I would still be interested to learn if Scroggins was a healthy scratch, or was battling something. Is he ready to dominate D-1 opposition? No, but I don't see how a few minutes could have hurt, given that Louth was given some run, and did free up Coop a bit. Is Scroggins just a last man off the bench at this point, and benefited from an undersized Concordia (Ann Arbor) to make him look better than he currently can play against D-1 teams?
Scroggins hasn't played much at all, including the exhibition, other than the Concordia game. So I suspect he hasn't earned the playing time. With Cooper as the last bastion of defense and rebounding, it could be a rough year for him physically.
Louth has the ability to give Coop a break on rebounding. I expect to see a lot of sets with both men in the game, potentially freeing up cooper to do perimeter work rather than be stuck in the paint.
@rezynezy re: Scroggins and Louth. Wasn’t that the same aspiration for Lual and Jerome last year? And how did that work out? This feels like deja vu all over again.
If either of them can defend opponent bigs at the 5 (individually or as a tag team, with a total of 10 fouls to give), to free up Coop, I’d gladly play 4 on 5 at the other end with the tag-team doing only one thing: setting hard screens (and, yeah, an occasional ORB). If they can’t do that, our lineup will face the same pressures last year’s squad did with generally the same result.
This team sucks. Half court offense never looked organized last year and still doesn’t look organized this year. The fact we have nobody that can make a shot consistently doesn’t help, but even with bad players a good coach should be able to make them look coherent. The players don’t look like they know where they are and couldn’t dribble around or shoot over anybody even if they did know.
This is the current state of college basketball with all of the transferring. It takes a few games to get your team up to speed and if the other team is playing better teams than you they are going to be farther along in development and that was where Cleveland State was against Valpo. For the most part I felt Valpo was slightly better than CSU but their coach knows their team better and his team responded better to making the right adjustments. I feel Powell will get there but it may take a long while and the best this Valpo team will do is finish middle of the pack in the MVC.
Exactly what I was trying to get at. I do think that with the argument that athletes are employees/pros, schools will eventually hold them to professional contracts. So and so years of service time with a buyout to get out of the contract. Even the SEC is seeing unsustainablity with the new system, and they were the biggest advocates for the NIL and portal system.
