Yeah, I mentioned that a few months back and from what I've seen of him recently, Kon as an undersized stretch 4 in certain matchups could be worth experimenting with. Would love to find a way to integrate his offense w/o killing us on D.
Yeah, Jared was more than just a shooter for Duke last year -- he had 38 steals (Proctor had 22) and averaged 5.0 rebounds.
This idea has a lot of merit and plays to Kon's strengths. My only worry is Jon likes to switch on defense, which negates where guys start on D.
Clearly Jon is playing some 4-D chess here. Lets give UK and AZ some highlights of Kon being relentlessly driven on, so they design their entire game plan around it. Then when the games finally roll around, Kon just funnels drives to Man-Man and to a weakside Cooper so they can set single game block records...
DB, you and I have been battling the Kon doubters for months. Back in June and through the summer they were arguing he was a deep bench guy. Then they begrudgingly put him in the rotation.
CTC 1 - Sion James: 6 points, 4 steals, and hounded Caleb Foster into an 0-6 nightmare.
Jon Scheyer had this choice and he picked Caleb and Tyreese.
One thing about Roach's stats are that his shooting was stellar only for a portion of his career at Duke. He shot well during the second half of his junior year and his senior year. The first 2.5 years, he was a so-so shooter. That stretch of good shooting coincides with when Roach was moved off the ball in favor of Proctor providing more of the primary point guard responsibilities. So one could make a case that Proctor moving on the ball made Roach a better shooter. Compare Roach's JR year shooting splits to Proctor's SO season and Proctor was very similar if not slightly better.
Yep. People have seemed shocked at the idea that Sion's defense could be as good as Mason's. But the coaching staff thinks so, and now we have first hand evidence.
I miss Jeremy as well, but you ignore his faults. Jeremy was only an excellent three-point shooter last season. Until then, he was a worse three-point shooter than Tyrese. Tyrese has always been better at both distributing and protecting the ball. Jeremy was a good defender his senior season but still not as good as Tyrese.
Sion definitely brings more playmaking than Gillis. But Gillis shot 47% from 3 last season on decent volume. So a lot of it depends on need.
Not to provoke an argument (Moi?), but I still expect to have nine or ten players with 300+ minutes for the year. That's what I call "meaningful minutes." Now I understand that the coaches are working primarily with a "rotation" of seven, which is perfectly understandable -- but that's now. Duke basketball is extremely intense, even physical, and there is wear and tear on the players, so I expect some down time or restricted minutes to occur, creating multiple opportunities for others. Also, it's a long season, and there will be migration of roles across multiple players.
I'm not going to check all the teams, but for the last 4 games of the season/tourney, UConn's 8th man averaged 11.5mpg.
