A couple day after thoughts...

#26
#26
Turner yes, JJ no way. There's only one ball. You don't need 5 scorers on the court. Pons may be their best defender, a strong rebounder, and blocks shots. You're undervaluing Pons if you only look at his offense IMO
 
#27
#27
IMO Pons is a bit of a liability on offense right now. He does 3 things very well and he can make open shots. He's a threat to score when running the court. He can score hitting the offensive glass. He can throw down the back door lobs. The lobs get the crowd into games, but it's a pretty low percentage play. He's not really on the court to optimize TN's half court offense. In the slow paced games we'll probably see more of Turner off of the bench and maybe even JJ.
If you surround pons with 4 other players that can score. He isn’t a liability. You just have to use what he’s good at on the offensive end to your advantage (cutting, crashing the boards etc..)
 
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#28
#28
One thing I wanna talk more about is the versatility of this roster, it’s pretty incredible honestly...I know it has been mentioned but until you see the guys out there you’re not really sure how much guys have actually improved or changed their games.

I feel like we are seeing a very similar transformation from Grant that we did from Adrmial. Early on Admiral was an undersized 4, he went to work incredibly hard on improving his perimeter shot, ball handling, and lateral quickness to allow him to play the 3, he did an incredible job at that, are we seeing similar with Williams? Obviously an undersized 4 man, he has trimmed up and through 2 games looks much quicker, he is 4-6 from 3 through 2 games, I don’t think anyone predicted that. In addition he also appears more comfortable with the ball, he actually brought it up the court a couple times last night and looked comfortable doing so, and as further proof of this transformation he did indeed play some 3 last night when Vols went big.

Besides Williams you’ve seen Admiral continue his development on the perimeter and he’s a guy that could play 2-4 and hold his own, he’s gonna bring bigger guys away from the basket and post smaller guys up down low, he’s also really embraced looking for his teammates and his nearly 6apg average through 2 games is evidence of that.

Yves Pons offensively isn’t going to change his game but defensively he can guard 1-5, and that allows Barnes to be very versatile and not worry about moving guys like Williams or Schofield to the 2 or 3.

You look at last night and we didn’t play Lamonte Turner, the reigning 6th MOY, who’s our backup PG...and yet the offense has still been much more efficient than it was most of last year, that’s a promising sign. Louisiana played a smaller uptempo style, as a result you saw Fulkerson get a lot of minutes and Alexander finally played 30mpg, this meant Walker didn’t play much at all. Barnes attributed it to Louisiana going small, but again that’s the versatility and options we have, against bigger teams you will see more of Walker and less of Fulky.

I don’t know how this season ultimately ends or goes, but through 2 games I really like the makeup of this team and individually I don’t think there’s much debate that we are better across the board, now whether that translates to better as a team is yet to be seen but the early signs are positive. Barnes is a stickler on defense so I feel safe in assuming he will continue to fine tune it and get it to an elite level like last year, my question for this year was can we take the next step offensively, because last year that was what held us back and so far we look better than I expected offensively and that’s without arguably our best guard scorer in Lamonte Turner.

GBO!!!

Pons struggled last year when guarding a smaller, quicker guard. Hope he proves me wrong, but I don't see him guarding a quick PG.
 
#29
#29
Pons struggled last year when guarding a smaller, quicker guard. Hope he proves me wrong, but I don't see him guarding a quick PG.

He’s already done a pretty good job at it, not saying he can stick with Tremont Waters or some other 5’9” jitter bug but he will be able to defend majority of the PG’s he faces.
 
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