Boy, I'm glad I kept my mouth (keyboard) shut after the WVU game.
It's hard not to react to something like the 88-63 "the score was closer than the game" debacle that took place in Cassell on December 30th, my birthday (some birthday present). The Hokies got stomped on the court, and Buzz Williams nearly blew a blood vessel yelling at his players and frenetically yanking guys up and down off the bench while trying to find a lineup -- any lineup -- that looked like something other than West Virginia roadkill.
Then Buzz kept his team in the locker room for an hour and 45 minutes after the game, skipping his VT radio obligations in the process and causing the beat writers to have to twiddle their thumbs for almost two hours. That rankled the media, even calm, cool football beat writer Andy Bitter âĻ
https://twitter.com/AndyBitterVT/status/682299741032550400
âĻ and caused a few Tech fans to question his methods, to put it nicely. Not all fans, just some, and yours truly even got into the act.
In all, it was a train wreck of a day, and on the heels of Tech's whipping at the hands of St. Joe's, it was not a good two-game stretch for Tech basketball.
But I've been saying for years now that basketball is a game of runs, both within a game and within a season. Teams will score ten straight during a contest, or they'll win four straight, and it looks like the fun will never end. On the flipside, they'll get outscored 18-3 at one point in a game, or they'll lose three games in a row, and it looks like those lifeless, incompetent bums couldn't find the rim with both hands and a flashlight.
It's best to just weather the runs, I've always said, and see how things play out over time. So I kept silent after the WVU game and its aftermath.
But I did reset my season expectations. Losing Ahmed Hill and Ty Outlaw before the season started was bad, but up until Chris Clarke got hurt, I thought the Hokies still might be able to piece something together. The clock was ticking, but they still might figure it out.
Then Clarke went down, and the WVU thing happened, and against my biggest hopes, I decided we might have another throwaway season on our hands, and to relax about the rest of it. I don't like that loser-think any more than you do, but it just didn't look good, and too many pieces of the puzzle were still missing.
Effort
The biggest piece of the puzzle that was missing was players willing to play Buzz's preferred style of basketball. What does that mean? GCHokie34, who doesn't post often on our hoops board but who nails it from downtown when he does, summed it up in this post:
Buzz isn't a system coach...he isn't going to come up with an offensive philosophy and recruit guys to fit the rhythm of his offense...Buzz isn't a player development coach, and he isn't going to coach worse players up and make them markedly better fundamentally...Buzz IS an effort coach, what he will do is make guys play harder than they feel they can play, they will (ideally) suffocate the offense and compete at such a high level, that it will be difficult for most teams to match their intensity...the "problem" with this method is it takes an incredible amount of buy-in from the entire roster...this means that when you take over a program and need kids to buy-in, it sometimes means there needs to be a complete roster overhaul
I would bet (and I don't know, because I won't pretend to know the locker room dynamics) that the reason Buzz had such a long post-game meeting with his team is because he wanted to test their buy-in...he probably needed to draw a line in the sand and see who will respond...conference play is about to really begin and he needs to know which guys he can count on...in a 25 point loss to a quality opponent, it's tough to get a gauge on that.