Game 3: Indiana

[The Pack]

0-3 is a crappy way to start the year but at least I see steady improvement in each of those games to build upon.

[kingnebwsu]

I remember saying in the offseason that WSU could be a pretty solid team and still be 0-3.

The defense has overall been shoddy but the ceiling is still high for WSU this season.

[raiderrunt]

I see steady improvement. The Raiders should be very competitive in the HL.

[Dr J]

I would rather see a W but happy with the way the team responded. In the last 3/4 the of the game we outscored them. I think we will see an eight or nine man rotation.

[Pauley]

I know there are no moral victories, but this was a helluva lot better than the game against IU that I attended at the Hoosier Dome in '93. Very respectable showing this evening. Very happy for Andrew Welage to have this kind of performance against a school he probably rooted for as a kid. Fortunately, WSU will not be challenged by this type of size in the HL.

[Pauley]

Also, loved the real Rowdy Raider on the unis tonight.

[kingnebwsu]

Nov 16, 2023 22:37:53 GMT -5 Pauley said:

Also, loved the real Rowdy Raider on the unis tonight.

These uniforms were one of the best I've ever seen ar WSU. Loved them.

[hokieraider]

Nov 16, 2023 19:26:22 GMT -5 Ukraine Train said:

I've seen enough of this season to see that it's time to move on from some of our upperclassmen and just let the freshmen play and burn their red-shirt year. I'd rather live with the mistakes of some of the young guards than to watch Alex play another minute for us. He can't defend. He can't score. I don't get why he is playing. Same thing with Welage.

[hokieraider]

That post didn't age well. Good games by both Wellage and Alex.

[hokieraider]

If WSU gets Trey back, and plays with this effort next week, I foresee good things. Should also be able to get the inside game going more against the competition we will see in Florida and in the HL.

[Big D]

Nov 16, 2023 23:23:59 GMT -5 hokieraider said:

That post didn't age well. Good games by both Wellage and Alex.

No. That post didn’t age that poorly and if you think Alex and Andrew played good games tonight you need to go back and watch the game again. The way they both played is EXACTLY what Nagy has been preaching is our problem all summer and fall. Too many guys are focused on their scoring and they don’t put anywhere near the same effort into their game on the other end of the court. The whole purpose of playing the game is to score more than your opponent. That is how you win games. It doesn’t matter that those 2 combined to score 40 points if they let the guys they were supposed to be defending score more than that.

We lost tonight. There are no moral victories to take away from tonight. We are 0-3 now because we are statistically one of the worst defensive teams in the country. There are only 7-8 teams in the entire country that are allowing their opponents to shoot a better FG percentage than us. 7 or 8 in the entire country. Let that sink in before you reply to my comments. We aren’t going to compete for a HL title if we continue to play defense like this. We are going to be lucky to finish above .500 if this is what you get out of your top 6 players who all have a minimum of 3 years in this system. Most have 4-5 years in this system.

[wsuraider12]

This has been the same thing everyone has said for years. I guess you can say they need to try harder, but I’m sure every minute any one of them are on the court they would prefer to do the right thing every time. Maybe it’s time to start questioning the system instead. If all you do is preach defense, but constantly have a bad defense, try something else.

[willgrahamsbanked3]

Looked like Nagy gave Brown a chance to run the offense to start the game, didn't go very well. Holden & others started taking the ball up the court and the offense started scoring more consistently. After IU went up by 15 early and Woodson started rotating in a lot of his bench players WSU was able to chip away when IU took their foot off the gas pedal.

Looking forward to watching Brown's improvement, but last night he was the weak link. WSU was outscored by 16 points in the 16 minutes he was on the floor.
WSU outscored IU by 7 the other 24 minutes of the game.

Fun watching Welage have a breakout game in his home state in a game that by default was the most watched WSU regular season game this season.

[ohiopirate]

Nov 17, 2023 1:43:49 GMT -5 wsuraider12 said:

This has been the same thing everyone has said for years. I guess you can say they need to try harder, but I’m sure every minute any one of them are on the court they would prefer to do the right thing every time. Maybe it’s time to start questioning the system instead. If all you do is preach defense, but constantly have a bad defense, try something else.

You have to question the system, the coaching, or the recruiting. It's certainly one of them.

Nagy says he recruits scorers and teaches them to be good defenders. Well, if your upperclassman still haven't learned to play defense then either your coaching is ineffective or you recruited players that don't have the skillset needed to be good defenders in your system. Either way that's a coaching failure.

[Retired Coach]

Nov 17, 2023 10:04:50 GMT -5 ohiopirate said:

You have to question the system, the coaching, or the recruiting. It's certainly one of them.

There has been a huge drop in our ability to defend the last 3 years and I personally thinks it stems from coaching and recruiting much more than the system. The system worked Nagy's first several years here and it worked for him in SDSU. It also works for tons of other mid-majors too so I don't think there is a problem with the system. I think you have to look at the other 2 areas.

I don't think there is a coincidence that our defense started to decline after our 2020/21 season. We had a massive overhaul to our coaching staff that year. Associate head coach Brian Cooley left for Colorado State and Sharif Chambliss left for Wisconsin. We also lost administrative assistant Nick Nagy. That staff worked really well together in all aspects of recruiting, coaching, scouting, and game preparation. The way we taught our system and ran practices was a well oiled machine. After that mass exodus, we promoted the only remaining coach, who was previously our least experienced coach to associate head coach, Clint Sargent. We brought in assistant coach Dan Bere who had some nice D1 experience. We hired assistant coach Travis Trice, who had no college coaching experience, and hired Tae Gibbs as director of player development. We lost a lot of experienced coaches that were familiar with our system and working with each other and replaced them with a lot of guys that weren't. The other major coaching issue we had at that time was that Coach Nagy lost his father and that really affected him. When we really needed him to be a much more hands on coach at practice to teach his staff how he wanted things done, he really took a step back and relied on Clint Sargent a lot more than he should have. I understand why that happened. It was a very hard time for Coach Nagy, but it did have a negative effect on how things have been run since then.

The other area that I think has hurt us the most is our recruiting during a period of time 3-5 years ago. I don't think our fans understand how much our school shutdown from the faculty strike, dropping sports due to budget changes, and Covid hurt recruiting. Our staff was severely handcuffed on the recruiting trail by those things. I also think we lost most of our previous staff because of those things. Every kid we were trying to recruit had coaches we were recruiting against in their ear telling them that you don't want to go to Wright State. The school itself is a mess. The whole school might go under. If the school survived all it's financial problems, we were going to drop out of D1, etc. We lost so many kids we normally would have had a chance to sign because they didn't want to take a risk on those things happening here. We also lost the ability to see recruits live or get them on campus during covid because of all the restrictions. A lot of the upperclassman on our roster that our fans are complaining about now were kids we signed while all of that was going on. Alex, Andrew, and Keaton are all great young men but none of them are athletic enough to defend good guards in the HL, let along, the athletic guards we have been seeing so far in our OOC schedule.

The good news is I think our staff is starting to hit their stride. The defense is no where near where we want it to be, but it has been improving game by game. It's not going to be up to our previous standards as long as we have this roster due to their athletic deficiencies, but it can be good enough that we can win games with our ability to score. The staff has definitely hit their stride recruiting. The last 2 classes have been excellent. We have added guards that are athletic enough to defend the way our staff wants. They just signed 2 bigs that can bang down low and control the boards the way we want. I think we still have time to turn this season around and make it successful. I think the future beyond that looks even better with the younger roster the staff is starting to put together.