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Bryant Crawford Hiring An Agent, Staying in Draft

RE #3 - It's wrong to include Crawford with Key and Wilbekin in bad D. His D was fine.

RE#9 - This is another board myth and knee jerk reaction. Yes, Bryant made boneheaded plays. Yes, he made more TOs than we'd like. But the way people talk about it here, you'd think he made 6-8TOs/game. He actually made 3.3. Markell Johnson made 3.2. Duval 2.8. Pinson made 2.4. I could go on and on. Hell, in almost 20% less PT and less control of the ball, Brandon made 2 TO/game. If Brandon simply played the same amount of minutes, he'd project less than one fewer TOs/game. If you added the amount of time controlling the offense, that number would close even more.
I'm not saying Bryant shouldn't have valued the ball more. I am saying it wasn't anywhere nearly as bad as this board makes it out to be.

Crawford's D was woeful. He played Olay D about 8 possessions per game. Wilbekin, whom everyone including you gave tons of shit for his defensive liabilities, arguably NEVER sidestepped his man and gave him a clear lane to the basket. My frustration with Crawford was almost exclusively due to his Olay D and I posted as such all year long. It happened. He was bad at it, his focus sucked.
 
When a large number of your players have been bad defensive players for multiple years...

Hmm. Almost makes you think the problem lies elsewhere.
 
Crawford's D was woeful. He played Olay D about 8 possessions per game. Wilbekin, whom everyone including you gave tons of shit for his defensive liabilities, arguably NEVER sidestepped his man and gave him a clear lane to the basket. My frustration with Crawford was almost exclusively due to his Olay D and I posted as such all year long. It happened. He was bad at it, his focus sucked.

I side with jaybone. Crawford had the athleticism to play good D, he just lacked the focus. He would constantly lose his man. Wilbekin typically didn't lose his man, but was just too short or slow to stick in front of him.
 
RE #3 - It's wrong to include Crawford with Key and Wilbekin in bad D. His D was fine.
For the gazillionth time, if you think Crawford was "fine" on defense, you clearly just aren't paying close attention.
 
Folks are too caught up in who starts. When you just flip Chill for Craw as a starter and look at their per 40 in conference numbers it's easy to rationalize the impact. Yes, it's an 8 point dropoff, but Chill has fewer turnovers, roughly equal assists and steals, slightly better rebounding, plays better defense, and shoots it about the same as Craw. With Hoard coming in to replace TT those points don't seem as important.

But that starting 5 wasn't going to be our best lineup or the one on the floor in crunch time. I'd bet anything we were going to close games with Chill/Craw/Brown/Hoard/Moore. Flipping Sarr for Moore was already a brutal hit, especially since we have zero depth now at the 5. And Sarr is a huge question mark - he's replacing a double/double machine and he hasn't scored 10 points ever. Hell in his last 7 games he didn't score more than 2 points.

Now we're simply removing Craw from that lineup as well and we have no similar talent to replace him. Maybe Mucius steps in, maybe someone else... But it's not the delta between Craw and Chill that hurts, it's the complete absence of a guy who can score 30 on any given night from our best lineup.

Decent teams need someone who can get a bucket when they need one, and someone to pull down rebounds. When we lost Collins we lost both of those. Now we lose both again but across two players. For the season to be remotely interesting we need Sarr to take a huge leap, Brown to become a consistent scorer, Hoard to be at least as good as advertised, Childress to log 30+ minutes a night of solid PG play, we need to have zero injuries, and even if all that happens we still probably need something randomly good on top of that, like Wright turning out to be good or one of the transfers being better than we thought.

What sucks is that the ACC was fairly weak last year and won't be that much better this year. Getting kneecapped by the Collins/Dinos/Moore/Crawford defections all a year ahead of schedule came just as the ACC was giving us a chance to leapfrog a bunch of programs. It's like Charlie Brown trying to kick a football every offseason.

Good post.

I don't know about going off for 30 on any given night, but I REALLY liked what Chaundee started doing toward the end of the year. That little mid range floater was sweet, and that combined with his three point shot could be very very good. The main improvement I'm hoping for from him is his ball-handling. I expect Chaundee to be very good this year.
 
Good post.

I don't know about going off for 30 on any given night, but I REALLY liked what Chaundee started doing toward the end of the year. That little mid range floater was sweet, and that combined with his three point shot could be very very good. The main improvement I'm hoping for from him is his ball-handling. I expect Chaundee to be very good this year.

Me too. And I agree, that was a good post by DCDeac. I do believe Sarr has NBA talent - not NBA starter talent, but fringe player talent, but I had missed that he has never scored in double digits in a game. Manning's big man coaching cred is going to be on the line next year in Sarr.
 
in the 5th year of a new coach at Wake Forest shouldn't making the NCAA tournament be a given? A P5 basketball program's success is measured on being relevant in March.

Is there anyone on this board who believes that Wake Forest will achieve the following next season:

Finish higher than 11th in the conference
Be .500 in ACC play
Make the NCAA tournament
Make the NIT

If you dont believe any of those things will happen and given the shit show of where the program is with players leaving the only logical thong to do is hire a new coach who has a vision and strategy (Dave Clawson) and start the rebuild.
 
in the 5th year of a new coach at Wake Forest shouldn't making the NCAA tournament be a given? A P5 basketball program's success is measured on being relevant in March.

Is there anyone on this board who believes that Wake Forest will achieve the following next season:

Finish higher than 11th in the conference
Be .500 in ACC play
Make the NCAA tournament
Make the NIT

If you dont believe any of those things will happen and given the shit show of where the program is with players leaving the only logical thong to do is hire a new coach who has a vision and strategy (Dave Clawson) and start the rebuild.

Before the mass defections I would have predicted a 20-22 win season and an NCAA tournament birth with a good chance to advance outside the first weekend. I was really high on where our talent level was going to be. We were looking at a deep team at all positions, experience in both the backcourt and frontcourt and some real star power coming on board in the freshman class. When you lose 3 seniors and a rising junior all of which were going to play major minutes its hard to imagine a positive outcome to the season. Our freshman and sophomores could be REALLY good, and it would still be difficult to crack the top half of the ACC.

The departing players have screwed Manning unfortunately, but that is his responsibility to manage. He has to figure out a way to get it done. He recruited those players, has had them for either 2 or 3 years in his system, and it is up to him to create an atmosphere in which they stay. Crawford and Moore are making idiotic decisions, but that doesn't absolve Manning of his responsibility. Woods made a fine decision because he is not sitting out, and he has his degree. Mitchell saw the writing on the wall with Hoard and clearly didn't feel as though he fit into the future here (so I think you can argue he made a reasonable choice in leaving). In year 5, the roster is the head coach's roster - regardless of circumstances. Can't blame it on anyone else.

My stance is still the same on Manning's job. If he can't make the tournament in year 5, then he needs to go. No excuses if he doesn't. Those players were his responsibility. If he makes the tournament, even despite all that has happened, I will gladly support him for the following year, but if he doesn't then the right move is to let him go. He deserved a grace period taking over for [name redacted]. He has had it. Time to produce.
 
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After the season, I thought we'd be a really good team next year. I also said "No Dance, No Job" for Danny. The first concept is now gone. The second still exists.

As to Brandon being virtually the same as Bryant with more PT, I doubt you'd find a coach in the ACC who wouldn't laugh at that concept.
 
The only way he can is if they have remarkably strong relationships with certain players and their families.

Right now, I wonder if Ayo is wishing he came here to play with Hoard.
 
I’d expect a season similar to Gott’s last year. An NBA player surrounded by young talent that gets woefully mismanaged en route to a basement scraping ACC season. And I doubt Hoard is a top 5 pick like DSJ.
 
Would the apex WF outcome be to pull off a mini-miracle season next year and make the tournament, lose in the first round and have 2-3 players leave followed by several more years of terrible basketball with Manning? Or just have another year of disappointment and irrelevancy while somehow producing 1-2 NBA level players? One of those two seems inevitable.
 
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Crawford was TERRIBLE defensively

Agreed. I saw him jog towards close outs on many, many occasions. On paper he might not have looked as bad as we're making him out to be, but his immaturity impacted more off the court than we know. Well, than most of us know.
 
This. Who comes to play for dead-man-walking. That's why you cut the cord a year before.

This one extra year for Manning, that many claim he was owed, likely costs us 2-3 years on the rebuild and puts us in a worse hiring position. And that's only if Wellman is smart enough to can him after the season ends. The lost decade+ that many were afraid of early during the Manning era is now upon us.
 
Pretty sure that after [Redacted] year 2 there were people that feared an impending wellman caused lost decade.
 
There were plenty of games last year where Chaundee simply didn't look to shoot. It was pretty rare that he was one of the first three options on the court, as the offense ran through Crawford/Woods/Childress/Moore far more often.

In games where he was assertive (took more than 5 shots), he shot 44% and put up 17 points/40-min, 6.2 rebounds/40-min, and 2.3 assists/40-min. In games where he was less assertive (five shots or fewer), he shot 29% and put up 7.8 ponts/40-min, 4.7 rebounds/40-min, 1.9 assists/40-min.

With all our departures, he will likely be asked to be the 2nd or 3rd option whenever he's on the court. If he's up to the challenge, we should see a dramatic improvement in his game this year. I think he has the tools to do it given the flashes he showed last year, but he needs to maintain consistency from game-to-game.
 
Chaundee is one of the few guys who won't need a map to get from the locker room to the floor in the Joel. Wake needs him to make a big freshman to sophomore leap.
 
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