Evansville at Northern Iowa

[uniftw]

Anyone ever give a thought to the possibility that UE is developing/recruiting better offensive players to help Balentine?

You guys just contnue to ignore the fact that Martys offense won't allow any help. You could have the best 5 in the country and ONLY 1 will have good stats. Ballentines numbers are a result of Martys one player scores philosophy rather than Ballentine not having help.

This! There is a reason Ballentine leads the league in minutes. Heck he played all 40 on Wednesday.

This is exactly it.

22 games into the season and DJ has played 140 more minutes than the next highest minutes on the roster. He has played 823 of 880 possible minutes for UE this season.

Colt was the same way. He was always a 140-180 minutes a head of his closest mpg mate and usually 200+ more than the rest of the team.

Marty doesn't know how to coach anything other than 1 player running off of 800 screens and chucking the ball up the entire game.

[rlh04d]

It's pretty clear what UE's offense is going to be the next 2.5 years with DJ there. If you are 7 years into your coach and you are just hoping he can develop a role player or two you have the wrong coach...or very low expectations.

Or you have the right coach for the ridiculously low salary you're willing to pay a coach. Not sure how many better options there are out there for what Evansville will pay.

Evansville is what it is under Simmons. They'll win some big games when Ballentine/Colt/Whoever comes up next is hyped up, but they'll lose when he isn't. They'll struggle to field a team better than .500 every year. Just what they are.

[bleach]

Don't get me wrong, Evansville has been more competitive the last 5 years than they used to be but, they will never get better than they are (.500 ballclub) with any consistency.

[Ricardo del Rio]

Anyone ever give a thought to the possibility that UE is developing/recruiting better offensive players to help Balentine? His 43 pts. against UNI came in a game where we needed every one (and more). Right now I would say Marty is trying to get much more offense out of the other players. I know we are seeing more in Mock's contribution. Simmons will continue to improve offensively. We are hoping the guards do also as they gain experience. We desperately need defense to stop the competition's threes....and we need better rebounding effort, although we did out rebound UNI. I do know that IF we had the shooters that UNI had, we would have been going to them. So, we got points where we could...and against the Panthers it was Balentine, who was on fire.

The game against UNI was called super close, both ways, but it hurt us more because Mock got 2 fouls during the first 3 minutes and had to sit. That caused us to have to double down on the post, freeing the UNI 3-point shooters. We did not do a good job of guarding the perimeter...thus all those shots made. We have to get better defensively...and offensively....there's nothing newsworthy about that. Marty has a difficult job ahead, but the potential is there with this young group.

I don't know what will happen against the Shockers, but I hope my Aces play with energy and with confidence. This may not be the time for this young team to win, but I hope they give it a good try.

Simmons will be out for the rest of the season. Baker broke both of his ankles today.

[rlh04d]

Simmons will be out for the rest of the season. Baker broke both of his ankles today.

Not true. They were actually able to stabilize his ankles in the locker room, using some of his back hair to tie them up.

(I expected him to be a lot worse in this game considering comments from Evansville fans. He wasn't terrible.)