Big Ten Basketball 2022-23 Discussion

No Ulis and no Murray. Lotta “weird guys” for Iowa tonight…Carter Kingsbury has barely played all season and got a ton of run.

Ugly ugly ugly ugly game

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Tyler Wahl is bothersome.

And then he misses both FTs that could ice the game.

Feel like that rivalry always yields a weird blowout in one direction or another.

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So Rutgers it hurts.

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I took a triple-take at the word “Final” and still am not sure that I am seeing that right.

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That EFG line

As someone who had Rutgers be the only loss in a parlay (had them at ML), that was a brutal one to watch at the end. You’d think “oh this is a good look” until the ball left the guys’ hand. Yikes.

Also, it would have left a very slim chance…but did they get hurt by another OOB call at the end? I never saw a good replay but the ball (and player) were both terribly close to the baseline off the last shot attempt. I defer to @kcg on that one.

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Well then maybe he should coach his team to win one. I mean, they dont just hand them out.

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I didn’t realize that Purdue is hosting Davidson this weekend.

Loyer Up!

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Don’t look now, but our old friend Richard Pitino is 10-0 and has New Mexico rolling

Bahahaha

Painter has been past the Sweet 16 once in 17 years as a coach at Purdue. Now he deserves a national title?

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Deserves is obviously a dumb word choice but I do get the point. He’s an awesome coach.

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Largely speaking, I think things like NCAA success are a pretty unsatisfying barometer of coach or team success. Obviously it’s what fans care about and I’m not saying it doesn’t matter but we’re discussing a vanishingly small sample size. Bill Self was a massive choker until he wasn’t, so was Roy Williams. Jim Boeheim was a massive choker until he had the Carmelo year and has since largely consisted in dragging dog-poo teams that barely drag themselves in to surprising results, but I’m not sure I’d enjoy that as a fan. Personally I’d rather have the Beilein team that won the big ten title and got bounced by Ohio than last years, for my viewing pleasure. Would anyone make the case last years team was better? I’d find that pretty tough. Winning two extra games at the end doesn’t redeem 4 months of pretty disparate play quality.

Painter is a good coach. A very good coach. I don’t know if he’ll win a title or not (odds are against it obviously), but a failure to win consecutive games at a specific time of year will always be important to people who don’t understand math.

Personally, I find our sweet 16 streak a statistical oddity more than anything else.

He was probably out but it was close and I have no confidence they’d have done anything with the extra possession. We deserved to lose that game so the call at the end is whatever.

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IMO one thing nice about college sports is the variety of ways to measure success. Conference title, conference post-season title, post-season wins, performance against rivals. We’ve had a mix of all of that save for the actual championship, and that’s great. I think our S16 streak is more about having two coaches really good in that post-season setting, IMO. As for how that applies to Painter, well, if he keeps doing it he will break through at some point in the tournament and that’ll be well deserved. Certainly though I’m not going to ding Painter for the current hole in his resume, knowing that it’s always a bit random in the tournament. I’ve got tons of respect for how he does more with less.

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There’s success as far as achievement and what matters to fans and all of that. Then there’s success as far as what is predictive of future success.

Something like average KenPom finish is a far better indicator of future success compared to conference record or NCAA Tournament results, but it doesn’t lead to banners or parades.

Painter for some reason has the reputation of a poor NCAA Tournament coach when all he’s done is make the second weekend in 4 of the last 5 NCAA Tournaments.

As far as “deserves” … I think it is generally easier to root for people who seem like decent people (which doesn’t apply to all college coaches).

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Such as college coaches whose temperament is measured in DEFCONs, or those who make fart noises about their player’s leadership ability, or those whose assistants shove student athletes, or those who get on all fours and imitate irritated canines.

Coaches who slap other coaches as that coach’s assistant shoved a student athlete? Hmm… fifth amendment.

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I think Painter is a great coach and that should be pretty obvious. Particularly now that he has the #1 team in the country with a true freshman backcourt and possibly zero NBA players on the entire roster.

But it’s also fair to say Painter did less with more last season. No conference title, no B1G tourney title, and a Sweet 16 loss to one of the weakest teams to ever make an Elite 8, with the roster he had last season, is an objectively bad result.

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“Objectively bad result” just feels so talk radio hot take-y. They lost two games by two possessions all year.

Not winning the Big Ten title comes down to a Hepburn banked shot and a halfcourt heave by Ron Harper Jr.

Pretty impressive, considering that Ivey never really fit Purdue’s system and didn’t care to play defense, and Purdue was forced to play the worse big for more minutes all year :rofl: Trevion will always be one of the more overrated Big Ten players in my view. Talented, sure, but limited efficiency offensively despite the highlight passes.

It has to be disappointing for Purdue to not have raised a banner last year, but it is just how college basketball goes. I still think getting to the Sweet 16 is more impressive than not getting to the Sweet 16 like the rest of the league.

So again, it comes down to are you actually measuring the program’s trajectory and how good it is or are you just trying to measure the bottom line results (how far they got in the NCAA Tournament and did they win a conference championship with an unbalanced schedule).

Michigan 2019 is probably a season that fits this mold as well, but there are a lot of them in college hoops.

We generally need to do a better job of measuring teams by the fundamentals not the stock price. But it is always easier to reference the stock price.