Okay, after the high of noncon and now seeing us come back down to earth in conference, where are peoples' heads at? At this point, I'm thinking we need at least 6 more wins for an NIT bid. What do y'all think?

eastcoastcal said:

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Okay, after the high of noncon and now seeing us come back down to earth in conference, where are peoples' heads at? At this point, I'm thinking we need at least 6 more wins for an NIT bid. What do y'all think?

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Finishing with 7 wins in the ACC would be fantastic given the low hopes I had this summer after the signings. But really more critical that NIT or 7 wins or anything is player RETENTION and RECRUITMENT. We are making progress (yeah!!) but the gap is pretty big. Can't wait for folks to chime in about the "yearly player of the year" that Duke will feature wednesday and how much better he is than any player we have ever had at Cal.

This was always a team whose ceiling is a winning record (overall) and an NIT bid. That's progress! Let's get the makeshift practice facility up and running and increase the NIL-type dollars. Do that and we will continue to progress.

Big C said:

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This was always a team whose ceiling is a winning record (overall) and an NIT bid. That's progress! Let's get the makeshift practice facility up and running and increase the NIL-type dollars. Do that and we will continue to progress.

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We still appear to be a middle of the conference team.
Our ceiling is not a winning conference record overall: we were 12-1 OCC, so with 18 ACC games that would mean going 4-14 in conference to finish 16-15. Last year we won 6 ACC games so 4 wins would be the floor falls out.

We are 13-4. Here is the rest of the schedule and guess at the likely outcome:
Duke L
North Carolina L
@Stanford T
@FSU W
@Miami L
GT W
Clemson T
@Syracuse T
@BC W
Stanford W
SMU L
Pitt W
@GT W
@WF L

I see 6 to 9 more wins. 9 would be 22-9 (10-8) with an outside shot at the NCAA Tournament with a couple wins in the ACC Tournament. That is still this team's likely ceiling and goal. Of course we will need Camden and Bell to start scoring again. If they don't, we are toast.

socaltownie said:

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eastcoastcal said:

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Okay, after the high of noncon and now seeing us come back down to earth in conference, where are peoples' heads at? At this point, I'm thinking we need at least 6 more wins for an NIT bid. What do y'all think?

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Finishing with 7 wins in the ACC would be fantastic given the low hopes I had this summer after the signings. But really more critical that NIT or 7 wins or anything is player RETENTION and RECRUITMENT. We are making progress (yeah!!) but the gap is pretty big. Can't wait for folks to chime in about the "yearly player of the year" that Duke will feature wednesday and how much better he is than any player we have ever had at Cal.

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To your point, the biggest deficiency of this year's team is physicality. I hope next year we can bring in a couple of power forwards to give us a stronger presence inside. Maybe Yeaney fits the profile but it's hard to tell if he never plays. The problem with having both Bell and Camden in our lineup goes past their shooting ability. We need at least one of our frontcourt guys to bring more strength inside to support who's ever in the post. This is something that MM needs to address over the summer.

At this stage, I'm not focused on post season bubble fantasies. I am following the development of players and team to see if we have something to build on longer term.

Yeah, yeah, yeah - I know that long term is less meaningful than in the past, but watching how EACH player fits into and executes the offensive and defensive schemes demonstrates that the staff has a workable plan that cna be executed (which Fox and Jones were unable to even sniff).

In this regard, I think this team is far ahead of the first two with Madsen - so I think that is very promising.

So - less concerned about W/Ls and more concerned with how those games look. Under the prior regime, the games were over during the first half. Under Madsen and the current players, we seem to be in almost every game.

calumnus said:

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Big C said:

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This was always a team whose ceiling is a winning record (overall) and an NIT bid. That's progress! Let's get the makeshift practice facility up and running and increase the NIL-type dollars. Do that and we will continue to progress.

---

We still appear to be a middle of the conference team.
Our ceiling is not a winning conference record overall: we were 12-1 OCC, so with 18 ACC games that would mean going 4-14 in conference to finish 16-15. Last year we won 6 ACC games so 4 wins would be the floor falls out.

We are 13-4. Here is the rest of the schedule and guess at the likely outcome:
Duke L
North Carolina L
@Stanford T
@FSU W
@Miami L
GT W
Clemson T
@Syracuse T
@BC W
Stanford W
SMU L
Pitt W
@GT W
@WF L

I see 6 to 9 more wins. 9 would be 22-9 (10-8) with an outside shot at the NCAA Tournament with a couple wins in the ACC Tournament. That is still this team's likely ceiling and goal. Of course we will need Camden and Bell to start scoring again. If they don't, we are toast.

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If you are going to do this exercise in a productive manner, (I used to do the same thing) you need to push yourself to take off the Cal glasses and really look at your assumptions once, twice and three times. I say this because just looking at your Stanford results, I don't think you can argue for your case here. How is the road game a toss up and the home game a presumed win? They are either an L and a W or two toss ups. When I looked at your list and saw Stanford, my off the cuff thoughts were those are clearly both toss ups. Looking into it, Stanford is 2 spots ahead of us in Ken Pom and 1 spot behind us in Net. They are 2-2 in conference to our 1-3 playing the same 4 teams. We have the same overall records. There is no argument that we have an advantage. I think we are almost exactly even. That is two toss ups. Counting one as a win is the blue coming through.

I think the other 5 W's you have on your list are accurate because those games are against dreadful opponents. Not guaranteed (and neither are the losses), but we are significantly better than those teams. I tend to default strongly to toss up in this type of calculation, so I would also give Syracuse a toss up, but given the data and the fact that it is on the road, it is a toss up leaning strongly to Syracuse and in fact could easily put that in the L column on another day.

How on earth is Clemson a toss up? They are 53 places ahead of us in Ken Pom and 43 places ahead of us in NET. They are very clearly substantially better than we are. On the other hand, I don't know how you have Wake as a loss compared to Clemson. I'd put Wake in the same category as Syracuse as they are almost identical in KenPom and NET and both like 30-40 places behind Clemson.

I see 5 W's, 4 toss ups with two of the toss ups being a lean to the L side. If I had to predict, I'd say 6 more wins.