The Trentonian talks to Sydney Johnson about Princeton's long season.
Write-ups of the Tigers' two games over the weekend are in the Brown Daily Herald and the Yale Daily News.
Peter Clapman said,
Good article about the current situation. As for the team "handed" to Johnson, it is probably accurate to say that only one player has exceeded expectations--NIck Lake. The others, particularly the sophs, have not experienced any improvement and might have declined. Statistics will confirm that this is the poorest shooting f team in memory, particularly 3-pointers. Some players have one good night and then get totally blanked on other nights. With Scott leaving last spring, the current freshmen class produced no one who contributed. This might also affect recruiting for the next class.
It wil take a while, but it sounds like Johnson can handle adversity.
Jon Solomon said,
Peter,
While you make several good points, I'd say Zach Finley has improved from where he was a year ago. To paraphrase Coach Johnson, I hope he's not the "finished product," but he's improved upon several parts of his game from his freshman year.
http://statsheet.com/mcb/players/zach-finley
As for three point shooting, Princeton is currently at 33.0% as a team.
Believe it or not, the 1998-99 team that went to the third round of the NIT shot a similar 33.8% from outside.
The 2003-04 Ivy champions were also 33.8% from behind the arc.
Jon
David Lewis said,
"Not as far gone as people think." What does that mean? How much worse can it get than 5-21? (only four wins against D-I competition). I hope I'm wrong but we'll probably find out next year when two of the team's best players, Savage and Koncz, graduate. I think we have all learned that coaching is not the problem (and was not the problem when Coach Scott was here). The problem lies squarely with the admissions department and the school president's anti-jock bias - e.g. - no early admission makes it virtually impossible to recruit and requiring athletes to stop playing their sport for seven weeks is not realistic and hurts competitiveness and recruiting. Why would a top quality student basketball player go to Princeton when he could go to Davidson, Penn or Bucknell for that matter. Princeton needs to decide if it wants to compete at the D-I level or not. If Princeton wants to be more like Swarthmore or Amherst or other DIII academic schools, be up front about it and play a less competitive schedule. This would be much better than the present situation. Finishing with an RPI of 325 out of 330 is an embarrassment for any school but for Princeton, with its rich basketball tradition, it's a disgrace. It's not fair to Coach Johnson, to his players work their tails off or to the team's loyal fans.
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