The talent thing is a cop out. Central CT doesn’t have more talent than us. Pike has honestly been outcoached. That’s been the difference outside of the Tenn game where it was a talent mismatch. I don’t understand what we’re doing on D. Until the 7th team foul of each half we should be trapping the snot out of the ball and when we do it full court we need to take more chances with a third guy waiting to intercept a shaky pass. The double team is useless with another guard standing completely unguarded to receive the bail out pass. I actually expected our offense to be worse than it’s been so far based on the talent. We’re not great, but the bigger problem is the defense. By far. Today rebounding was awful. We were so bad at tracking down long rebounds.
It’s a cop out to some extent
but the truth is we don’t know if pike is teaching the same defense He’s taught for years and these guys just don’t understand it which is on the players at some point
talent does matter when it comes to execution
if you took the 5 smartest iq people on here and we understood everything pike asked and practiced it perfectly it doesn’t mean we’d be good enough at defense or rebounding because we’re not talented enough
so is it a cop out yes in some respects but it’s also not a coincidence that our best defensive players were generally better athletes than these guys are and better overall basketball players