10%? Almost every shot he takes is a difficult pull-up jumper. Kid needs to keep the ball moving and just do the dirty work for a while.

He struggled with Penn State's very good ball pressure. Not the first or last guy that will happen to. Rice was quick enough to beat that pressure several times, but then he seemed to get stuck between two thoughts - should I drive this all the way, or pull it out and run offense? I think Rice is the key to this team. Maybe not our best player, but our most irreplaceable one.

I thought we started the first half pretty well. We played an extended stretch of the first half with Carlyle, Tucker, and Leal all in at the same time - that was when the offense started to bog down.

Ballo was an absolute monster today. That's the guy who was first team All Pac 12. The first 8 minutes of the second half are probably as good as we have looked for the last 1.5 years. The spacing was so much better - Woodson has to see it.

Yea, it's 100% coaching. Tucker takes those shots because the staff is not telling him they are bad shots. Even going back to Hood-Schifino - JHS had some big games, but he also had a habit of barfing up contested 17 footers.

Agree Matta or Fife on Woodson's staff wouldn't matter much. Disagree with your characterization of Matta at Butler. They aren't great, but he's improved them from the end of Jordan's tenure. Butler was probably better than IU last year despite a vast difference in the resources available. Butler is just kind of screwed in the NIL era. Both guys from their starting backcourt last season left in the portal for more money. When programs like Dayton and Washington can poach your players, it's going to be very hard to build anything.

Yea. It's pretty clear he is not the guy, but they are not firing a coach in December at 8-3. We will muddle through the season, beat some teams at home, finish middle of the pack Big Ten and on the NCAA bubble. And then hopefully a rational choice is made after the season.

Here is a horrifying thought: Per Kenpom, IU is projected to be the underdog in 14 of our last 15 games this season. That extends from January 15 to March 8. Almost two full months. The one exception is Feb 26 at home vs Penn State... and our win probability for that one is exactly 50%.

Woodson owes Leal for those two threes in the last 10 seconds!

I think effort is underselling the problem. As an example, Louisville has at least 2 players that only want to shoot threes. It's not a secret. On a well coached team, that is drilled into the players before the game until they understand - YOU MUST CLOSE OUT HARD WITH HIGH HANDS ON #93 and #6. MAKE THEM PUT IT ON THE FLOOR. But we close out with hands down and they hit shots, Malik doesn't learn the lesson until his guy has already hit 3 threes. It's not a problem that simply "trying harder" is going to fix. We are poorly coached.

I was at the game today. Really liked the shorter rotation. Those 8 guys are our team against real competition, barring injuries / foul trouble. Hate the crowd transferring their anxiety to Goode. We know he can shoot. It's the third game, chill out people.

Fun fact on Trey Galloway: he is #4 nationally in assist rate on Kenpom right now. 9 assists in 17 minutes opening night, 8 assists in 18 minutes tonight. The three guys ahead are small school guys who have only played one game, so he'll probably be #1 in a few days.

It's true that Woodson makes the final call. It's also true that good leaders listen to their people. Repeatedly mentioning Howard's age is petty. Either he's good enough for his role or he's not. Woodson hired him, he must have thought he was good enough. Ultimately it comes down to results. If Woodson was killing it in high school recruiting, he can say "my way or the highway" and people would be fine with it. When he's not, he's going to get second-guessed.

Myles Rice is exactly what this program has been missing. 20 pts today, 4 assists, 0 TO in 31 minutes. And a couple of huge plays to close the game out down the stretch. I thought Woodson's rotations were pretty good, particularly in the first half. Long stretches with Mgbako and Goode as the two forwards. If everyone is healthy, assume Galloway takes Cupps minutes and Tucker takes Leal's and some of Goode's. Outside shooting was terrible again. Has to be better. Both teams shot poorly, but they generated more clean looks than we did. Reneau is a stud scorer. And he did it in a number of different ways, not just iso post-ups. Ballo didn't do much other than rebound. He'll have better games.

Rice was pretty passive, didn't do much positive or negative. But the good news is we can evaluate him based on 35 games as a key player for a tourney team last year, not just from 15 minutes of a scrimmage.

There was no second half, but some time got added back onto the clock at one of the stoppages. Probably 15-ish minutes of game time total.

Hatton looked better than I expected offensively. He's pretty mobile. Ballo is an absolute load underneath as expected. Goode showed why we brought him here with back to back threes. The exhibition began as starters vs reserves, and then they swapped some of the players halfway through. The reserves "won" the first segment of the scrimmage by 1 point. It was interesting that Ballo and Reneau remained on the same team after the switch. I believe one of the keys to this season is how successfully Woodson staggers their minutes and gets Mgbako at the 4.

I'm also looking forward to the scrimmage. Is Jakai playing? Thought I had read a few weeks ago he was still not at 100%. Could be wrong though.

He did better in the portal this year than last year. That's the difference. It was pretty obvious we needed a high level guard last spring, in addition to the 2 starters and 2 rotation pieces we did add. We tried on guys like Love and Knecht. We just didn't land them. I am very happy with the portal haul this year. It would still be foolish to believe high school recruiting no longer matters and we can always fill all our needs from the portal.

Yes he entered last spring with a roster that had several needs. Added two of his top players in Ware and Mgbako, but struck out on his guard targets. Overall result was the team he built stunk. This year he seems to have done better in the portal which I am very happy with. Results are still pending. But there is a risk with waiting until the spring. It would be foolish to assume it will always go like this offseason, and not like last offseason.

Yes "if" they win. Woodson tried to build a roster the same way last year, and we were terrible

This is the mix of our projected top 8 in Woodson's fourth season: 1 kid recruited as a high schooler by the prior coach. 3 kids recruited by Woodson in the spring of their senior year HS after they decommitted from elsewhere. 4 transfers new to the program this season. I do agree the best programs moving forward will have a combination of veteran "culture guys", high level freshmen, and impact transfers. But I don't see an overarching plan with Woodson. He is not identifying prospects who fit his program, landing them and developing them - he's scrambling for whatever talent becomes available in the spring. That directly led to our mess of a roster last season.

You could be right, but if that's the case I don't see why he was retained for this year. Unless administration is reasonably certain they can pull a better candidate than Dusty May next spring. In any case, Woodson leading this team to a great season and then peacefully riding off into the sunset is a best-case scenario. So I'm going to pretend you have a crystal ball and that is exactly what will happen.

I guess that's possible, but it's pure speculation. My point is that if Haralson wants to play PG, both IU and ND are in the same boat with good sophomore PGs who you'd expect to still be around when Haralson arrives.