Thoughts on Texas' crushing of Bearkats

I agree with your comment about Hamilton as a ‘poor man’s Durant’. When you consider that Durant has become one of the top 3 players on the planet, that is high praise – but I think deserved.

Like Durant at during his brief tenure at UT, Hamilton can look awesome at times, awkward at others. Regardless, he’s turning in a 25 pt, 8 reb average. I think he is showing much more maturity and patience on offense as well as much more effort on defense.

Better enjoy JH while we can. The guy drips of NBA talent.

“Why is it that we always get the less talented brother in basketball families?”

The Larry Abdul-Jabbar experiment in the early 80’s was a disaster, imo.

Ha, LA-J paired with Gary Bird was supposed to re-define the sport. Remember that? What a crock that was.

if hamilton had a better mid range game, he could really take his game to another level. for some reason, he really struggles with the 12-15 footers. but hey, the guy makes 20 pts look easy, regardless of how many off-balance, awkward shots he takes around the basket (most of them go in).

Bad move with the early offer to Minute Bol, when what we really needed was a shot blocker.

Tough times all around back then as my big business venture, Tallmart, failed miserably.

My only concern, this early, is the interior defense. SHSU’s two “big guys” … who weren’t really that big … got far too many second chances. Barnes has to find a way to offset our own lack of bulk, IMO.

Reno, good summation. We’re going to need Cory’s onions to drop by conference play because he gives us the best combo of offense/defense in our backcourt. If he can put it together offensively, then we can be efficient even with Doge on the floor. As Cory goes so will this team even though Hamilton is the alpha dog.

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SHSU’s big guys were both strong as oxes and the kind of dudes you run into in decent mid-major programs.

How many times have you seen the football player playing power forward who gives an elite basketball player fits because the b-ball player hasn’t gotten strong enough yet to hold his ground or perfected his face-up game enough to torture the great beast? Happens all of the time.

Didn’t Sam Houston get to the tournament and give someone a slight scare last year? I remember a bespectacled hispanic big man being good but maybe that was UTEP now that I mention the word bespectacled.

I didn’t see all of the game (mostly first half), but I wasn’t happy with J’Covan at all. Bad decision-making in the first half, kept on with the pouty faces. The Lucas fellating was ridiculous. The color guy probably knows John.

TT and Gary had their hands full inside but still looked decent. I thought the color guy did a great job of pointing out that the Horns weren’t getting Thompson involved in the O enough. Get the big man some touches. We’ve actually looked good at post entry this year, which is surprising for anyone who follows Rick Barnes’ guards.

As for Hamilton. Stout. Check out the usage rates that Luke Winn points out:

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2010/writers/luke_winn/11/24/power.rankings/index.html?eref=sihp

Scip …

While I agree with your assessment completely, it doesn’t belie the fact that we’re woefully thin inside. We have a super frosh who’s still just a kid with a lot of growing to do and a couple of average sized bangers (Johnson and Wangmene). Unfortunately, neither is really a big. Hill meets the definition based on height, only.

I still can’t help but think it’s going to be our Achilles on defense.

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Of course it is. However when a team with a solid front court still shoots 29% on the game, I’d say our team defense did a nice job of offsetting that weakness.
 
Obviously, a team with ball handling and great bigs will abuse us, but basketball is a game of match ups. We’re a nightmare for a lot of teams out there, despite our lack of size. See Pitt/Illinois.

99.9% of the teams in the nation are going to have some sort of obvious weakness. We knew coming in that ours would likely be in the lack of depth/size in the frontcourt so that’s no surprise. The good news is that Thompson is ahead of where most people figured he would be and is an even much bigger defensive presence than originally though. And Lexi’s showing competence on the offensive and improvement. What we do have is a dynamic scorer in Hamilton, a growing trio of guards, a lunch pail guy in Johnson and pretty impressive frosh in the middle. That can go pretty far.

To put JH’s offensive wizardry in perspective, he is averaging 25 points a game in less than 29 minutes a game. Damn.

Yeah, scoring is ridiculously easy for that guy. He’s both a scorer and a shooter. That’s a rare and deadly combo.

I think Reid Gettys is a good commentator, but, yeah, his comments about how our offense runs best with Jai running point was easily the stupidest shit to come out of an announcer’s mouth this year. I also agree that CoJo’s the wild card. He’s the farthest from reaching his potential right now, and his progress this season will be a huge factor on how this season will ultimately turn out. Wangmene officially has a little mid-ranger this year; it can no longer be considered a fluke. I’m very surprised nobody has mentioned our horrid three-point shooting this year form everyone not initialed JH. The rest of the team combined literally shoots like 15%. On days in which Jordan struggles from outside, we’re gonna be worthless on threes. J’Covan still can’t shoot the three, which has always surprised me, and Jai somehow went down 30 percentage points between Gainsville and Austin (nother big mystery to me). Jai killed it from three his freshman year. At least if he had an outside shot he’d be bringing something to the table. It’s incomprehensible to Texas fans how this guy was a McDonald’s All-American and then All-SEC freshman. Just unimaginable how those things happened.

Gettys only does our games against the Navys and the Sam Houston States. He probably wouldn’t have said any of that after watching him against Pitt and Illinois.

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