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HookEm

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Everything posted by HookEm

  1. KenPom had us at #16 pre-season, and we were an improbable pair of made TN free throw away from potentially making the Sweet 16. The only other schools who got close were Oakland, Colorado and A&M. So you could say we finished the year in the 17-20 range. Pretty solid prediction.
  2. I guess we will see. Nobody expected Mitchell or Hunter back last year either.
  3. To say nothing of his defense, which was really solid. He has the athleticism and length to guard anywhere from small forward to center.
  4. Texas should definitely be the 800 pound gorilla in this era of college sports, regardless of the sport. The last 3 years have definitely favored experienced teams, with all of the 5 and 6 year players enabled through Covid. But with the extra Covid year now over, I think the young talent will go up in value. And it is good timing because we are reloading with some top-tier young talent. Regarding Mitchell, if he leaves it will be to a top team like Kansas - and then we are all going to watch with dismay when he is a huge contributor.
  5. I thought it might be interesting to trend the data from all of Derka's KenPom updates through the year. It seemed like the team got a lot better in the later part of the year, especially on defense and I wanted to see what the data looked like. The blue line is offense rating, the green line is defense. The solid line is where we finished the year. We ended up finishing about where we started on offense. KenPom's had us at #30 in the preseason and we finished at #29. Most of the season we in that range. Defense was a different story. KenPom had us at #6 to start the year and it took us it took 6-7 games for the model to settle in where we belonged ~50-60. Our average and median rank was 44 and 50 respectively. We bottomed out after the BYU game ranking #74!! on defense. For me, that felt like the low point of the season. From there, we took Houston to OT and then beat TCU and K-State and punished West Virginia. The only real defensive lapse was giving up 93 to Baylor, which accounted for the spike toward the end of the season. Overall, there was a definite positive trend in the last 2 months of the season. Our overall ranking mirrored our defensive ranking to a large degree.
  6. Perhaps, but Shedrick is #2 on the team in BPM and for me he had at least as many cringe moments as Hunter. Mitchell was #3 on the team and half the people on this thread want him to hit the portal.
  7. I agree with just about all of that. I don't think being "nice" is a criteria at all. That said, recruiting matters a ton. Retention of your elite talent matters a ton. Motivating and in-season improvement matter a tremendous amount. Handling the media and donors and assistants matters a lot too. Being nice is great if you can leverage it to help with all that. But you can also be an asshole and do all of that well too.
  8. Tyrese Hunter has started all 106 games of his college career. And as a starter, his team has won 6 tournament games (a Sweet 16, an Elite 8 and a Round of 32). On the ISU Sweet 16 team, he lead the team in assists and was 2nd in scoring and minutes. On last year's Elite 8 team, he was 3rd in scoring, 3rd in assists and 3rd in minutes. On this year's team he was tied for 1st in assists, 1st in steals, 3rd in scoring, 2nd in minutes. TJ Otzelberger and Chris Beard both thought enough of him to make him a starter - and he has proven he can start on an elite team that has success in March. Just about anybody you get in the portal to replace him is going to carry way more risk than they bring in upside. Hunter also has a lot of "dog" in him and can be a defensive menace. By far his biggest issue is the turnovers. My goodness the turnovers. We have had a lot of players who have had similar turnover metrics, but it isn't really the number of turnovers, it is when and how they happen. For the year, he averaged 2.6, which isn't terrible considering that at their BEST, TJ Ford had 2.5 a game. DJ Augustin had 2.8. Matt Coleman had 2.6. I still mainly blame our roster composition. We had to have Hunter handling the ball to try to free up Abmas to move off the ball as our primary scorer. I love Weaver, but wouldn't trust him as a primary ball handler against a team like Tennessee. And Horton was also not the answer.
  9. I don't know anything about any of this, but curious why a vision only driving model is insufficient. Isn't that what humans have? I'm all for doing BETTER than humans, but if we can do just as good, then that is a solid start.
  10. Looking at the top-25 in the portal. Not a lot of quality point guards in there so far.
  11. Interesting quote that gives a lot of insight into the program. Not really that surprising, and is kind of a double edged sword. The team clearly likes playing for RT, play very hard, and seem to (generally) improve in March. On the other hand, it is clear that Beard was a much tougher coach as I'm sure we all appreciate. That will give you a more disciplined and mentally tough team, but it can burn out some players. You can also expect more attrition.
  12. Looks like our offense is now #29 and our defense is #30 on KenPom after yesterdays games. So I retract my argument that our offense and defense were the same. Our offense is indeed better than our defense. Carry on.
  13. Looks like Coleman stats got posted twice. Strange.
  14. We have had a few decent players over the years who turned it on and had great senior seasons. I am hopeful that could happen with Tyrese Hunter. Tyrese Hunter Javan Felix Matt Coleman: Kerwin Roach: If you look at all of these guys, their productivity and efficiency all went up in their senior year. Hunter improved in most facets this year except in his turnovers and free throw shooting. His defense was really solid. I attribute the turnovers as much to roster composition than anything. Last year he turned it over less because he was asked to do less. Pairing him with Abmas was just not good at all. You basically have two undersized shooting guards out there. Horton and Weaver are also not great to pair with him. None of them are great passers. If we can get a floor general in the portal, a mature player who can play defense and lead us in transition, it could really unlock Hunter. I could see him averaging 15 ppg and cut his turnovers in half with the right running mate.
  15. To be fair, I only subscribed to KenPom because it seems to be the Bible around here. Sorry if our defensive improvements in the last week suddenly made the data worthless. [emoji1787]
  16. Yes, they were 260th. Now they are 157th. Maybe if they would have played this good all year, we would have had a better year. Considering the WHOLE season though, this team played better 3 point defense than nine other teams since 1999. If you want to compare regular seasons, without Big 12 tourney and without the NCAA tourney, that is fine. Just compare apples to apples across all the years.
  17. Look, it is very simple. If you use the end of tournament KenPom defense rankings for 1999-2023, you should also use the end of tournament ranking for 2024. This isn't complicated. And comparing an absolute defensive ranking from 2013 to one from 2024 is stupid. The game is different now. We shoot more 3s. We have 5th and 6th year players. We have players foregoing the NBA draft because of NIL. Comparing the national rank is a better measure of how we stack up in the given year. None of this has anything to do with RT. It is just basic logic.
  18. Hard to hate Barnes. He is the best coach in our program's history. I don't fault Patterson for forcing him to make staff changes. We were underachieving given the program's resources. But it speaks to Barnes' character that he left on his own terms, took personal responsibility and refused to fire his staff. I guess I'll pull for him to win the whole damn thing.
  19. Dillon Mitchell Larry Nance Jr. Nance had a better shooting stroke as a SO than Mitchell, but Mitchell has been better in most other categories. Better FG%, better rebounder, fewer fouls, fewer turnovers, against much better competition. Mitchell has already improved from 40% FT to 60% FT in the last year - and he was up to 69% in conference. With another full year in the gym, I can see him getting his free throws up over 75% this year. And honestly I don't want him settling for long range shots. He has the ability to get to the rim. I can't imagine wanting to move on from this kid. All the physical tools are there for him to be a great college player. He is a really good rebounder and is a very willing defender. He pretty well shut down Dalton Knecht (the SEC POY) last night and did it without fouling. He also seems to have a good attitude and is willing to do the dirty work, without getting a huge amount of shots. That is rare for a player with his HS recruiting pedigree.
  20. Also, we finished ranked #23 in KenPom, accounting for both offense AND defense. That puts it as the 3rd highest end of year ranking since 2012... behind only 2022 and 2023. Still not good enough. And I'm not sure RT will ever be consistently good enough. But given our recent history, it was a decent but often very frustrating year.
  21. I guess I’m in the minority regarding Hunter. I like him a lot. He is so close to being a tremendous player. I mean sometimes he literally looks like an All-American. And then he makes a boneheaded turnover at the worst time. But then he will take it to the rack when the rest of our team is too passive. And he was playing really great defense by the end of the year. If he can just cut out the turnovers, he can be an All SEC player IMO. I want to see the redemption story. I have come around on Shedrick. I want to see him back too. He played hard and has some low post skills. He is a good 15-20 min off the bench contributor. And I don’t trust that we can replace him well in the portal. Obviously I want to see Weaver back and continue his progression into Russell Westbrook 2.0. While Mitchell didn’t progress as much as we all wanted, he did improve. KenPom says one of his closest stat comps is Larry Nance. I can see it. Nance played 4 years at Wyoming before being drafted by the Lakers and looked similar to Mitchell as a Sophomore. He made a big jump as Junior. Maybe Mitchell will too. I hope he comes back. I think we can do better than Onyema, sorry to say. He is out of his league here. Best for him to move on. We need someone either more skilled or more aggressive. Or ideally both. Glad to see Chris Johnson is likely to be back. With more reps, maybe he will be good. He just looked out of control to me. The main portal adds I would like to see are a physically dominant big and a high scoring wing. An elite distributor at point guard would also be nice for a change.
  22. I love my new KenPom subscription so I can combat disingenuous shitposts.
  23. Looks to me like this year finished with a better defense than 2012, 2013, 2014, 2016 and 2021. Based on national rankings.
  24. Are you comparing our 2024 rank through the end of the regular season with the full year including tournament ranks from the other years? Seems like you are. And you call others disingenuous. Lololol.
  25. Yeah it is the whole season through yesterday. Just like all the other UT seasons it is compared against. In the end we had a good but not great offense, a good but not great defense, a good but not great roster, a good but not great coach… and unsurprisingly a good but not great year.
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