Time will tell whether or not Wes Flanigan can recruit. I see some hope that he can. However, right now he is going to have to show that he can coach. A good coach 1) has his team ready to play, and 2) is able to fix things on the fly. I have yet to be convinced that Wes is competent in those areas. Again, time will tell, but he has yet to prove it to me.
I am not reading too much into the games so far this season. OBU was an aberration; let's just forget it. Memphis was encouraging and Grand Canyon may have been just one of those nights when a good-shooting team and a fired-up crowd steamrollered us. Which will prove to have been the norm?
But one of the things that disturbed me about last season was the way that Marcus Johnson was allowed just to shoot us out of game after game, and no one ever seemed to apply the brakes. It doesn't have to happen on the sidelines, but Wes needs to be getting in some players faces and telling them how the cow ate the cabbage. A coach just cannot let individual players get the team beat because they refuse to play good basketball, and we have had some of that going on. "You play it my way, or you don't play." Positive motivation is a good thing, but at some point the coach needs to add the stick to the carrot. Some teams don't make shots because they just do not have shooters, and that could be our case; but some teams do not make shots because they do not take good shots, and taking good shots takes discipline, and the coach is the one who has to enforce the discipline.
Again, I am not reading much into such a small sample, but it looks disconcertingly like last year is repeating itself.
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