Pretty good, but not quite good enough. Strong moments of really good basketball. But too many weak points, just at the critical time.
Utah has to move on; this is not going to change. We may make a mistake and move backwards. College basketball is tough. But we have to take that chance.
Get it done and don’t look back.
Agree. Trajectory is important, and no reason to believe it will change.
Agree, but I feel bad for LK. Perfect storm—COVID scheduling , Jones injury, jatunen break and most of all losing lohner after he signed. He deserved better
Lohner averages just fewer minutes than Battin (just over 20 mpg), yet he averages more points and rebounds and shoots better from outside (35% vs 29%). He would have taken Battin’s time here at a minimum. That’s a pretty significant loss, enough to think that we would have won some of the 7 close conference games that we lost.
I think losing Lohner will be the big difference in Larry losing his job.
Lohner would have filled a huge hole in this team.
Shhh, you’re not supposed to say things like this. Moose will get upset that you don’t think LK is a GREAT coach.
At this point I’m not upset anymore, but rather looking forward to saying I told you so when the next coach never finishes in the top 4 of the PAC 12 and Larry finds a team to coach outside of Utah where he finds success because he can easily recruit kids not named Tag, Ryder, Race, Rad, Treyton, Trei, Cutter, Gunner…et al without having to travel all over the country or to Europe.
College coaches can only do so much, they can’t use fear tactics that were once successful, and they can’t turn Saratoga Springs kids into edgy ball players who take charges and drive to the basket relentlessly.
We all understand that the next coach may be worse or the same as LK. We also understand that the next coach may be better than LK. You have nothing to gloat over either way.
I know the next coach will not be better than Larry, because I’ve looked at the overall situation which everyone else is ignoring. So yes, when I have been proven right, I will gloat, for good reason.
Hurts me to even think about.
Yep. But on the other hand…should our b-ball fortunes depend so heavily on a single recruit?
No, but it also isn’t as simple as a kid who committed then decommitted; that was really a screw job.
That’s just reality, especially in basketball. For many teams fighting for a spot at the table, one player is going to make the difference between survival and starvation. Pope’s entire future is on a different trajectory because of that steal.
Whoever replaces Larry will have his fortune as a head coach determined by the decisions of a couple of 18 year olds.
This.
Larry’s success early on was due in large part to him convincing Jordan Loveridge, Delon Wright, Jakob Poeltl and Kyle Kuzma to all commit to him before he had shown much of anything here.
As the announcers were announcing our international connection and where our roster is from, the unspoken conclusion is we’ve really struggled recruiting/retaining African American kids, the past 4 years or so.
Sweden, Finland, Costa Rica, Puerto Rico, Senegal.
Larsson and Martinez match up decently at this level. If Plummer comes back for one more year, YEA!
I don’t know where it went south with AA kids, but it did. Tad Boyle has it figured out, I don’t think he’s cheating.
It sure seems like that has been going on for more than 4 years. And not just to coach K. It seemed to happen with Majerus as well.
Delon fell out of the sky and happened to land in our lap. Same for Justin Bibbins. Brandon Taylor was solid. Loveridge is a local kid, but was solid. Dakari Tucker was good, is still making money playing the game.
Then something happened.
Majerus and Larry were/are similar grind-it-out, fundamentals coaches.
I don’t buy the line that Utah is tough to recruit to, because kids are going to Pullman, Utah State gets talent and our own football team has a critical mass of player-recruiters.
I don’t necessarily buy it either. But I don’t know the reason either. My only point was that it isn’t something that’s just happening lately.
Absolutely. It reminded me of the times when we were always fighting with BYU for recruits. That is much less common now because of our higher level (“higher” is a term I use advisedly here, because our performance has not been at a higher level). As often happened in the past, someone got to Lohner. That is all there is to it.
there’s a solid argument to be made that Larry isnt popular with his players. He has a Jerry Sloan type gruffness to him. But that gritty attitude seems to be true of nearly every college basketball coach. I’m not sure why we struggle so much landing and keeping players.