IMO, there is not one single fatal flaw on this team. It is like all of Moser's team -- it just isn't good enough overall, and it is certainly not coached well enough. We have a more talented starting five than most years under MMM, but we don't have high level SEC talent. If Reid rounds out his game, I guess he could have an NBA opportunity down the road, but he's the only guy you can say that about. Davis is inconsistent, both with his effort and his production, and it is truly a joke that he and Moser seem determined to have him keep shooting 3s at a 10% clip. Mo is Mo. Very good occasionally, a total nonfactor other games. Brown and Pack are good college guards but they are small, struggle against physical defenders, and neither is great at creating their own shot.
The bench . . . well, Jones is a very good defender who is hit or miss offensively. Atak is a major weapon when he is making shots but will likely be streaky all season. Dayton has been a disaster. JN is not remotely close to what Coach and others billed him to be. Yet again -- summer ball doesn't mean much when evaluating how a lower level player will play in structured games against well-coached teams with athletes as good or better than you. Rogers has shown promise but is a freshman and not a threat offensively at this point. MMM took a risky gamble on Blair and lost. He also recruited a tall skinny dude who was almost certainly going to redshirt, so other than a few minutes of Rogers per game, we got nothing from our high school class. And Kirill has shown a good basketball IQ and some decent skills, but likely will be just a limited role player.
One of the biggest gripes I have with MMM is that he simply cannot put together a complete team. For the most part, this team has been far better than most his teams at taking care of the ball and defensive rebounding. The offense is better. But the defense has been awful, the focus inconsistent, the FT shooting has tailed off, and he allows a guy like Davis to play well outside his offensive limitations. They showed some defensive improvements for 20 minutes Wednesday, but it was undone by an awful offensive game, and then the defense reverted to crap in the second half. They have had far too many games where they sleepwalk through large portions of the game. Bottom line, there is always something that goes wrong. Wednesday night, they looked like a team that had spent the previous four weeks playing home games against several of the worst teams in America. They missed shots and couldn't deal with a physical SEC team in a road setting. The number of times each season that we get our doors absolutely blown off is appalling. Yes, they occasionally step up and get a surprising road win, but far too often, they lose by 20+ and look like the Washington Generals for long stretches as their opponent toys with them. It's embarrassing as hell.
