Justin Smith
- Thread starter nallen34
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A comp in production, not style of play. Jacobson was more proven in several aspects, and Smith better a few others (namely the ability to defend wings and small 4s).
If you wouldn't be thrilled to land Smith you should probably just stop following Iowa State basketball
Many have stopped being thrilled, if not stopped following, until a new staff is brought in.
Please stop trolling with straw mans. Either comprehend the conversation or don’t respond.
Despite his athleticism, Smith has been a complementary role player. I’m thrilled to add P6 role players to next year’s roster. We needed all forms of help. Hopefully he’s more, he could improve for his senior year and unshackled from more rigid coaching, but it’s not clear as had been suggested.
And that's fine but there's no reason to crap on every positive or potential positive development within the program on here. We get it, you don't like Prohm
The problem is fans expecting every grad transfer to be DeAndre Kane, who might be the most productive grad transfer of the last decade across all of college basketball. 99% of grad transfers are not going to be all-american caliber players, or they would just go pro. Harris, Coleman-Lands and Smith still make us significantly better. They are replacements for Lewis, Leech, Grill and Anderson. I don't know how anyone could not recognize they are big upgrades.
I don't know how with two available schollarships you would not be thrilled to land even a grad transfer that might come 9th off the bench. Let alone a guy like this who could be a starter from a top big 10 school. It's either we land him or we have nobody and have two open schollys. What is the point of that?
ISU basketball doing solid twitter work this morning showing how Prohm has put a college 3/4 in the league as a wing.
Then why comment/participate in these threads just to crap on everything?
Go away and if/when there is a new coaching staff in place, come on back. No one will miss your commentary.
Indiana basketball fans are basically the equivalent of Nebraska football fans.
They made the title game in 2002. Since then they have 3 Sweet 16's but no further. They've only made the tourney 8 out of 18 years since. They are absolutely a good program but their production is about as far as you can get from a blue blood. Heck West Virginia has been a lot better than them in that time frame.
Your infatuation with using "straw man" in a sentence is rather impressive. That is all, carry on. Go Team! Go Justin Smith!
You can tell the people that see basketball as a simple math equation. Look at the stats; if the stats they are analyzing are the same, then the players MUST BE =. Sorry, but those of us who play the sport understand that Jacobsen and Smith are completely different players NO MATTER WHAT the STATS say.
One simple difference (among many):
Jake gets the ball wide open in the corner at the three point line and he is essentially forced to pass it back to the wing because he's very unlikely to hit the three and he can't drive all the way to the lane without charging. This killed our offense so many times last year as it let defenses simply leave Jake and double team without any repercussions. Combined with Nixon's struggles from the three point line, and teams literally were playing 5-3 against us daring Jake and Nixon to hit open threes.
Smith gets the ball in the same situation drives to the hoop and either (a) passes to (i) Solo/Conditt/Foster for a dunk (primary defensive rotation), (ii) a wide open cutter for a layup (secondary defensive rotation), of (iii) Bolton or JCL on the wing for an open three (third defensive rotation option); or (b) adjusts his driving path and dunks. Even assuming Smith's 3P % doesn't improve, defenses then couldn't just leave him wide open without repercussions, such that the help-side defensive rotations are slower, which results in better shots for the rest of the team.
Don't get me wrong, stats have a huge place in player assessment, but using them as your sole form of assessment leaves a huge hole in the resulting opinion.
I feel like the Bart Torvik methodology for projecting defense is essentially exogenous and does not account for what new players might do on the defensive end of the court and the boards, which is going to affect your net rating and projection, obviously.
If I remember the "documentation" correctly (or really just a blog post), BT projects defense based on a trend analysis of the past few years and makes some adjustments for the physical height of your roster and likely lineups. And that is it.
So we are doomed to be projected as sucking at defense because... well, our program has sucked at defense for a long time now. So that is a reasonable enough supposition. One of the best models for predicting the weather is just assuming whatever happened today is going to happen again tomorrow without any variations.
I wonder how well that projection is going to work on us. The fact we are just bad as a program at defense is a strong argument, but then again, you would hope adding Smith on the boards along with a bunch of rangy wings to guard 3-4-5 and Foster to block shots would help quite a bit on defense. We also lost some comically bad defenders who did play at least rotational minutes for us at times. I would hope the aggregate size and athleticism on this year's team would help to improve this; as well, we dropped a couple of knuckleheads/awful defenders in Lewis and Griffin, which is a nice bonus.
Then again, we lost Haliburton -- our best defender -- and have never proven we can be good at defense and rebounding in the past decade, so just assuming it stays that way might be the reasonable thing to do. Either way, it is that end of the floor where we need the most improvements next year. We were #3 in ORTG in the conference before Haliburton and Bolton went down. That was good! Only KU and Baylor were ahead of us! We were just #10 on DRTG by a mile behind #9 at the same time.
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I've become pretty anti-Prohm, but the fact remains that he will coach next season. And personally, I'd rather not go two seasons in a row of not watching basketball. So, here's to Steve succeeding this season and getting us back into the NCAA's.
Illinois and Iowa State seem like strong contenders.
In what world is a guy who led his team in minutes, finished third (very nearly 2nd) in scoring, 2nd in rebounding, 1st in steals a "complementary role player"? Sounds like a guy the coach didnt want to take off the floor despite their tumultuous relationship.
A very solid case can be made he was the second best player for the Hoosiers last year behind Trayce Jackson-Davis who is a former McDonalds All-American.
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