iogyhufi
Masters Student
Posts: 681
Age: 27
Reg: 10-10-17
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01-05-24 11:17 AM - Post#361281
Yale's had a non-con with a lot of ups and downs. The ups were pretty high (two wins against solid mid-major competition in California! smoked Colgate on a neutral floor! was better than Kansas for 30 minutes in Phog Allen!), but the lows were pretty low (lost to Fairfield at home, was Rhode Island's only D1 win in the span of a month, struggled mightily with a very mediocre Gardner-Webb team).
The optimist's view is that those early-season struggles were just a team struggling to find its identity. Danny Wolf is a tremendous player, but he has to have a super high usage rate to be most effective. All five Yale starters could easily be the best offensive player on a D1 team, so you could easily imagine that it could take time for everyone to find a role that they're comfortable with. And it's a great sign that the two best games of the year by far have been the two most recent ones where they've been at full strength - Kansas and Santa Clara. SC in particular looks promising, because they won in the way that Coach Jones prefers to win: limited SC to 0.83 points per possession, won the boards, and assisted on 64% of all made baskets. The trend line is positive, and Yale has the highest ceiling of any team in the league (which isn't a shot at Princeton so much as it's an acknowledgement of the crazy talent level on this roster - Yale has a returning 1st team all-Ivy player and he hasn't been the best player on the floor most nights!).
The pessimist's view looks at those lows and is concerned that they're still there lurking beneath the surface. Yale gives up too many open threes, in large part because of lapses in defensive positioning and awareness. They also have a tendency to let their offense stagnate - the ball can sometimes stick in one place for too long. If you view Princeton as the biggest obstacle to Yale's success this year, this concerns you. Princeton's biggest asset isn't their overwhelming talent (though they have plenty of talent), it's their discipline. They don't make too many mistakes, and they'll punish you for yours. The optimist looks at where Princeton is weak (paint defense, especially against slashing guards with size) and licks his chops. The pessimist imagines Matt Allocco going 6-7 from three because the person guarding him keeps sinking into no-man's-land on defense for no good reason.
Personally, I think there's more to be optimistic about. But this isn't a finished product yet. I'll be interested to see how they improve as the conference season moves along.
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