Comments on: Men’s Hoops Update: In Between Scoring Bursts, James Harden Finds His Teammate

By: ScribeDevil01

ScribeDevil01 — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 03:46:02 +0000

@beatuofa, considering the athletes on our team I think we’re kind of stuck in a zone. Rihards Kuksiks and Derek Glasser offer what you need offensively, but I’m not sure they can do much man-to-man on the other end. Same goes for some of our backups. We may be forced into the zone by the lack of athleticism on our roster.

If anyone knows more about hoops than me, I’d gladly hear your take. I just like watching the dunks and stuff. Thoughts?

By: Beatuofa

Beatuofa — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 00:57:44 +0000

Wasn’t one of the criticisms that NCState fans had when we hired Sendek was that he stuck to man-to-man defenses even when a zone might have been appropriate? I almost wonder if Friday night was a situation where sticking with a zone defense was a mistake and we should have been going to a straight man D. There is obviously something to be said for sticking with what has worked, and the way Baylor was shooting it might not have mattered, but maybe changing things up with a different look once it was obvious that the Bears were in a zone might have shaken things up a bit so we didn’t have to play from so far behind.

By: ZD

ZD — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 04:26:23 +0000

Hey just curious — don’t teams go to zone defenses against teams that *can’t* shoot? Baylor had to be licking their chops, since they live outside the arc anyway.

It was a gritty rally in the final, like, three minutes, but never should have come to that.

By: Beatuofa

Beatuofa — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 20:24:15 +0000

Hopefully Abbott, Kuksiks, McMillan, Glasser, etc can chip in a little bit more on the scoring end. It’s never good to get too attached to just one guy scoring all the points, we are going to start to see some exotic defenses designed to slow Harden down and wear him out, and we need to be able to punish teams who don’t respect our other players. Plus given that Harden and Pendegraph will be gone next year, it’d be nice to see other guys who will be back showing they can be counted on in years to come.