Kdug

Yup. You could see him falling backwards before there was any contact.

Loyer with the flop

I’d agree with the rebounding, but his two point shooting outside of rim shots significantly drops off - as it does with every player. Here are Edey’s shooting splits via Bart torvik: Dunks: 48/49 (98.0%) Non-dunk rim shots: 39/55 (71.0%) Other 2 point shots: 40/93 (43.0%) I’m not 100% sure how he defines each grouping, but I’d imagined a rim shot would likely be in the ballpark of 5 feet or less. Regardless, his efficiency is not good outside of rim shots. Again, that’s normal for most players, but it’s not like Edey has magical touch that’s allowing him to hit 10 footers. He’s just really good at establishing deep post position, and getting rebounds which gets him right at the rim.

Imo it’ll be tough to stop Edey from scoring. But we just need to make sure we limit his efficiency to some extent and make sure the other PU players don’t have efficient offensive performances I think you take advantage of Edey by constantly putting him in ball screen coverage when we’re on offense. From what I have seen, Edey pretty much exclusively plays drop coverage on ball screens due to his lack of quickness, which means whoever he’s guarding will have open looks from the perimeter. I’m assuming he’ll guard Ware, so I hope we run a lot of pick and pops with him. The other big thing is we need to keep Edey and Purdue off the offensive glass as much as we can. Though at this point I’d say that’s a key to the game regardless of who we’re playing.

Agreed. If he could go up stronger he’d be much more effective. Unfortunately, I think some of that is just pure strength, which he doesn’t have at this point in his career. But he does so many other things well that I think he more than makes up for it.

It makes sense if you look at the game by game results. MSU doesn’t have any close wins, and only two of their wins are less than a 20 point margin. Most of MSU’s losses are close games vs good teams as well. Kansas has 7 single digit margin of victory wins. One of them being home vs EIU, who is a sub 300 team. Another at home vs a mediocre Missouri team. Ironically the other would be vs IU, since the metrics hate us. MSU’s bad performances would be a close home loss vs JMU, thought JMU is better than what most thought at the time of the loss. A double digit home loss vs Wisconsin, and a double digit road loss vs Northwestern.

It’s between Mbagko, Galloway, and Ware for me. In the end, I voted for Ware with Galloway a close 2nd. Without the foul trouble, Galloway might’ve got my vote because he was outstanding on both ends, and very efficient on offense. Mbagko was great on offense, but didn’t do much else. Ware was great on offense, our best rebounder, and good on defense. That’s the difference for me.

Well it’s 3 straight games where our opponent didn’t shoot the 3 well, with two of those games coming against good three point shooting teams. At some point our defense has something to do with it. If you’re an analytical person, kenpom has a series where he talks about whether defenses or offenses control certain statistics. Three point percentage was 83% controlled by offenses. So this just seems like regression to the mean more than anything. Here’s the article if you’re interested: https://kenpom.com/blog/offense-vs-defense-3point-percentage/

Agreed. Might be getting off topic, but they should just copy the format that the women use. Men’s college basketball is the only level of basketball that has halves and the 1 and 1.

Good response to a bad game. Thought we struggled keeping them off the offensive boards and struggled with free throws again, but everything else was solid. Minnesota isn’t a great team, but they were 3-1 in the Big Ten before this, so not a pushover either. We also controlled the game and got a much needed double digits margin of victory. Ultimately these next 3 games will tell us a lot about what to expect the rest of the year.

Will be interesting to see how Deboer does at Bama. I think he’s a great coach, but he’s not Saban - nobody is. I wonder how much patience Bama fans will have if he doesn’t make a championship game in his first 4 or 5 years.

Eh, the 3 starters in at the same time isn’t needed. Imo just try to have one of Ware/Reneau and one of XJ/Galloway always in. Mbagko doesn’t really play starter minutes anyway.

Anyone who follows ITH, they have a video breaking down the 4 airballed threes: https://www.insidethehall.com/2024/01/11/film-session-indianas-rough-night-from-deep-against-rutgers/ I honestly don’t even know how you’d address that as a coach. They took the shots they were supposed to, with the 2 Mbagko airballs not even having a defender closing out. I hope this doesn’t cause IU to start passing up open threes. Need to keep shooting those, just have to make them.

I agree with a decent amount of this, but disagree with what you’re implying with the bold. There is no team in the country that would not have a significant impact to their depth by losing their best guard to injury. Our guard depth was fine going into last year. You can’t plan for your best guard to break his foot and miss most of the year. This year is a different story.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I legitimately would not care if another coach had called Yogi the little guard, because he was a little guard. It’s the same thing as calling someone big fella. If anyone gets upset at that, they’re just looking for something to be upset about. There’s plenty to criticize Woodson for with this year’s team, but criticizing him for that quote is beyond absurd.

It seems like he is focusing on offensive shot selection, in which case you’d basically just do an inverse of the % of shot attempts that are mid range. If that’s the case, here are the rankings with the % of FGA that haslametrics has classified as mid range: 1. Nebraska (24.54%) 2. Wisconsin (24.95%) 3. Illinois (25.31%) 4. Minnesota (26.03%) 5. Purdue (26.7%) 6. Michigan (27.17%) 7. Penn State (27.57%) 8. Maryland (28.01%) 9. Northwestern (29.04%) 10. Iowa (29.08%) 11. Rutgers (29.24%) 12. IU (31.18%) 13. Michigan State (33.86%) 14. Ohio State (34.69%)

Bates was showing that improvement at IU from his Freshman to Sophmore year. For non-NBA guys, we need to ensure we’re keeping the guys who can be developed. He could’ve transferred to be closer to home and there was nothing we could’ve done. But he seemed to project to have a clear role as either a starter in a 3 guard lineup or at minimum a 6th man who’s getting 20ish minutes per game.

Fair enough on the NBA stuff. And yeah, as it sits now the staff has a lot of work to do for next year’s roster. Imo we don’t have anyone who I’d feel good about starting at either guard spot. Gunn and Cupps are fine if they’re projected as rotational bench players, but having them pencilled in as starters would require both to have massive improvements. Imo we need multiple starting caliber guards from the portal. One bad year you can write off as a fluke (assuming things keep going the way they look this year), but two bad years in a row in year 3 and 4 would probably get Woodson fired or at least on the hot seat unless he has something exceptionally promising lined up for year 5.

I’m not trying to argue Woodson was a great NBA coach, but trying to act like he was terrible and accomplished nothing is just inaccurate. He was probably somewhere around average. Regardless, none of that matters now because it’s not going to fix the issues at IU. I think many of our issues this year go back to how this roster was built this offseason. Getting another good guard in the portal should’ve been a priority, and relying heavily on X (who’s inconsistent) and Galloway (who’s better in a complimentary role, also inconsistent) was clearly a mistake. Hopefully the staff learns from this and prioritizes getting multiple impact guards in the portal for next year. We also need to prioritize keeping young players who show promise, especially guards, from leaving in the transfer portal. I know Bates was inconsistent last year, but he had flashes of potential and looks to have improved this year. No idea if he left on his own or if the staff pushed him out, but he’d really help this year’s team on the offensive end. I feel like Gunn and Mgbako fit that mold.

He’s responsible for the best NY Knicks team and the second best Hawks team since 2000. Don’t think he’s unquestionable. But he did have some good tenures at each spot relative to other coaches, but that was over a decade ago and a lot has changed since then.

The lack of hustle knock on Ware is something IU fans grabbed onto because of the Oregon coaches comments. His hustle has not been an issue, and Ware himself isn’t IU’s issue. Ware was the only person on IU who rebounded last night, with 17 rebounds. You don’t get that without effort. The knock on him is he isn’t very strong and can be pushed around. That can be fixed with time in the weight room over a few off-seasons.

Right. Just pointing out that to this point, IU has been an objectively “young” team since X has been out most games. Agreed that last nights performance was unacceptable, and it starts with our experienced player getting himself ejected after playing terribly before that.

Rutgers had an 88.3 adjusted offensive rating vs IU, their 2nd worst of the year. They also had 54 points with 2 minutes remaining, and would proceed to score their last 12 point all from the free throw line once IU started fouling. IU’s defense has been bad most of the year, but last night that was not the case even considering it was Rutgers. The offense was the issue and was abysmal in every facet.

In this instance, Woodson is right. The defense was good. Rutgers scored a decent amount at the end because we were fouling. IU’s adjusted defensive rating according to Trank vs Rutgers (which accounts for possessions and Rutgers being bad on offense) was 90.6. That’s the equivalent of the 5th ranked defense. The only major issue on the defensive side of the ball was rebounding. On the offensive side of the ball the issue was everything.

Agreed with most of this, except for two things: 1. I don’t think the knock on Ware and effort is legitimate. I think you could say he can be pushed around or be a bit soft, but that’s more due to him being thin and not an effort thing imo. 2. Agreed that experience isn’t a legitimate excuse for how we’ve played thus far. That being said, we rank as the 328th oldest team by minutes played in the country - or 35th youngest if you prefer looking at it that way. Calling IU a young team is just factually correct. If we were ranked 40th or 50th, I could see it being a reason for not being better, but we should still be better than 100th. The only two teams younger than IU who project as at large tourney teams are Duke and Kentucky.