It's not just me - it's everyone on this board. You are heavily in the minority if you believe last year's basketball team is on the same level as this year's. For God's sake, Corey Heyward (nothing against him, love the guy), started ACC games for us last year. You can count his minutes in meaningful games this year on one hand. Your basis for your argument is a loss to a poor non-conf opponent (which actually happens quite regularly in CBB) and a loss at your rival who had 11 days to prepare for you where you had 3, you're coming fresh off of a hard fought game against a good VCU team, and one of their players went Adam Smith unconscious from 3.
Statistics this year (season to date) vs. last year (full year - couldn't find only 2 games in) are as follows: Shooting 10% better from 3, 5% better from the field, 6% better from the line, 3 less turnovers a game, 3 more assists per game, 3 more rbs per game, and 15 MORE PPG. No, we're not in the meat of the conf schedule yet, but I think we can all agree we weren't exactly lighting it up from the field this time last year. You can't possibly think last year's team is on the same level as this one. If you do you're ignoring facts.
I couldn't care less what the popular opinion on this board is. The popular opinion at one time was that Jorgenson was the next Price because he happened to be a white point guard. Also, this isn't the first year the "we're better this year, I swear" has been the popular opinion.
The basis for my argument is the entire 4 years under Gregory and the fact that we haven't done anything this year that we didn't do in years past. It's the same "gift" wrapped in different paper.
Anyways, regarding your stats offense has improved, but using raw stats when rules changed to help the offense and comparing a full year vs part year isn't the way to do so. Anyways, that doesn't mean the team has because offense is only half the game. Also, you're not just arguing that this team is better than last years. You're arguing that it is better than all of the past gregory's years. Here are some stats from 2013 (through 2 ACC games).
In 2013 our scoring defense ranked 83rd. This year 177th.
In 2013 our FG% defense was ranked 48th. This year 221st.
Defensive efficiency under gregory has been ranked 112th, 41st, 104th, 106th, and 182nd this year.
Offense is up, but defense is down.
And lets face it. Even with improved offense, it's not like we are a great offensive team this year.
We are 86th in scoring offense. 88th in FG%, 61st in 3FG%, 140th in FT%. Better than in years past but hardly great, and hardly enough to overcome the weakness defensively that we have. In fact, going by efficiency numbers. We are 8th in the ACC in offensive efficiency and 14th in defensive efficiency.
Sorry, but improving the offense while having a sharp decrease in defense doesn't mean the team is better. It's just a different shade of bad.
We are also not a very deep team as we rely on Hunt, Mitchell, and Smith heavily and there is a significant drop off after them. And this is already with weak pg and center positions. Mitchell has a history of issues with both fatigue and fouls and is playing 21% more minutes per game so far this year than last. Last year through 14 games, first 2 ACC games, he played 352 minutes, average of 25.14 per game. Over the last 17 he played just 332 averaging 19.53 min per game. Even if he is in better shape, you can't reasonably expect him to not have a drop off in minutes played coming into ACC play.
Also Smith is a very one dimensional player. He is very good shooting 3s, but he is a low assist and low rebound player. He also only makes 1.6 two point field goals and only attempts 1.3 FT's per game. When he is on he is good, but when he is off he isn't giving us much. In the 6 games he's shot under 40% we have scored 403 points, 67 ppg vs the 769 in 9 games he's shot over 40%, 85.44 ppg. FWIW if we take the games where he shoots below his current average, then there are 7 games and we scored and average of 68 ppg. 68 ppg would be good for 254th in the nation currently (for comparison we were 258th last year in ppg). Last year he had 10 games against ACC teams, out of 20, where he shot below what he averaged last year, shocking I know. Even if we assume that he'll shoot below his current average in 9 out of the 18 regular season ACC games we play this year, for those 9 games we are playing both with a really bad defense, as well as an offense comparable to what we had last year in terms of ppg ranking. That's not a good sign considering we just lost two games where he shot 60%+.
