Playing for metrics or end of year health and success

[AuH2O]

It is less about trimming injury potential and more about creating depth for if and when injuries happen to allow those guys to come in with confidence.

I get that, but do you really think Kelderman or Nojus getting more minutes during the season was going to change the Mississippi game? I don't.

I think they would be better prepared to play, but I just don't think that would have a material impact on the season.

I don't remember the details, but people asking the old Colts owner or GM what his plans were without a veteran backup to Manning if he got hurt. He basically said his plans were to lose. If Manning went down, they weren't going anywhere. You can get the best veteran backup QB out there, but it just didn't matter. If Manning was healthy, they had a chance to reach their goal of a SB. If Manning got hurt, they didn't. It was that simple.

When a guy that was playing at a 1st team AA gets hurt and never gets back to full strength and ultimately gets shut down, then Tamin gets hurt, Kelderman or Nojus being much better versions of themselves isn't going to matter all that much.

Love the attitude of next man in, but those guys just were never going to be good enough this year to overcome those injuries.

 

[syclonefan]

Other things but they spend more time running scout reps than our own reps. If you don’t know that, hit a practice some time.

I guess my point was the coaches still see Nojus practice defense whether it’s our defense or scout team. Either way TJ didn’t think he could trust him on defense and his offensive abilities couldn’t make up for it.

 

[Cyientist]

I’m in the camp that I think there are opportunities for a 9th maybe 10th man to get some spot minutes based off of game script but not on a predetermined basis.

We had 2 different times this year where we were only down 1 starter yet we had to play someone who hadn’t seen complete mop up duty in over a month+.

The fact we only played 8 against Nebraska-Omaha and Morgan State while winning by 32 and 27 is wild. No one played too many minutes even, but seems like a missed opportunity for experience/confidence. We also had comfortable wins against Baylor and Utah. I thought we could have gotten Watson time and maybe even the next guard up in those games as well.

Then against Kansas and for the next 4 weeks we needed Watson. Would 5-10 minutes in 4 of the previous 6 games had made a difference? Maybe not, but I also feel like the analytics probably would not have taken much of a hit either.

Kelderman looked more comfortable each additional game that he was out there.

 

[madguy30]

Numbers don't always tell the truth. BYU was actually more like a 3 and ISU was more like a 6. I mean they beat ISU twice in a week when the games mattered the most.

The way they were playing sure but on the season that's where they landed.

 

[SleepyEyeCy]

My belief is you win games first and develop players second. Winning margins take care of themselves because it's a "numbers game". What I mean by that is if you are projected to win by 20...then 39 is your metric. But if you are projected to win by 19...then to a point 10 becomes your metric. As far as game minutes, it is critical in player development. If a player gets run in game action they not only learn but their attitude and attention are more focused in practice. That doesn't mean 20 minutes of game minutes, but it is easy to pick up 6 minutes by just subbing in before the tv timeouts.

 

[NY Chicago Fan]

It's a fine line. A 12 point home win over a team rated #250 will not compute well in the majority of metrics, including the NET ranking, I personally would like to see a deeper regular bench rotation. Ideally a 10 man rotation instead of 7-8. Easier said than done though

But who cares about NET or any metrics at the end of the season. Winning or losing games in March is all that matters

What if ISU was 6 seed and MissU was the 3rd seed this year. Result the same.

Goal should be having a team peaking at the end of the year. Of course you don't want to lose the early games vs lower level teams, but beating them by 30 does not matter. Just need to build rhythm and teamwork for later on

 

[Cyhig]

But who cares about NET or any metrics at the end of the season. Winning or losing games in March is all that matters

What if ISU was 6 seed and MissU was the 3rd seed this year. Result the same.

Goal should be having a team peaking at the end of the year. Of course you don't want to lose the early games vs lower level teams, but beating them by 30 does not matter. Just need to build rhythm and teamwork for later on

Idea is to get the best possible seed. It's the best way to make it further in the tournament. Would you rather face an 11 seed in the first round, or a 14 seed?

But yes, eventually your seed line will match up. For example, first round there 8 and 9 seeds are essentially the same. They play each other. And if the seed lines hold up:

Second round: 1 is the same as 8, 2 same as 7, 3 same as 6, 4 same as 5
S16: 1 same as 4, 2 same as 3
E8: 1 same as 2
FF: all same

But these seeds NEVER hold up. A better seed historically will result in a better path through the bracket

 

[SoleCyclone]

Idea is to get the best possible seed. It's the best way to make it further in the tournament. Would you rather face an 11 seed in the first round, or a 14 seed?

But yes, eventually your seed line will match up. For example, first round there 8 and 9 seeds are essentially the same. They play each other. And if the seed lines hold up:

Second round: 1 is the same as 8, 2 same as 7, 3 same as 6, 4 same as 5
S16: 1 same as 4, 2 same as 3
E8: 1 same as 2
FF: all same

But these seeds NEVER hold up. A better seed historically will result in a better path through the bracket

Right. I feel we fell to a 3 though from being a 1-2 most of the year and seemed to fade. The original post was how to get to March peaking. Physical health and on court performance

 

[NoCreativity]

It's nice to see people coming around now. Back in December we had heated arguments on here about this exact thing and I was in the extreme minority of people who wanted Watson and Nojus to play more.

I think I saw Michgian St has 10 guys play between 10 and 25 minutes and it seems to work well for them. If we want to continue to exert this much energy on defense it might not be a bad idea to expand the rotation.

TJ seems kind of stubborn in his set ways though so I doubt it ever changes.

 

[NoCreativity]

He played about 10min a game against good competition in Maui and did well. Played meaningful minutes in a top 10 matchup against marquette. It's just odd TJ basically shut him down the rest of the year. Not even playing in meaningless games

He did the exact same thing last year. I was looking at game logs and Pav was getting 25+ minutes in December and then vanished once the conference started.

I think it boils down to him thinking they'll lose us games but then Kelderman proves that's not really true once he's forced to play him.

 

[CySmurf]

Eyeroll. This is a discussion about game experience and minute allocation.

He was being sarcastic...at least I hope.

 

[cayin]

That was such a weird injury, too. I still don't know how he injured himself.

Fact of the matter is injuries are bound to happen to every team. Otz's first 3 years were largely injury free seasons. The injury bug hit the team hard this year. IT HAPPENS. Look at Juju. Did she tear her ACL because she played too many minutes?

Yes, it sucks when your team has injuries, especially to key players. But it's athletics. Injuries are bound to happen eventually

we didn't have an injury, but losing Grill hurt our guard depth. King played hurt down the stretch last year.

 

[rosshm16]

I think a lot of folks are misconstruing this topic. It’s a general “How can we peak in March?“ inquiry, not a “Should Nojus have played more?” inquiry.

Any major changes here are perhaps overly reactionary to our terrible luck with injuries this year. More on that below.

Eight-man rotations are not unusual in NCAA MBB. Our main issue to me was the lack of depth for filling holes in that rotation when injuries came up.

On practice vs. gametime, I don’t have any comments that haven’t already been made, and I of course don’t know how TJ runs things, just speaking in generalities here:

- All teams absolutely do not run the same defense.
- For player development, there is no replacement for gametime against a real opponent. This is why guys like JT Rock transfer.
- Practice mid-season is mostly about preparing for the upcoming opponent, not a great deal of scrimmaging.

The issues we had this year resulting in lost games played (broken hand, groin strains, pneumonia) are not really “overuse” related, nor are the minutes played by our top guys unusually high. By that I mean, I don’t think there’s a load management or S&C strategy that would have prevented Milan from breaking his hand in practice or Keshon or Tamin or someone else from pulling a groin muscle. Maybe Keshon should have rested some mid-season when he had the injury, but that was also around when Milan went out and who knows how many games we win/lose in that scenario, maybe we completely tank and miss the tourney. Lots of bad timing this year unfortunately. And the lack of depth for filling the holes compounded this.

This roster hypothetically should have had a five-star Mac Shacker (Omaha) playing big minutes.

 

[AlaCyclone]

The whole metrics thing reminds me of Ivan Lendl being ranked #01 all the time in Men's Tennis racking up points in lesser tournaments to end up and Wimbledon and losing because he was allergic to grass! Then, Boris Becker showed up (not ranked #01) and won because he was a bad ass mother ******. Point is, Ivan Lendl was a GREAT tennis player, but he played the metric game to the hilt, and he still struggled at the most important Tournament in the world (outside of France, the US and Australia).

 

[moores2]

Can anyone say that Omaha wouldn't have broken into the lineup this year? Despite his injury he put in some good minutes for his team. Would he have stayed had he cracked the rotation for 5-6 minutes a game as a freshman? Who knows, but if we can keep some guys like Nojus around long enough to develop into rotation players the better this team will be in the long run too.

 

[NoCreativity]

Can anyone say that Omaha wouldn't have broken into the lineup this year? Despite his injury he put in some good minutes for his team. Would he have stayed had he cracked the rotation for 5-6 minutes a game as a freshman? Who knows, but if we can keep some guys like Nojus around long enough to develop into rotation players the better this team will be in the long run too.

I doubt he would have played anymore than he did last year.

Small sample size I know, but I watched a couple of their games and he still looked completely lost out on the floor most of the time. I didn't see any signs his game had progressed from what we saw last year.

 

[Rural]

Garbage time is called garbage time for a reason.

Does it matter if it's 5 or 10 minutes?

 

[madguy30]

Can anyone say that Omaha wouldn't have broken into the lineup this year? Despite his injury he put in some good minutes for his team. Would he have stayed had he cracked the rotation for 5-6 minutes a game as a freshman? Who knows, but if we can keep some guys like Nojus around long enough to develop into rotation players the better this team will be in the long run too.

It sounded like he was about the same at WF even when healthy so no he likely doesn't get in the rotation.

 

[rosshm16]

Omaha game logs for this year. He was injured for a good chunk of the middle of the season, not sure if the specifics were ever publicly disclosed. Doesn't look like a lot of progress.

 

[alexssdean12]

We have underperformed our seeds line three of our four years:

2023 6 seed losing to an 11 seed
2024 2 seed losing to a 3 seed
2025 3 seed losing to a 6 seed

I think this is a fair critique. I'd rather sacrifice a seed line or two and have the team better rested and have our depth more prepared. It's tough to play the way we do and only run 8 or so guys. Hopefully we can adjust and start running 9-10 guys except for big games. We just need to hit on the right guys.

There are no guarantees with injuries but certainly would improve our fatigue that it seems most TJ teams go through at the end of the year.