wow...
not sure how much more simpler I can put it. At least it wasn't something that life long Buffalo fans have learned to accept after so many years of watching Buffalo basketball. What I want to know is how much we can actually play on the coaches, or if we need to blame it on the players? Losing close games in the last few seconds (especially at home) is a specialty of Buffalo Basketball for many many years. For some reason Reggie never can get his players to hold onto the ball and not turn it over on the last play of the game...but I guess that's on the players since they're the ones who are on the court.
Blaming the game on the last possession is the first thing that people would usually get mad about (since it was the final piece of the disastrous puzzle that we saw) but the game was lost way before that. Rodney Pierce, our "best player", had what is easily his worst game ever as a Bull. He couldn't hold onto the ball in transition, he couldn't hit water if he fell out of a boat, and didn't seem to think that taking it to the rack to get fouled was the smart thing to do when you cant shoot to save your life. 2 for 15 from the floor means stop taking jumpers, and either take it to the whole, or at least penetrate and kick. But maybe it wasn't all his fault. Who was he gonna kick to? Smiley and Filzen were a combined 1 for 13, so kicking it to them would have been dumb anyway. Maybe we should have given the ball to Max in the post. I mean he did score 7 points on 3 shots taken...oh that's right, he was in the game for a total of 10 minutes because he fouled out (he got screwed over with a few of those calls, but still gotta learn to just let the player go sometimes.)Giving the ball to Betts usually would make sense, but he was only on the court 22 minutes because he got a little hurt during the game. Still though, for those 22 minutes, I don't remember Betts doing a single thing. He's made a name for himself being Charlie Hustle on the court, but whenever he was in the game I barely noticed that he was actually out on the floor.
With all of that said, we still only lost by one point, which isn't bad considering everything that went wrong offensively. I know its easy to criticize Reggie's offensive scheme, but that was only one game. Its really hard for a team to get into a good offensive flow in the first game of the season. And besides, a lot of our misses (actually most of them) were open looks, that just didn't fall because of bad shooting. Defense is something that is always constant, and we looked better than I thought we would defensively, and I think that is something that will continue to be very good throughout the year.
All in all, I don't think anyone should be worried, especially since it was only the first game of the year. But everyone has a right to be extremely frustrated at Sundays game since we cant win a home opener against an America East school. Expect Buffalo to get continuously better over the next few games, and really have our offense going when we face Canisius a week from today. I really think we will win the next 2 games against Navy and Towson...its just a shame that the first look that our fans had of our basketball team was a typical Bulls lost that just reminds everyone of years past.
not sure how much more simpler I can put it. At least it wasn't something that life long Buffalo fans have learned to accept after so many years of watching Buffalo basketball. What I want to know is how much we can actually play on the coaches, or if we need to blame it on the players? Losing close games in the last few seconds (especially at home) is a specialty of Buffalo Basketball for many many years. For some reason Reggie never can get his players to hold onto the ball and not turn it over on the last play of the game...but I guess that's on the players since they're the ones who are on the court.
Blaming the game on the last possession is the first thing that people would usually get mad about (since it was the final piece of the disastrous puzzle that we saw) but the game was lost way before that. Rodney Pierce, our "best player", had what is easily his worst game ever as a Bull. He couldn't hold onto the ball in transition, he couldn't hit water if he fell out of a boat, and didn't seem to think that taking it to the rack to get fouled was the smart thing to do when you cant shoot to save your life. 2 for 15 from the floor means stop taking jumpers, and either take it to the whole, or at least penetrate and kick. But maybe it wasn't all his fault. Who was he gonna kick to? Smiley and Filzen were a combined 1 for 13, so kicking it to them would have been dumb anyway. Maybe we should have given the ball to Max in the post. I mean he did score 7 points on 3 shots taken...oh that's right, he was in the game for a total of 10 minutes because he fouled out (he got screwed over with a few of those calls, but still gotta learn to just let the player go sometimes.)Giving the ball to Betts usually would make sense, but he was only on the court 22 minutes because he got a little hurt during the game. Still though, for those 22 minutes, I don't remember Betts doing a single thing. He's made a name for himself being Charlie Hustle on the court, but whenever he was in the game I barely noticed that he was actually out on the floor.
With all of that said, we still only lost by one point, which isn't bad considering everything that went wrong offensively. I know its easy to criticize Reggie's offensive scheme, but that was only one game. Its really hard for a team to get into a good offensive flow in the first game of the season. And besides, a lot of our misses (actually most of them) were open looks, that just didn't fall because of bad shooting. Defense is something that is always constant, and we looked better than I thought we would defensively, and I think that is something that will continue to be very good throughout the year.
All in all, I don't think anyone should be worried, especially since it was only the first game of the year. But everyone has a right to be extremely frustrated at Sundays game since we cant win a home opener against an America East school. Expect Buffalo to get continuously better over the next few games, and really have our offense going when we face Canisius a week from today. I really think we will win the next 2 games against Navy and Towson...its just a shame that the first look that our fans had of our basketball team was a typical Bulls lost that just reminds everyone of years past.