Sport said:
Watching Portland play North Carolina in a tournament. Remember Shantay from Eastern Washington? He was our nemesis for several seasons. He then moved on to Portland. Just watching his brand of bb, aggressive, always moving to the basket, MINIMAL DRIBBLING and pass, pass, pass. Everyone is always moving. Makes one wonder if Travis’s brand of basketball has passed him by? Or maybe it’s the personnel he recruits?
The Pilots are within 3 with 2 minutes to play against the number 1 team in the country. They’ve led several times.
Shantay was our nemesis primarily because of the Groves brothers. Yes, he recruited them, but they were both under-the-radar talents that blossomed into big-time players. Every mid-major coach should be so lucky. They won him a nice contract at Portland in a league with other college heavies, St. Mary's and Gonzaga. We'll see how far he can take that program.
DeCuire's offense has been the subject of much criticism on this board over several years, and I'm a chief culprit. We haven't had a pure shooter since I can't remember when. Every game every season you can expect scoring droughts at the worst time that take us completely out of games. (During one game down here against Stanford a few years ago we were tied at 30 right after the start of the second half, only to suffer a murderous scoring drought that put Stanford up by 24.) You seldom see backdoor cuts or baseline cuts or passing out of the post leading to wide-open layups, and almost never a fast break or movement off the ball or....well, Mike Montgomery said it best when he was doing color for the Oregon game last year: "I could not diagram the Montana offense."
I keep expecting things to change. For DeCuire to change things up himself, or hire an offensive coordinator, or watch the Warriors on TV, but then nothing ever changes. Against Northern, we started the second half with 33 points, and by the first official TV timeout at 15:43, we'd scored...one point. That's over three minutes against a Division 2 team without a field goal. And that will happen again and again this year, and it will remain as frustrating as it's been the past several years.
I confess to being a spoiled brat: I've watched almost every game during the Warrior dynasty, which means I've seen two of the best shooters in the history of the game in Curry and Thompson, but also dynamic fast breaks with precision open-court passing thanks to Draymond Green. I can't expect our Griz to live up to that but at the same time I would hope to see an offense that isn't lacerating to watch.
