Will we see Holiday unseat Collison as the starting PG later this season?
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I can't see Howland doing that to Collison, a true stalwart who skipped the draft and was instrumental in repeated Final Four runs.Originally Posted by redxalonso
I can see a shift in roles without actually changing the players or the positions on the lineup card. You can see that Collison is arguably the most efficient shooter in all of college basketball. He's not the prettiest, or most prolific, but you can't argue with his ridiculous percentages. He shoots 3's better than the team shoots free throws. Granted, that might not hold up, and Collison is NOT good at getting his awkward shot off. But if you see Holiday handle a bit more, and drive to create open looks... Holiday can definitely find space and find the open man, and Collison can definitely knock down the open outside shots. UCLA, with the personnel this year, MUST be a solid perimeter team or it's going to be grind-it-out tight games all Pac-10 season long and a quick exit in the tournament. Options outside? Shipp (streaky), Dragovic (dead-eye... in practice...), Roll (even worse at creating his own shot than Collison), Holiday/other freshman (still working on his range), or Collison. I'd ride Collison's shot until his wrist swells up, and I'd do everything possible to get him open looks which, IMO, means having him handle the ball LESS and get open more.
The team is rounding into form a bit, but today's defensive effort isn't going to cut it.
Easily Darren Collison's best game of the season (that I've seen). He was a cold-blooded killer down the stretch with all those free throws. Still not an instinctive PG, but at least he was efficient today.
Shipp got hot. As a pretty respectable perimeter team, we're hard to beat if Shipp is hitting. Let's see how long that lasts this time...
Dragovic should never pass the ball, except maybe hand-offs. Guy has no vision or sense. At least he hit a few shots.
Speaking of hitting shots, the Bruins hit 47% from 3-point range against the Oregon schools. Nasty if they can keep it up and work in Howland's defense.
Holiday is taking longer to round into form than I expected. He needs to improve on defense, and I'm still not sure what his offensive role is, though I'm sure they're not utilizing his dribble drive enough.
Glad to see Howland is continuing to work Anderson and Gordon into the rotation. Anderson needs a lot of work if he's going to provide Collison any relief late in the season. His judgment just isn't where it needs to be.
Is it possible that Aboya's free throw shooting is coming around? He actually looked pretty smooth from the line. Howland reportedly tweaked his form a tad recently.
And is it just me, or is this the worst Pac-10 in recent memory?
Basically it was the one consistently major flaw of all of Howland's teams at UCLA: the complete inability to play against the zone defense. We were up 54-43 with over 8 min. to go and they scored the final 11 pts. of regulation to send it to OT.
Shipp had a good night, but Collison was off and Holiday was invisible. When Howland is pulling Holiday for Roll late in games, it's a bad sign.
I'm still confident we'll win the Pac-10 pretty easily, but only because the Pac-10 is relatively weak this year. I'm guessing Sweet 16 exit at best. I just don't want to be that 4-13 upset special in the first round.
I'd say it's been for different reasons, but yeah.
In the past, I think you had better decision making on the floor but a dearth of outside shooters. Now, I think you have a few guys that can hit but very poor decision making on the floor and no inside presence to keep teams honest.
I won't generalize to include the ASU game because I only caught the end of it, but against a zone they have options if they let Holiday penetrate, or if they can actually set up a shooter with ball movement.
And in watching Harden, I'm reminded that the one thing I've really missed is a perimeter player who can find their own shot (and make it).
Shipp had a good 3/4 of a night, right? And Collison hasn't been "on" in awhile against a team of note.
Where were the upperclassmen when things got tough? Alfred fricken Aboya was the only guy who made a basket the entire painful time that I watched, and that was a 16 foot please-don't-shoot-that shot.
And Roll going in late is really how it should be. Roll is a much better player than most of the guys on the team, right now. He's not the best athlete, but he's smart and passes well, and he extends the defense. Holiday gives you a different dimension with his penetration, but that's about it at this point. If Holiday didn't need minutes to grow, I bet we'd see Roll start. And in the few times when we've seen Howland go with 5 upperclassmen (see Arizona, for like 5 minutes at the start of the second half), they've actually looked like they knew what they were doing. (Granted, it was Arizona.)
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