I know a lot of people have been complaining about the last couple of years of basketball which primarily boils down to disappointment in tournament success. Why have we been losing? Part of it is that we don't have the super-elite players (Boozer, J-Will) from previous classes and this makes the margin for error much smaller. I don't want this to be a recruiting discussion about whether or not we should have elite players, so I'll just leave it at that.

What we have had the past few years is a gaudy record that starts getting national attention and then seem to start to fizzle out in February and tourney time. There have several threads discussing why, such as bench depth, injuries, lack of post presence and point guard play, but I haven't seen anything that rings true with me quite yet. I've watched Marquette and Villanova win without a post player and those teams played really well in the tournament. Tennesse also just runs a bunch of wings out on the floor and defends well. You can argue that those teams have better point guard play, but I think that is debatable (except for Scotty Reynolds, who is just amazing).

I'm starting to think we reach our potential earlier in the season than other teams. This is different than peaking too early in that I don't think we necessarily play worse than earlier in the season, just that everyone else plays better. Do you think we would have blown out Wisconsin in February? I kind of doubt it. They are on a roll now and have looked very solid. This is a tribute to our coaching staff that we play so well early on, but also hints that we no longer have the talent gap over other teams that we used to have. We have some incredible players, but we haven't gotten lucky in landing the next Boozer or J-Will for a couple of years. That's ok, since recruiting is such a crap-shoot a lot of the time anyways, but we're due for the next J-Will to land in our laps (Boynton maybe?).

The other thing that I think we are missing is the guy on our team with an iron will who can change a game with one shot. Redick could do that and Ewing hit a lot of crunch time shots when he was around. On this team when the momentum started to turn toward the other team, we never had someone we could count on to be "the man". I think Paulus actually had the most desire to become that guy, but he often would just jack a long 3. Henderson's game against Belmont is exactly what I'm talking about and he gives me the most hope on our team to become that guy. He willed Duke to that victory. Every time down the court I wanted him to touch the ball because good things were happening. If he can develop into that guy next year who can take over a game when necessary, I think we can become very good again.

Sorry for the long rambling message, just a few things that have been rattling around the noggin for a while.