Excellent: I'm going to single out Ed Morrow. While none of the freshmen disappointed -- and I should stress that they all at least lived up to expectations -- Ed Morrow's motor stood out. I love his tenacity and desire to make plays, whether by setting a solid screen or going hard after a rebound. He's clearly the player he was billed to be.
Really Good: Depth and rotations. We are legitimately 9 men deep this year. Regardless of who ends up starting, we should have a bench that can come in and score. That is really nice to see.
Pretty Good: I liked the tempo. I liked seeing them push the ball in their transition offense. Especially considering we don't have a post presence on offense where we can hope to find some points in the half-court, I liked seeing the ball movement and getting layups off of basket cuts. They were loving the rim even as they appeared to have a love/hate relationship with the three ball.
Reasonably Good: Jacob Hammond was a mixed bag. At times, his defense looked sketch; his free throw shooting at times cringe-worthy. But we have Glynn Watson. And Jack McVeigh. And Jacob was smart enough to hang out near the rim to receive the dish pass so that if they got a step on their defender, he was available for the dish. That was good. He rebounded decently and had a couple of really nice blocks. For a guy who only played like 13 minutes all last year, he was a lot better than I expected he would be. Reasonably pleasant surprise there.
Bad: The team 3 pt percentage sucked. Horribly. Which is really scary when you don't have an inside post presence whom you can count on to score with his back to the basket. Hard to open up those driving lanes when the defense can play a sagging, help D and we'd be hard pressed to force them out of it. They won't be chasing shooters over the top of ball screens because there'd be no point. Why bother? We aren't going to have anyone dribble behind a screen and shoot it. And, if they did, like they're going to make it? I wish that was something we could fix between now and the beginning of the season -- our perimeter shooting, that is. But too many unlikely things would have to happen for that to change to any great extent.