Another article about useless mentorship

[khans2k5 [enjin:6608728]]

Dieng's defensive stats either stayed the same or got worse across the board and he played 1300 more minutes. Do you know how hard it is to play 1300 more minutes and have your defensive win share total not move (his offensive win shares more than tripled which is the expected result when you get that many more minutes)? His rebounding got worse. His per 36 steals and blocks got worse. His only improvements came offensively which is normal for second year guys. Let's not prop him up to be more than he is. He made the improvements you're supposed to make from year 1 to year 2, but still hasn't show the improvements defensively that he needs to make for us to seriously consider paying him 10+ million after next season to be a backup.

[Carlos Danger]

- I don't blame Dieng for all of our defensive woes last year, but I do assign more blame to him than almost any other player. Centers, in general, have the largest influence on team defensive rating of the 5 positions on the floor, so they generally deserve a higher percentage of credit when the defense is excellent and a higher percentage of blame when it stinks. We had one of the worst 3 defensive teams in NBA history last season. Sorry, but Dieng gets a lot of the blame for that.

Let's run with this logic. That means Dieng deserves most of the credit for anchoring the #1 defense in the country back at Louisville. Which makes sense since he was named Big East Defensive Player of the year. Seems odd to me that some think he's now suddenly incapable of defending with a track record like that. I don't recall ever reading any quotes from Adelman or Flip having big concerns with Dieng's defense. That's not to say he can't improve. But last year being his 1st real year of playing big minutes I thought he played pretty well and all the advanced stats back that up. Seems like we might have bigger issues to worry about than Dieng IMO.

[Q12543 [enjin:6621299]]

Carlos, Playing Center in a zone scheme in college is a hell of a lot different than playing Center in the NBA. In fact, deciphering how someone evolves defensively coming out of a full-time zone college defense (think Syracuse here as another good example) has always been a vexing problem.

And of course we have bigger things to worry about than Dieng. No one here is suggesting that trading him will cure what ails us. I'm merely suggesting that he's one of the few assets we have where we may actually get equivalent value in return that ends up being a better fit for our roster. Shabazz might be another example. I am not suggesting a roster dump or fire sale for either player.

[Monster]

So about playing in Louisville...