I swear I enjoyed it when I was a teenager and earlier. I went to over 100 MWC games (most of them not including a team I was a fan of), and the vast majority of them were entertaining. Even watching on the TV was a ton of fun. I don’t recall Men’s Basketball being this downright awful. It’s not just the Utes. Unless it’s a tourney game with two quality teams that deserve to be there, the product is bad enough that I could switch the channel at random to something else and it would probably be at least as much fun.
I don’t remember teams gonig 8 minutes without getting a bucket. I don’t remember endless processions of free throw. I don’t remember teams getting turnover, after turnover, after turnover… and yet still somehow managing to keep the game close.
I know a lot of this (if not all of it) is due to the changing of rules, and generally philosophy of the game. The #1 culprit behind MBB sucking ballsack is the foul calling. The idea was to make the product better by allowing offensive players more freedom of movement. Did that work? No it did not. It’s been what, a decade? and MBB has turned into a freethrow contest where the most dominant players spend half the game on the bench because of foul trouble.
The #2 biggest issue is a combination of a bunch of things that I’ll lump into one issue because I’m getting lazy whilst writing this. It’s a combination of the shot clock, zone defenses, and modern basketball’s love affair with three pointers. Offensive possessions, when they don’t end at the FT line (pretty rare tbh), most often consist of a bunch of guys standing around swinging the ball back and forth on the perimeter, occasionally setting useless screens for each other than aren’t used properly. The shot clock makes this worse because it prolongs this horrific display of alleged “entertainment.” The love afair with the three is at fault for obvious reasons. The thing that is crazy to me though, is that players in college don’t seem to be getting better at shooting threes.
Taking a look back at a random Ute team from the past, the Andrew Bogut lead Utes (his finaly year)… They shot 32% from three as a team… When shooting threes wasn’t really a point of emphasis. Andrew Effing Bogut, one of the worst shooters in the NBA during his time there, shot 36% from three on well over 20 attempts. This was all when defenses were allowed to hand check, and things were much chippier on defense. How about a couple years earlier, Majerus’s last team… They shot 38% AS A TEAM. We had 4 guys on that team that shot WELL over 40% from three on over 50 attempts each (the lowest was 59 attempts). That’s two non-cherry picked teams from my childhood that are as good or better at three point shooting than our modern team.
The problem with the current team isn’t just that they are shooting 32% from three in an era where there is an increased emphasis on making threes… This 32% number is coming at a time when 3 point shooters are more open than they were when I was a kid, and there is more space to operate because of an increasing number of shooters on the floor (for most teams, not ours sad LOL). The current team doesn’t have anyone shooting over 40% from three except for Exacte Jr., who has only tried 6 threes this year (probably wide open and in garbage time). The result of all this is that we have a bunch of mediocre three point shooters, and NOBODY that can score points from the low post or high post with consistency.
In today’s day of modern, three point chucking basketball, why can’t we find a single guy that can shoot three pointers better than Andrew Bogut (a notoriously horrible shooter in the NBA).
.
Loading ...
