Where is the consistency?

By any reasonable standard,  it appears this is going to be a sub-par regular season, which is really a shame, given all the maturity and experience we have had on the roster. Be that as it may, we can take comfort in the fact that in basketball (as in most sports these days), the regular season is virtually meaningless. The question is not, "How good a season did you have?" but, "How good a team do you have right now?" (That really irritates me, and it probably is the single thing I like least about basketball, but it is what it is, at least for the time being.)

That being the case, the questions for us are the same. The kind of season we have had is virtually meaningless (as it would have been last year if we had lost in the first round of the SBC tournament). The question for us is, "How good can we be by the time of the tournament?" And that is a little more difficult to answer. Without a point guard, I am not optimistic. However, Shoshi is back healthy, and even in a horrendous game at Texas State, he pulled down eight rebounds and blocked five shots. That is something to build on, and something that will serve us well in a tournament. A dominant rebounder and shot blocker helps cover a multitude of sins. We have some shooters, enough that we can have a couple of threats in the game at all times, but they have a depressing tendency all to go cold at the same time.

The bottom line is that we have the talent to be pretty good on a given night. What we do not have, right now, is the consistency - on either side of the ball - to be good over three or four games. Johnson is a world-beater one night and a total disaster the next. Same with Jackson. Same with Burns. For a team that is very mature in years, we are distressingly juvenile in performance; and until we fix that, I do not see us making a run in the post-season.