"As Greg Wrubell has reported many times, coach Quincy Lewis instituted the new Pack Line defense last year that resulted in a Points Per Possession (PPP) improvement to the 77th best in Division 1 from 160th in the prior year. Unfortunately, the offensive PPP efficiency declined to 52nd from 12th."

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Last year I think we can attribute the slip in offensive efficiency to having to rely a lot on offense from Nick Emery straight off a mission. He was pretty streaky last year and combined with the streaky shooting of Fischer it gave us a lot of dry stretches in games where we were chucking a lot from the cheap seats and not getting much to show for it. When either or both Emery and Fischer were ice cold, Rose didn't have a lot of options to turn to and had to let them shoot their way out of it, often times putting the team in a big hole in the process.

I think this year we'll see a marked improvement in our offensive PPP efficiency and a return to top 25 level offense without a slip in our defensive PPP eff. I think our offense will be way more balanced and I think the onus will be on Coach Rose to be quicker to recognize when a player is cold and utilize his bench more effectively than he ever has in the past (instead of limiting his rotation to mainly 7-8 guys). We could see a boatload of players in the 20+ mins per game range this season with the spread of wealth we have.

The big OFI for Rose will be in improving his late game coaching. We lost a lot of games that were 5 pts or less last year and many that went to OT. He needs to be sharper in this area for the program to make that jump to the next level of NCAA tourney success.