Duff Man

Glad to see the Big 3 all getting their All-conference due. What's great about this team is how everyone has settled into their role and flourished within the team unit. No time to rest on these laurels. Get the W Friday and keep it going.

Jacobs' ballhandling and FT shooting is useful at the end of games when the other team is fouling to put us on the line.

Perkins shot 22.5% from beyond the arc vs D1 non-conf opponents vs 41.2% in A10 play. Even more remarkable since in his first 5 A10 games he shot 2 for 18 (11.1%) from 3 Over Perkins last 13 games, he's shooting 52% from 3 and his FG% + 3P% + FT% = 1.814

Maybe they enjoy having the traditional round robin schedule where everyone plays everyone home and away. It would be cool to have an annual home schedule that included X, Butler, Marquette, Creighton, in addition to Dayton...plus Nova, Seton Hall, etc every other year...but we'd struggle to go .500 in that league, and you can forget about winning the conf tournament. Sure, we could recruit at a higher level but not at the level of the conference elite. I mean, we struggle to do much better than .500 in the effing A10, how are we going to do in the Big East? Programs that were a lot more successful than SLU before joining the reformed Big East (Creighton, Marquette, Georgetown) don't make the tournament as regularly as they used to because the competition within the conference so fierce and someone needs to finish in the bottom half. Bottom line: It'd be great if it happens, but it won't really make getting into the NCAA tournament any easier.

Wichita St were a better team coming off a Final 4 and SLU could not buy a 3pt shot. Dayton went to the Elite 8, were as good as we were not to mention Jordair was banged up. They beat us. Duquesne hit 8 of 15 3s while SLU went 4-23. That's why they lost. It wasn't the refs. Are you talking Bonnies in the A10 tournament? Thats probably the most egregious screw job I can recall. Jett got hammered and stayed down. No call. They hit open 3 playing 5 on 4. Total garbage. But...its different in the conf tournament as the league benefits from a dark horse winner.

In order to beat a top 10 team on the road, you're going to need to overcome biased officiating. Period. College basketball refs are often crap. We should be used to it. You would be naive to think we don't have dirty refs. Of the refs who are 100% clean, there is a natural bias towards the home team - esp when it's a sellout crowd - esp when it's the best team in the conference - esp when they're ranked in the top 10. No ref wants to be the one who made the bad call that caused the best team in the conference to lose (at home), and hurt their NCAA seed. When the Billikens were the top dogs in the A10 at the height of the Jett/Evans era, we certainly benefited from this phenomenon. It works both ways. SLU does not project as an at-large NCAA team. They are a spoiler at this point. Come A10 tournament time, it'll be a different story but right now when they play the A10 teams with legit NCAA at large aspirations, we're going to playing uphill against that officiating bias. As far as leaving the conference goes...I mean, since joining the A10 they've made the NCAA tournament 4 times in 14 years. It's a conference that's strong enough that they can earn an at-large bid with a strong regular season but also a conference that's not so good that winning the automatic bid via the tournament is not an impossible task. What other conference could they join where both of those factors would remain intact?

That has been brought up and my guess - without knowing anything about how the plaintiffs are structured - is that the bonds with be paid off by the time the money arrives but the settlement/payout will factor in the debt payments from 2016-onward. Regardless, the state felt like they got burned on the Dome long before the Rams moved. The Cardinals were denied direct stadium funds by the state in 2000/2001 (remember they briefly bluffed that they might move to the east side) and while they ultimately got $30M in tax credits (pocket change) and some state money went towards demolishing/rebuilding highway ramps, the Dome was the deal that effectively ruined STL's credit when it comes to any kind of state funding for stadiums.

The bonds don't mature until 2022. From my recollection, it's $12M/yr and when the team was here the state was coming out narrowly ahead ($12.6M in additional tax revenue) but even with the Battlehawks about to begin play, it's still a bleeding wound on the state's books and has been since 2016.

I don't know what Parsons' end game was or why he pulled his support for the tax breaks after previously indicating he was on board with them... But in addition to the general political rift between STL and the rest of the state (which goes back centuries), there's the far more recent history of the Dome financing which was a terrible con job where the state financed a $280M stadium on spec - no one has every really dug into how that happened but if you look at who stood to benefit from the project we can assume HOK and the unions were influential - which ground had already been broken by the time STL missed out on the NFL expansion - at which point the region had zero leverage in negotiations with any team looking to relocate (i.e. the Rams) which led to the awful lease that didn't even cover maintenance costs in the short term and allowed the team to leave before the debt was paid off in the long term. So yeah, while this MLS deal appears to be win-win for all involved with the ownership group covering the vast majority of the costs and only asking for "pocket change" tax breaks...the fact that the state got burned on the Dome, and also how the MLS and the STL ownership group are pot committed at this point, I understand why there's hesitation to give them the $30M in tax breaks.

eFG% 2019 Bess: .469 2020 Goodwin: 508% However, that's not necessarily an indicator of jump shot percentage. Obviously the majority of Goodwin's FG attempts are not jumpshots. Bess for the record is shooting 33% from 3 in the G-league (34 of 102) which is better than what he shot a year ago (.325) with the closer line and he's certainly improved from his Jr year when he shot .270 from 3.

I think Goodwin's NBA potential is greater than Kyle Cassity's, but he's a longshot compared to Bess. While there are some similarities between Jordan Goodwin and what Marcus Smart brought in college, Smart -was just at another level when it comes to his defense and athleticism. More importantly Smart is an NBA caliber ballhandler. For Goodwin to make the NBA, he'd need to improve his ballhandling in order to play PG against the best in the world, and also improve every other aspect of his game. The reality is he's a great fit for SLU because of his limitations - i.e. he'll be here 4 years.

Willie was being represented by a con man agent who'd been fired from his agency at the time he turned down that deal... https://www.cbssports.com/nba/news/report-willie-reed-lost-out-on-15m-contract-with-heat-due-to-uncertified-agent/ and then he got arrested for a domestic violence beef...which as far as fringe players go, teams would just assume not employ a bench player with a history of domestic violence arrests... and that's on top of the whole evolution of the league and extinction of the traditional center (who doesn't have an outside shot) He defied the odds to get to the NBA and then he managed lose it more quickly than really should have been possible.

Forgot to post yesterday for the 29 year anniversary...I guess technically the 2nd half was played on the 12th (RIP Orlando Stewart)

Goodwin has really cleaned it up in the half court set. Granted probably facing easier defenders than he'll face most nights, but he's playing under control getting to his spots and knocking down shots. (and no turnovers...knock on wood)

He was there. On crutches w cast.