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| Out with a bad back is where our boy Grim is going to be if he keeps having to carry this team like he did tonight. |
Outside of that, we've mostly just seen potential.
This team is still very young, very inexperienced and very capable of putting things together to make for a solid basketball team. But they're not there yet, and until they get there, they're going to take some lumps. Tonight, was one of those lumps.
After tonight, I'm starting to rethink my comparison of this team to the 2006-07 squad might have been the wrong comparison. Things are, at least as of right now, looking much more like that 2008 season than 2007. But really it seems like a mixture of the two more than anything else. There's the underdog status of 2007, and the wealth of youth filling out the roster that 2008 had with the likes of then-freshmen Tai Wesley, Tyler Newbold and Pooh Williams. Really the similarities in personnel are intriguing across the board. If there's two standout aspects that differ from 2008 and 2012 I'd say that the 2008 team could score much better than this 2012 team has shown to be able to so far, but this year's team seems much stronger in both the defense and rebounding departments.
In 2008 they also started 2-1 losing on the road to Weber State and won the next game at home. They went on to lose the next two games in blowout fashion. Eventually they stood at 5-5 and everyone thought the season was going to be a continual letdown. But that team came together and eventually won USU's first regular season WAC championship. When all was said and done, they still had their weaknesses, but they got the job done, and I'd argue that the rest of the WAC in 2008 was just as good, if not better than it is this season.
Let's talk about the game though...
Morgan Grim is carrying this team so far this season. If you can honestly say you expected that he'd be putting up these kinds of numbers this year, you should be living at the sports book out in Wendover every weekend. He's been great in just about every way so far.
Brockeith Pane is still trying to do too much on his own. Part of that is somewhat understandable with all the youth and inexperience around him, but shooting 9-for-31 over the last two games is very bad. Losing another veteran leader when Brady Jardine hurt his foot didn't help things at all either. USU needs Pane to produce, and last season he was the guy to take over a game down the stretch when the Aggies needed someone to step up, but he's got to find a healthy balance of being "that guy" and being the point guard.
If Kyisean Reed's offensive game develops, that just might be unfair.
Also welcome to the show Adam Thoseby. If he can get consistent as a deep threat, that will go a long way toward giving this team some much-needed scoring punch.
Really, that scoring punch is something this team doesn't have right now. The defense has been surprisingly good this year (great if you take Scott Bamforth out of the equation), essentially keeping this team in games while the offense has been scrapping for anything they can get. And one has to think that things will undoubtedly get better on both ends of the floor.
Again, it's a young team. What's worse is that they're a young team that just lost their most experienced player for a few weeks. Now their learning curve is much higher and those lumps they take like they took tonight are going to teach much better lessons. Then, in a perfect world, when 22-X makes his triumphant return to action, the team around him will be that much more seasoned than they otherwise would have been. There's going to be that much more practice time for the young guys and that much more film for them to learn from.
On the good side of that, they're a young team that's already pretty good defensively. And in case you haven't had it shoved down your throat enough, they're freaky athletic, and that dynamic is something USU isn't terribly used to seeing. Stew Morrill's teams have always turned out to be good shooting teams and that's no accident. Stew develops talent as well as anyone, so for everyone looking at some of these guys and doubting their basketball skills, they'll come along just like they always do.
Just keep in mind that this team just graduated the winningest senior class in school history, possibly the best 3-point shooter in USU history who was also maybe the grittiest player I've ever seen, and five of the seven Aggie players to have ever been to three NCAA Tournaments. So they deserve more than just a few weeks to gel together before mass suicide is committed and the season is written off as rebuilding.
There's a chance it could get a tiny bit worse before it gets better, or there's a chance that an overtime loss in Texas was the low point for this season. We'll find out for sure soon enough, but things are definitely going to get better.
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