When we were lighting up the high school teams in our OOC games we were getting wide open looks at the basket. In the first two ACC games, the defense has taken Hill and Bibbs off the 3 point line, and presto, the result is an offensive flow that is chaotic. That has resulted in a team that turns over the ball about a quarter of all its possessions. I think that has been the big difference. Even the last 2 high school teams we played tightened up their 3 point defense and had success against us, although not enough to win. I saw this coming, although worse than I thought, in the sense that I thought we would lose close games rather than not even being competitive. I was concerned what we would do when we no longer got those wide open looks.
As far as bigs, Buzz hasn’t been able to recruit the kind of bigs that can impact the game much at this level. He’s good at recruiting wings and guards, but hasn’t brought in even one ACC level power forward in 4 years now, and at this time, none are coming. Ironically, even with all the guards we have we are currently turning the ball over at an astronomical rate. That’s because the offensive flow has been bad which leads to the turnovers.
Buzz has recruited talent, but its a hot mess right now. Buzz needs to coach it up - in a hurry. My opinion is that could have been done by playing better teams during the OOC but he seemed satisfied to run defenseless competition out of the gym instead. Now he’s going to have to try to get his team better prepared on the fly against ACC teams. We are still only two games in so its still too early to jump off the bridge, but the natives are starting to get restless.
