So are you saying it is unreasonable for the team to take a while to gel and play like a seasoned team despite all the early injuries and learning a new system? You think we should be undefeated? The UMass game would have been a win if we hit anywhere near what we are capable of shooting the basketball. And sure we returned 4 of our top players but remember, they were the top players on a team that was 15-18 and only won 6 conference games. It's not like we are returning the top players from a team that won 25 games last year. I agree with you that it is reasonable to build on where we ended up last year, but I think 4 games (with a team that is not completely healthy) is not a big enough sample size to determine if we are improving or regressing. Finally, what players that are no longer on the team were going to help this year more than the players we brought in? I saw players that may have had one or two flashes of decent play but none of them were able to do it on a consistent basis. I didn't see you or anyone else on here regretting the fact they are no longer on the team before the season started. I believe Claude and Ndongo are definite upgrades from what we lost last year. And guys like Sacko and Gapare look like they have much more potential than what we lost.
We had back to back games against teams from one bid leagues where we played bad. We were lucky to escape with a win against Howard who led us for about 75% of the game. Remember when people were talking them up because they went dancing, as a 16 seed last year. They are now 2-4 with a pair of 20 point losses to compliment a loss to Bryant. In your hypothetical against UmassL do they also get to shoot their average? We didn't lose because we had an off night shooting and they torched the nets. They shot 13% from 3. And Cinci lost 4 of their top 5 scorers from last year and of the 10 players who average over 10 mpg half are new faces. We aren't the only team dealing with new faces.
Yeah, the team went 6-14 last year. We went 6-12 in 2018/2019 and followed that up going 11-9 in conference the following year then 11-6 the year after. Turns out returning a bunch of your core tends to lead to improvement. Yeah, we haven't gotten to conference play so things could still turn around, but this isn't a bad half or even a bad game. We haven't looked good in 4 games this year outside of a 10 minute stretch against a winless GSU team.
As far as who was going to help? How about Smith, a 4th year PG who led the team in assists per game (with a near 3-1 ATR) and was a great rebounder for a guard? The biggest issue with Smith was his shooting, but so far Abram has looked horrible in that regard and even if Abram turns that around Smith will almost certainly have been a better facilitator, rebounder, and defender this year. Also, Jalon Moore would have 100% been an upgrade over Gapare, Souare, and Sacko and likely better this year than Ndongo. Regardless it didn't have to be, or shouldn't have had to be, an either or. We had basically no bigs and Claude has obvious flaws that will likely mean he can't be out there that long, so there was still plenty of playing time for both Ndongo and Moore.
Claude has been okay, but I'm skeptical he'll be as productive as Franklin was the back half of the year. Ndongo looks like he has high potential. But we've also brought in Dowuona, Gapare, Souare, George, and Forrest maybe joining later. We had some good additions, but by no means was this a situation where none of the players who left were better than what we replaced them with. They transfers out weren't world beaters, but it's silly to me to see the "needs time to gel" argument when the team inherited already had a ton of experience together, and the new staff chose to to overhaul the roster despite that, and the tradeoff wasn't even an obvious upgraded roster despite what people pretended. At best we have more potential for a year or two down the line if it develops , but that is reliant on both the new players developing as well as them staying long enough to do that.
But how long is enough time to gel? My guess is that it will be right up until the point we starting hearing about CDS needing time to get his players in.
