Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Orr Presser

Coach Orr's presser from this week is up on the bgsufalcons.com website.  Seeing the video helps a lot.  Anyway, he had some interesting things to say.

The first thing was that someone asked Coach is he was praying more given the results of the last two games.  You know, I don't know if they were joking or not, but it was kind of an "awk-WARD" moment.  You won't be surprised to know that Coach prays the same whether the team is winning or losing.

Anyway, he then segued effortlessly into a pretty nice metaphor when he said it was "revelation time" for our team is.  These early games, you find out what you have and what you need to fix.

The foundation of our team is defense, and we have not guarded---especially the perimeter--in the last two games.  As such, we have not "established the foundation" of our team.

He said some interesting things about defense, which he said is mostly about "will."  Yes, we need to defend the easy basket better (he ticked off about a dozen things that go into defending your basket)  but it starts with will--the determination to shut your opponent down every time down the floor.  If you don't defend you are just "playing tag" and that makes it hard to win.

Coach feels that we have to improve our man and zone balance, because we apparently are not doing either one very well.  (Which is a kind of balance.....anyway).

Other than a stretch where BG got 7 straight stops against Wayne State, (DII), we have had no real sustained success on the defensive end of the floor.

We are a work in progress, and everyone is still sorting their roles out.  Someone asked, more or less, who's going to be Nate Miller, and Coach said that it doesn't work that way, we don't have a guy like that right now, but the team has to sort out the roles that work and then find the team's chemistry within that.

You can't look at our team to date without noting that we just aren't getting to the line.  Coach says that our guys who handle the ball have to do better at creating foul situations, which you can do other ways besides just driving to the basket.  So, Jakubowski, Brown, Thomas, etc, need to get themselves to the line more.  (Our opponents have attempted 55 FTs to our 27, and BG is shooting 48% on top of it).

Finally, he had nice things to say about Marc Larson, who has really brought his skills along for his senior season, which is what Coach expects when a player becomes a senior.

Key words are revelation and work in progress.  We had a read from the last two games....the question is can we grow from there?

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