All About The Defense

made me feel like I was watching a different basketball league, in terms of defense and physicality. I love our team, and think we were a solid sweet 16 with a better draw, but the defensive shortfalls relative to the top 8 teams are pretty important.

It’s nice to have a team that is building for a great year in 2011 but has growth potential with talented freshmen for 2010. I too hope that we get the freshmen lots of playing time. Although I like MR and ND and JK, unless they have a super-breakout season I don’t see their athleticism being able to drive us to that next level of play.

I don’t want to get all pollyanna here, but I am not sure who else in the Pac-10 will be dominant next season. Brockman has graduated, so Wash should be down. Harden will surely be gone, so ASU should be down. Not sure who else is an up and comer.

My impression is that CBH has a goal to have a program which has consistent success over the long haul, in terms of on-court results and off-court character. He does not look for the banner one season and the NIT the next. He also is not trying to achieve this success in a joke league like C-USA. So when he is recruiting, he is presumably not just looking at the next season, but at the season after and the season after that.

If we are really looking at a major rebuilding season, where 2010 is a placeholder while we set the table for 2011, how do you think that we might have arrived at this juncture? There are no obvious surprises that I can remember where a player or players might have been an integral part of a power team in 2010 but are not available to the Bruins.

For example, RW not coming back for 2009 may well have been a surprise, but do we think that CBH expected him to run the point in 2010 when RW was being recruited in HS? It is certainly possible that this scenario was exactly what CBH had in mind, and that RW’s off the charts improvement left a hole which could not have been foreseen.

I cannot imagine a coach who is a better steward/ caretaker than CBH. Just curious as to how with the longer-term perspective he brings to the table, we might have wound up with major holes in the roster in a given season where the Pac-10 might be out of reach. There must have been some surprises- wonder whether the knowledgable base which resides in BN could provide some perspective. Thanks.

I think its clear now, more than ever, than success requires getting everyone to stay with the team and playing together for some time

This year’s final 4 features Villanova, UNC, Mich St, and UConn

Villanova is a soph/junior/senior heavy team. UNC returned every player from its FF run the year before. Michigan State lost Neitzel, but returned everyone else. UConn could’ve lost a bunch of guys, but returned everyone as well.

Then you consider that Kansas returned everyone except Julian Wright for their championship the year before despite the fact that it was the strongest frosh class in years. Or that Florida won after keeping their sophomore/junior heavy championship team together for their junior/senior years.

Given all that, I’m not that bummed that we lost in the tourney seeing how little we returned and how many new players we had to bring in. Two years from now though, watch out

This year featured a marked improvement on offense for a number of our players — on an individual level. However, contrary to the team’s offensive performance the previous four years (yes, even the year before Howland’s first final four season) our team offense was deficient in terms of efficiency and execution. In the three seasons that preceded this one, Howland was criticized in some quarters for a low-scoring offense. I was not one of those who criticized. Although at times those teams would go cold and brick shots, our teams played fundamentally sound, and executed, taking high percentage shots and almost always “finished.” This team, for various reasons, did not exhibit the efficiency and execution and fundamental play — in terms of TEAM offense — that our previous four teams did, in my opinion.

While agree that our main problem this year was less effective defense and rebounding, I believe the offense was still a problem. I am not suggesting that the players didn’t try, or that CBH didn’t coach, but from what I saw it just didn’t come together. I don’t expect what we saw this year to be a regular thing. I expect more of what I saw the three previous seasons going forward. As an aside, our incoming recruiting class appears to to have the potential to reinvigorate our physicality, a Howland trademark, which should help immensely on the defensive/rebounding end.