I believe that Bamba will tell those in doubt everything they need to know about the future of our program. He was supposed to be a "one and done", first round wonder. Based on his play the last 4-6 weeks, one of two takes: 1) The NBA says stay there, Smart hasn't improved you 2) NBA grabs him and develops him into a star because they don't want Smart to ruin a potentially great talent. Either of those cases adds to Billie Powers legacy of overwhelming stupidity in athletics. 3) The NBA takes him, but can't develop him into anything more than a journeyman player; in which case, everyone can sit around and point fingers at who is to blame for his loss of enthusiasm for the game. If it's 1 or 2, we need to start looking at coaches, but I don't see anyone buying out Smart's obnoxious contract. That said, no big wins, no tournament runs, the new arena will be empty.
Repeat performance in the second half. Horns were outscored 16-4 in the last 5 minutes and 16 seconds. Seems like they could score four points accidentally.
Yes we saw the loss coming (my post the other day, etc.) but the way it came was more shockingly inept than I was hoping. After the last game against ou, where the shooting was decent (over 50%) and O had a monster game, and Bamba had his best game, it appeared the Horns had something. I knew ksu would play tough defense, but still held out hopes that our offense would shoot around 40% from the field and maybe 30% from beyond the arc. Instead, we are 28.6% from the field, and 11% from three point land. Well, O had one of his worst games, Bamba was AWOL, and Davis had one more basket than a dead man. Shaka looked like he was watching a movie in a foreign language without subtitles. (confused and disoriented)
That’s generous. We were given a wide open layup with less than :30 to play. KState actually scored on EVERY possession after we took 44-42 lead. I’m so disappointed in Shaka. No havoc brought over his VCU days, and don’t say it can’t work in major conf, WVU does well. On that, you would think he could create an offense to break the press but we always look clueless against them. We have no offensive identity at all, last night we either dribbled at the top until the help man off the failed pick and roll pushed our ball handler out and we had a desperate shot, or we continued to heave 3s hoping to eclipse 15% I guess. My assumption is Shaka gets a pass, but likely consecutive years as bottom 2 in conf isn’t acceptable. Maybe Del Conte can see through all that.
What's becoming pretty clear is that the shooters on our team are very poor at shooting when they're not fully comfortable. The more Ostekowsi has to think about his shot or move in any way, the more likely he's going to airball a three. It's inexcusable to me that a guy that has a quality shooting touch that he clearly has should still miss so badly and so often on open shots. We just don't have guys who are talented at consistently creating shots off the dribble against good defenses - particularly zones that are good at helping. And what makes it worse is that we have guys who believe they ARE good at it. So when we're not passing and not getting wide-open threes (on a night where we happen to be shooting well), we're not scoring.
Just pitiful. I'm not sure if it's the guys Smart trusts in the developmental and amateur leagues, but he's taking chances on guys who just suck at shooting in general. And on top of that, there isn't any guard help coming in the next recruiting class. It's so strange to be that he built his VCU program on these heady, wiry, average-shooting guards, but we can't shoot our way out of a paper bag on even a good night.
