Old guy

OT of course. You all know what the word CIGNA stands for don't you, "Call In Get No Answer". Leaving jokes aside, it is an acronym for the initials of the two companies that merged to form CIGNA, Connecticut General and Insurance of North America. More useless data for the useless data file.

Congratulations to Jalen Johnson, well done!

Hey NextYearBill, I think you are making this bet ahead of time. I am not talking about Hines playing or not playing next year because of his merits, not at all. I am talking about weird unanticipated events happening. Let explain it it this way to you. Assume for a that Goodwin cannot start practicing or playing by the start of next season because his shoulder is not fully healed. This is not likely to happen but it could happen. Also assume that Bishop decides to transfer because he prefers to be a star somewhere else rather than just another PG for SLU. Again, I do not think this is likely to happen but it could happen. If both of these conditions occur, Ty Graves cannot start playing until the second half of next year season. Given these unexpected events who do you think might be getting playing time as a PG if there is no one else to do this job? I would say Hines might. Again probabilities are very low for this chain of events ever happening, and you are probably correct in assuming that Hines is not likely to play next season when other PGs are available. But in the unlikely situation that we need a PG to play when no one else is available, then Hines may well come in, would you not agree? Again this is not likely to happen but it might. I am not taking your bet, I think you are probably correct in your assessment, but weird things do happen.

Checked Team Rankings, they have LaSalle as a favorite to win by only 1 star out of 5, certainly this is not a vote of confidence for LaSalle. To make some simple comparisons, St. Joseph was favored to win by 2 stars out of five, and George Mason (2nd game) was favored to win by 3 stars out of five. We won against both St. Joseph and George Mason (2nd game) despite the projections being more favorable to their winning over us than they are for the coming game against LaSalle. I keep on saying this, numbers and probabilities are not facts carved in stone. If they were we would have a hell of a lot less wins this year than what we already have. This does not mean we will win the coming game against LaSalle with any certainty, it means that losing this game is not a fact, not yet anyways. As Wiz says, this will be a game between a very good offense with no defense against a better (by no means the best) defense with a poor offense. In terms of physics an irresistible object vs an immovable target, or armor against penetration rounds. Who wins? It will be interesting to see how Ford preps the team for this game.

ChosenOne, I think the achievement of this team in winning games they were not expected to win is a big positive in and of itself. It shows a lot about Coach Ford and his staff in terms of their ability to coach and provide a sense of team spirit and cohesion to the team to the level that they have been able to win many more games than were expected to win. This board had some doubts about Coach Ford's ability to coach, I think we can cast aside some of those doubts based on the achievement of the current team this season. Yes, the team was far from having a winning year and we may wind up the season with less (or perhaps a few more) wins than Crew's team had last year. But who cares? This team under Ford's direction improved and has achieved a level of wins (so far) that went beyond expectation. This is a positive result for the year in my book.

I think we may be able to beat LaSalle next Tuesday, but I do not think SLU will be able to beat Richmond. It is likely that we are a lock for the 11th seed in the A10 tournament. This is not a terrible fate given our very limited potential for this season. If we get the 11th seed we are likely to play Duquesne the 1st day of the A10 tournament. This gives us two additional possible wins before we are likely eliminated the second day of the tournament. If we do get the two additional wins this will give us a 12 win record for the season which is higher than most of us ever expected we had any chance to get for this year. We are really doing a lot better than most analysis projected us to do this season. We owe the team and Coach Ford plus his staff a debt of admiration and gratitude for having achieved well over expectations for this year. Congratulations for all the work, the hard effort, and the team spirit you all forged these last couple of months.

As far as I know he was supposed to have his surgery right after he stopped playing for his HS team. So, by now he is probably a few weeks post op and looking good with no external support to the shoulder. That is assuming he did the surgery as expected. Thank you for the identification of the players in the photo crymdg2.

The baby race was funny. One of the kids just shot out at the very start of the race going straight for the other side and then lost interest a couple of feet away from the goal and just sat down on the canvas and watched the others win the race. You can never tell what a child that age is going to do.

I am assuming Goodwin is the kid on the Right withe the SLU hoodie. Is this correct? I am happy to see that neither of them is wearing any kind of visible arm braces or restraints. As we know Goodwin had recent shoulder surgery. It is nice to see him showing no evidence of this procedure.

I predicted 15 wins, this qualifies me (as the Wiz called me) as one of the greatest optimists in this board. However, the season is not over yet, we still have to play LaSalle and Richmond, plus the A10 tournament, and we are up to 10 wins. We may well finish the season with a few more wins.

I was there but went for dinner with friends afterwards. This is what I saw: we started playing very well and after 10 minutes or so spent building a significant lead, the Joeys kind of woke up and started playing just as we were losing our drive and confidence. I have no idea what happened there but for most of the rest of the game we played pretty poorly. The refs were a curse on us, as usual. We gave up a 15+ point advantage in the first half. Until about the middle of the second half we continued playing poorly but managed to regain some ground. Then in the last 10 minutes we woke up again from our slumber and started playing to win. We did win this game by 1 point. I cannot understand why the other guy drove to the basket when he needed a 3 pointer to tie the game but he did and lost the game with his last basket. We won the game. It felt good to win but it was not a game well played by our team. I do not know if we can beat LaSalle or Richmond but it would surely be nice if we did. As of now we have 10 wins to our credit. This is a significant achievement coming from a team that after the pre-conference play was pronounced incapable of winning much of anything else, the probabilities were against us in this regard. Well we managed to win a few more games more than we were expected to. The team has done better than was expected at that dark time after the pre-conference games. Ford has done a great job coaching them. We should be ready now for the final games of the season and for the A10 tournament; maybe we will win a couple more games, who knows?

Fully agree with you.

Are you becoming a pessimist or what?

Yes it is a winnable game, let's hope it happens. Unfortunately that is exactly what St. Joseph's players and fans are thinking about this game, it is a winnable game for them as well. At this stage in the season nothing is likely to be easy for us, let's hope we can come out with our A game this time and roll over St. Joseph's.

That is true Glorydays, a mediocre player in a really bad team can become a star. A very good player in a team full of starts may be pushed aside as mediocre. That is a very good observation.

Agree, it is like having an old beaten up car with over 300,000 miles in the odometer, bald tires, leaking oil all over, and then the check engine light comes up. Yes, a new car is needed for sure. The good thing is that we are getting one (a new team I mean) and soon. All we need is to keep the current one alive until the new one comes in. I really do not care about the prior history of Bess at MSU, I just hope he is better than Reggie.

Guys, the issue is not that we are going to be a lot better next year. The issue is how much better. I think there are a few factors that will be important in this regard: 1. Are Foreman and Goodwin going to be fully healed and recovered plus ready for full time practice before the 2017 - 2018 season starts? 2. Is Bishop going to remain in the team or not? 3. Are Gillmann and Neufelf going to remain in the team or not? 4. If some of these players transfer, who is going to replace them? I would say forget the issue with the FTs until we find out who is going to leave and who is not after the season is over. If anyone leaves we need to find out who is going to replace them, and then we need to find out if Goodwin and Foreman will be ready to practice and play from the start of next season. Things will become a lot clearer after we have this information.

I know we can have a preference as to who we play in the A10 tournament 1st round, but I do not think we will have any choice. Likely the bottom ranked team will play the top ranked team among the 4 in the first round and the remaining two will play against one another. I think we will land towards the middle of this spread, and so we will be likely to play the other mid ranked team (among the bottom 4 teams), whoever that turns out to be. I do not think that will be UMass, so we are likely to play either St. Joes or Duquesne.

As long as the repair lasts without a new tear for the few games left of the season, his leg should be OK.

Is this fake news?

That is quite a statement Torch and even better, it may be correct.

I was not aware that the VCU bench had come in with 12 minutes left in the game. This most certainly contributed to the final score of the game. We expected to lose this one and we did. A very difficult season is almost over for us.

We did better than expected, but again VCU put in the bench early.

I had another commitment and did not watch the game, it looks like we lost but did better than the expected spread and held them to a low score. Good effort, too bad we could not defeat them.

Maybe it is an intended zinger, maybe not. You have to realize that for the people that live in the East Coast, St. Louis is literally nothing other than a place to fly over. Such a place is, in their minds, not a place where good food may be found. I guess he could have named any number of cities in his comment but St. Louis was the one that came to his mind at the time. He really meant to say: there is absolutely nothing for me in the middle of the country (US). I take it as a generic put down of all people living in the inner country (US) rather than a zinger specifically against St. Louis. May he go broke in Reggia Emiliana.