Funny, I thought the school of thought was that the more scoring options you have, the better off you are.
I hope Jok doesn't turn into this season's fall guy. The blame was placed on Marble (by some folks) two years ago when the team collapsed. So I see a trend here: It falls apart, blame one of the GOOD players on the team.
I don't buy it.
2-3 top scorers, or 0-1.. I'll take my chances with a team that has some top players on it.
Doesn't seem to bother the Dukes & Kentuckys of the world...
I think that's the point though, you
do always want more scorers, but Iowa hadn't been planning on having two
that good that needed
that many shots.
Duke and Kentucky counts on that every year, and Coach K and Calipari know how to use it.
Jok is
not being made out to be a fall guy. Nobody has to take all the blame, but at some point there needs to be some explanation for what we saw in the last half of the year. I don't think it's crazy to think that Fran and the team started to focus too much on Jok and Uthoff, and as other teams adjusted, Iowa never countered to keep finding ways to get them space or to keep any of the other guys involved.
Just think about it. At the beginning it was Uthoff leading, but the offense was a flurry around him. Jok (and everybody else) was coming by his points organically, often in transition. Then all of a sudden they fell off on the fastbreak, and by the end of the year it was a lot of trying to let Uthoff and Jok make things happen in the half court. If they weren't hitting, the offense was doomed. Maybe you say "none of the other guys wanted to score," but that's too simplified. Clemmons is aggressive, Gesell is aggressive and willing in spurts, and even Woodbury insisted from time to time on trying be a mid-range shooter. They didn't
not want to score. They were just deferring.
Again, it's not that having two scorers as good as them was a bad thing. And nobody's blaming Jok for Iowa's collapse because he got too good. But the offense stalled, bad, and until someone comes up with a better theory, I give a little credence to the idea that -- maybe you put it on Fran -- the Hawkeyes simply didn't know how to effectively intertwine two dominant scorers into a great offense previously predicated on only having one.
I don't mean to seem like I think this is absolutely right, and I know I don't post often, but I desperately want to identify what happened to this team. This is at the least an interesting theory that shouldn't be discounted so quickly, at least not without alternative proposals.
Talent is only as good as how you know to use it.
