Offensively: It's not passing, shot selection, making jumpers, Walt finishing, or anything else. The last two games (at least), we have played like a team that does not trust each other. All of us, each of us. If each man leans on his teammates and holds his teammates up, everything else will take care of itself. Restore the trust and the machine starts humming again.

Defensively: Focus, mostly. We're tops in the nation in forcing turnovers (27% of opponents possessions) and we were also backing that up with hands in faces, clogging the lane, and not giving up easy buckets. We were highly ranked in opponent 3FG%, too. That's gone away the last four games. We've become too reliant on turnovers and not committing to defense in all facets. It's a seductive trap, but it can also be fixed. Our poorer defensive positioning was also a factor in rebounding trouble, but so was the lack of focus.

These are very fixable things. We'll see if they've figured it out or if they continue to struggle.

Sure, but that's not really a "fix" in the sense I mean. Either you make the shot or you don't. If you want to get better at shooting, you do that in the offseason. I was talking about things you can do in a half week.

Not necessarily.  Teams work on shooting in-season too.  I'll agree that to make a major leap in shooting, it happens during the off-season. 

Fixed that for ya.

You certainly can get better, as shooters are made, not born. I think that happens in the off season, though, unless you're not doing your homework.

We've seen glimses of all the parts needed to be a good team so far this season.  Now the million dollar coaching challenge is getting all the stars to align in March, which has got to be quite a task. 

We've seen:
*Reggie's played big around the basket on a few occassions and shown us glimpses of the year before last.  He can be an effective big.
*Walter has shown he can hit the 3, shoot foul shots well and drive to the basket.  But he's done much of any of these consistently as of late.
*Baltic has shown been Ivo of last year in many cases, but not all cases.
*Jon Smith showed us something during the last game.
*DJ--hope for the good DJ
*Kellog--we know he can stroke the 3 when he's going right.
*TJ-we've seen he can hit jumpers and even shown us a few times he can compete in the paint.
*Ricardo/Goard--we've seen they're athletic but you wouldn't want them to have an open 5 foot bunny in a tied game with 2 seconds to play with nobody guarding them.
Stevie--we've seen he can run the point, drive and get hot from outside.  He can be electric!  We've also seen him be mini-DJ in shot selection and taking care of the ball too.


Point is, we've seen glimpses of the good/bad from every player on the squad, which is very normal during the course of a long season.  If we can get everyone going at the same time, we're special.  And as with most teams, if we don't, we won't be very special.  Fun to be in this position of having all the parts necessary to be successful and spending the next couple months watching it all play out. 

Serious question: I can't tell what type of player Groce feels TJ Hall is or wants him to be.  He hits a few 3s once in a blue moon, but I think he's better when attacking the basket.  Yet he seems to rely on the 3 and I can only assume the staff feels that's his strength.  He must be a lot more accurate in practice...