Without Baxter…Rose runs a simple ISO with Childs. only works with Haws-Childs. Anyone else can’t drive so the dump down to Childs, here comes the double and Childs kicks out to Cannon or Seljaas or Hardnett or who cares…nobody can hit an open 3. So so so predictable.
Baxter in game- you can’t double Childs on the ISO or Baxter gets a freebie. game changer. also…anyone that drives including slowmo Cannon can oop it up to Baxter for a slam.
One more thing, Emery. He gets to his former self and BYU gets that third penetrator/shooter. BYU becomes dangerous.
Rose NEEDS someone that can drive and finish at the rim. Skinny Haws and sometimes, Hardnett, can. That is the state of BYU BBall. Impossible to beat a Gonzaga, Nevada or anyone else who have athletes.
Looking at the rest of the season. BYU has a tough road trip to USD and LMU. Then we lose at Gonzaga but we get SF at the Marriot. Hmmmm is there an outside chance BYU could land the 2nd seed in the WCC?
BYU is 5-3 in the WCC. It is a race for second place.
We have 4 more road games. @ USD, @ LMU and @ Port and @ zags.
BYU loses to Zags and possibly USD and or LMU.
SF is also 5-3
they have road games @ Zags, @ BYU @, @ Port, @ SCU
SF loses to Zags and BYU
SMC, also 5-3
roach games @PC, @SCU, @USD, and twice with Gonzaga.
So put a fork in SMC, they are done. SF will lose 2 games and I think BYU could lose 2 and still hold the tie breaker, Zags and to USD and still come out in 2nd.
Well, this would be nice but it still only means that wcc, which was supposed to have improved, gets 1 team in the ncaa tourney. Maybe BYU gets lucky for a NIT invite but probably not. They would have no good wins.
The WCC kicked the tails of the P 12 so the conference is elevated compared to past years. I would think that SF, SMC and BYU could get NIT invites.
Unless someone separates themselves in the WCC only Gonzaga would be a NCAA invite. And they will be a 1 seed unless another few conference champs go on big win runs…Nevada could take the 1 seed from a Gonzaga, I suppose. It all depends on what Duke does.
Grasshopper…Will you finally admit that you were wrong and that Baxter should have been playing 20-30 minutes a game all season? Or are you still going to stick with your “He wasn’t ready” rhetoric?
No…He has in interviews said he wasn’t ready. He just said last week the game is slowing down. That was obvious that he was lost earlier in the year.
Did you notice Harding did not play in the second half Saturday…
Yes, I noticed that about Harding. Maybe his mysterious (non-existent) hand injury was hurting? But more likely, what we had in there was working well (combo of Haws, Emery and Cannon) so Rose probably felt it best to keep that group in.
To address your unwillingness to admit that you were wrong, of course Bax is going to say that. Any smart player would to protect his coach, teammates, and team. What did you expect him to say, “Uh actually, I was really disappointed to not be playing more. I think Dave Rose was stupid to leave me on the bench. No offense to Mixon and Worthington, they are good guys and are my teammates, but I think they both are both flat-footed slow players who belong on the bench. If Rose hadn’t started playing me, I was seriously thinking of transferring. And if I did transfer, I would want to play for the boy genius Scott Gavenman who coaches the Southern Californian Unicorns of the WNBA.”
I don’t care what Rose says, I don’t care what Baxter says, and I certainly don’t care what Grasshopper says… Baxter should have been getting way more playing time whether he was “ready” or not. Seriously, what constitutes or defines the term READY? Worthington has been playing for 4 years on this team and he doesn’t look any more ready than the first time he stepped on the MC floor yet he has started many games, is a team captain and has been given a graduate assistant position already. I am confident that Luke is a good guy, just not a good basketball player.
So grasshopper needs to stop yapping about Baxter finally being “ready” and admit that he could have been at this same stage of readiness (whatever that actually means) earlier in the year. It was all up to Coach Rose.
This is a perfect example of what I said. You dismiss factual statements by those involved directly with the situation and replace them with your own opinions that have no factual basis.
What is? you have no examples of anything. Now you might try to twist and misrepresent something I wrote but I don’t think it will help demonstrate anything. If everyone was saying he wasn’t “ready”, then at what magical moment in time did he all of the sudden become “ready”? The whole usage of the term and the notion that a player is now suddenly “ready” is ridiculous.
The evidence I have used, to dispute your so called term of being “ready”, with the play of Worthington, Nixon, etc. is the PROOF you are yapping about. Why don’t you comment about their “readiness” and why they played so many more minutes early in the season than Baxter did?
The problem is you can’t. So you either will not respond to this specific post or you will respond with something weak. Be specific when you try to explain why Worthington starts or played lots of minutes early in the season and honestly didn’t look ready for anything.
Agreed, The more I look at it, BYU HAS to win @SD in order to salt away a 2 seed in the WCC. SD is 11-1 at home this year. They are tough at home. If BYU won out minus a loss at Gonzaga, I think we are still a NIT team unless we could pull out a SF win in the WCC tourney.
Hopper, you are way off topic. The topic is whether or not YOU are ready to admit that GBax should have been playing much more all season instead of just the last few games.
@UP (L) The Chiles Center has been a house of horrors for the Cougs. I see us stumble here.
Pac (W)
@ SD (L) Torreros are pretty good. @LMU (W)
SF (W) @Gonz. Gee, I don’t know. Resounding loss.
SD (W)
Absolutely not! He wasn’t ready to play. Baxter has admitted so. That is a fact. He said he had to think too much instead of reacting because he hadn’t learned the system and he was still out of shape from his mission. Throwing him in would not have gotten him to react better. It would have done just the opposite and destroyed his confidence. I’m going to stay with what Baxter said of himself. In fact, he said he didn’t want to start against LMU. He didn’t think he was quite ready. But the coaches felt he was. That is fact.
You have to keep it simple Craig. Grasshopper cannot think beyond the very simple statements that coaches and players make. He takes comments and then figures out a way to make them fit his opinions and then calls those facts… as if he is doing some kind of scientific experiment.
I’m not sure how the game can “slow down” for a player when he isn’t getting much playing time. It is my opinion that it took most of the season, based on what Baxter said and what the coaches said, for him to get to the point where he had a 25 point game. Getting more time earlier certainly would not have helped the game slow down sooner, right? It is my opinion that it would have. I am trying to follow grasshoppers line of thinking even though I know he will disagree with it.
Having said all this and seeing that Baxter now has it figured out (according to grasshopper) I am sure we will see Baxter scoring in double figures every game and being the major contributor that he could become because he gets it now, right?
Of course we both know that it is much more involved than this… I am just trying to slow the game down so grasshopper gets it as well.
