it was in 2016 legend but it was a parallel universe that only kilroy can see
Cook Might Be Our Best Chance At Recruiting A Point Guard
- Thread starter iowalaw
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Flip side of your argument, which has a little truth--if a team doesn't have players who can create their own shot and Iowa hasn't really had anyone over the past few years, then assists are very important. Mike was not a great point guard, but you continue to belittle his accomplishments, which by most standards were much better than "average at best." Nice to see that you at least recognize that Mike was even better on the defensive end.
"People who know the game are aware that stats have to be understood in the context of batting order, type of offense, matchups, 162 game schedule, etc.etc. "
No s***, Sherlock. That's kind of my point when I say citing MG assist number isn't very helpful in evaluating his performance. Good grief you clown, why don't you just say I'm right and move on. It would have saved you from the foolish rant where you embarrass yourself. No single stat is very informative, given by itself with no context. For example, looking solely at MG assists when he with 2 of the better Hawks to play this decade, and guys who are mostly jump shooters.
Please, stick to something you know, for it definitely isn't baseball or the stats that provide a good evaluation of a player's true performance level. It's apparent from your drivel you don't even know what stats are evaluated or how they are evaluated. You typed a lot of words that don't contradict anything I said. Nice job. The typical old school moron who doesn't understand analytics or how it relates to runs which relate to wins for a team. Your 3rd paragraph is filled with ignorant blather, as most of those things are measured by analytics, and a HR is an XBH and is measured in OPS but you aren't bright enough to understand this. Stolen bases aren't ignored, they just are given a more realistic importance as to how they contribute to runs/wins for a team.
You are probably one of those fools who believes a players value is based on "tools" or there's such a thing as "clutch" or measure a players value by his "scrappiness".
You don't know what the hell you are talking about in baseball or basketball. Hey, why don't you try bowling, maybe you'll finally hit upon something you know something about.
Priceless, coming from a man too stupid to realize a HR is included in XBH and both included in OPS. LOL. Bowling, buddy, that's your sport. Stick to it.
By what standard was MG "Better than avg"? He was a good passer but a poor shooter, poor shooter at the end of games, both at the line and from the floor. He couldn't blow by anyone off the dribble. His assists mostly came from throwing the ball along the perimeter to Jok and Uthoff, who were both good shooters.
I don't belittle his accomplishments, I just don't overhype them like so many here. Assists is a poor performance measure because it relies on the performance of other players around him. As I've said before a PG could have an outstanding game and not get a single assist, if he makes great passes and his teammates don't make their shots. The opposite is also true where a guy can do little and pile up assists because his teammates are shooting lights out. MG was a good defensive player but it wasn't so good to bring him up to a better than avg PG.
Yep, that's pretty much the 2nd half of the season in a nut shell. Woody was not a threat offensively down low to pull a double and Iowa didn't have PG or SG threat offensively. Stay in Jok/Uthoff's face and force everyone else to beat you, which they could not do consistently.
Really hoping Isaiah Moss pans out at the 2
I always thought Mike Gessell played his heart out and bled black and gold. Don't underestimate Bohannon. I've seen him play in person many times and he is the real deal as a shooter. Infinitely better than Ogelsby, Ellingson and some others. He just needs some experience.
You are correct, it was for a season. I think Mike was a great distributor of the basketball. He had a heart of a lion and was willing to take the team on his shoulders to try and win a game. No quit in the Man, wish him well in his future endeavors in finance.
Just curious, are any recruits scheduled to visit? Iowa seems to be really quiet on the recruiting front lately and we have a spot to fill. Doesn't look good. D'mitrik Trice is visiting Wisconsin, Charlie Moore is visiting team Purple, and Ohio St. got a juco point guard commit. Iowa needs to keep up with the Jones's.
I thought I read that Vital was going to visit Iowa before the end of the month. But he's at hometown UCONN today so we have to hope he doesn't commit on his visit.
We're alright. Trice is a 2*, 5'11" and all of about 160 lbs. He would give Wisconsin their 12th scholarship guy if I count right. Who knows where Moore will go, but as to Northwestern yes Moore would be a great get...if it happens. Ohio State's guy is also 5'11", 160 and a 2*...and with all their transfers Ohio State has some work ahead of it.
I wouldn't say Iowa is exactly behind any of these teams.
Moore is obviously very talented, but if Fran had a problem with him or his handlers previously, I wouldn't hold my breath.
No point in arguing with Phantom and others about Gesell, since assists and assist/turnover ratio are meaningless statistics, even on a team that didn't have anyone who could create their own shot.
No point in arguing with Phantom and others about Gesell, since assists and assist/turnover ratio are meaningless statistics, even on a team that didn't have anyone who could create their own shot.
You mean other than Uthoff and Jok? IMO Mike lived up to his Top 100 HS ranking in every respect except consistent scoring.
I'd love for us to get another shot at Moore if he's anywhere near as talented as Ulis. I really think the sophomore version of Ulis could have taken this team a long way.
Not meaningless, just overrated, and certainly a great indicator of how good/bad his performance was. Any PG would have racked up decent assist numbers with Jok and Uthoff on the team. I've always said the assist/TO ratio is a better evaluation tool than strictly assist. The reason being is TO's aren't reliant on the play of ones teammates, they are directly attributable to the play of the player being evaluated. They still aren't the end all, be all stat though because a player who never takes chances is going to make less turnovers than someone that does.
BTW, isn't the PG the one position who should be able to create their own shot? Too bad MG couldn't do this. If he could it would have resulted in more points. He would have been able to score on more layups, and set up his teammates with more layups.
Why is it so difficult for people to admit that MG was an avg (below avg offensively) B1G PG? It's not like we shouldn't be very glad MG was in a Hawkeye uniform. MG wasn't the problem, Fran's inability to bring in other guards who were as good, or better than MG, or at least complemented MG skill set, was the problem. So, the knock isn't against MG, it's against Fran.
I don't think anyone on Iowa's team was good at creating their own shot. Uthoff could create against some defenders, but excelled when someone got him the ball for an open 3 or a turn around jumper. Jok needed someone to get him the ball in rhythm to score with any consistency. The rest of the team had very little ability to score without being assisted, although Uhl sometimes looked good on drives until he failed to finish.
Moore would give Iowa a quick, creator that they don't have now.
So, list the B1G PGs that were clearly better than Mike. I would list Yogi and Melo, who actually underperformed this year. I would consider a few others as comparable (UM, Wisky and NW), and rest worse, unless you count Valentine as the PG for MSU.
Gessel finished the season 17th in assists at 6.2 per game and finished 14th in Assist/Turnover Ratio, ahead of Marcus Paige in both categories. The knock on Mikey is that he wasn't a scorer. That wasn't his job. He was a very good point guard. Often Iowa's offense would struggle when he wasn't on the floor. Fran will miss him.
I think Iowa's PG's will struggle next year but should develop nicely over the next couple years. Hopefully JBo can continue to shoot around 40% like he has from 3.
I think Iowa's PG's will struggle next year but should develop nicely over the next couple years. Hopefully JBo can continue to shoot around 40% like he has from 3.
Not that I'm really a fan of hating on any of the players, especially
Personally, I think the fact that Fran is letting Cook recruit Moore may indicate that it was he who cooled on Iowa and not the other way around.
Some on here are beating themselves & the Hawks up......if we only had Gatens back ( only for his senior year tho) AWhite we need him too. Who will ever replace him? Then Uthoff was meh just ok to some. 3rd team All American!!! Oh, then there is A Woolridge if we could have had him instead of MG this year. This debate can go on forever but heaven forbid we mention Dr. Tom or Lickliter. We have who we have & I will be cheering on our Hawkeyes regardless. Finding a #5 star PG in the whole nation isn't difficult ....talking them into going to Iowa City is.
I have to agree with you in this case. On the one hand, guys who get allot of assists are usually pretty good players, that usually bears out if you look at the guys leading in that category on most levels of basketball and in the record book.
In MGs case he was kind of like a TT Qb. He benefited from playing in a philosophy of up tempo offense with two really good shooters.
Usually a guy with high assist numbers is drawing defenders to him by beating his man off the dribble and creating easy opportunities for others and as we could all see that was just not the case with Gesell. The majority of his assists came from pushing the ball ahead in transition and hitting guys coming off screens. Both cases the guys scoring were usually fairly open.
Now those are good traits to have but IMO an above average pg needs to get in the lane and create easy buckets for both himself and others. Mike just never functioned well in the lane, it just wasn't natural for him. Everything was usually rushed to the basket.
All that said, I think he was still a pretty solid player. Ideally he would have been a 3rd guard, a guy who could spell both other guard positions, play good D and not make many mistakes. He just wasn't an ideal guy to be the only full time pg/ballhandler but he was certainly the best option we had.
The other guard position was a much bigger issue IMO.
Koening was clearly a step above MG. And I would take Macintosh too, although Mike was a better defender.
Cory Sanders, Lyle and Nate Mason are better offensively but not as good running a team or playing D.
Koenig is clearly a much better shooter than Mike. He is almost more of a shooting guard than a PG. Otherwise, Mike is at least as good. I consider Macintosh and the kid from UM pretty even. Sanders, Lyle and Mason have skills and will get better, but Mike was a better overall PG this past year.
When you consider both ends of the court and ability to run an offense, despite his individual offensive limitations, I consider Mike a second-tier PG, which is better than the "average at best" evaluation being thrown out by some fans. At this point, I think fans need to stop bashing Mike and move on to discussing the team going forward.
I agree with your assessment, Gesell's high assist stats were as much a result of the system as anything else. I would then say that for the system Mike Gesell was a very good point guard.
I would also defend Gesell to the bashers by saying Mike never called the flat four at the end of games, he was told to run it by McCaffery. Now, I don't think there is a Hawkeye fan on this board that likes the flat four. But before we go nuts and start knifing McCaffery in the back, let me say that there is no coach in the country that will make us happy all the time. And that set was run by many teams, not just Iowa.
It reminds me of Skinner trying to run the last ten second play that Dr. Tom used the entire time he was coaching at Iowa. Holy $$%^ it never worked! Same play with Woolridge and heck, I'd have been happy if we ran it BEFORE the shot clock was down to ten. What I'm trying to say is sometimes there is no explaining why a good coach will do something repeatedly that everyone else thinks is dumb. But! Go ahead and complain because any coach you get will do the same thing.
Bottom line. Gesell, very good point guard for our system. Improved immensely from the young man who would dribble and dribble at the top to a guy who could keep the ball moving. McCaffery, want to complain about the sets we ran at the end of the half or games...he's the guy to see, but just remember we aren't going to like everything any coach does. Maybe we ought to enjoy the progression and that same strategy might work when we get the McCaffery version of a Woolridge.
And might I repeat what RocknRoll said...The other guard position was a much bigger issue, imo as well.
Maybe from a slightly different angle, but I tend to agree with this. The bigger issue was lack of shooting/scoring ability from BOTH the 1 & 2 positions with Mike and AC on the floor. I think either could have done very well at the point with a legit scoring option at the 2, but with them both struggling in that respect by the end of the year teams were helping off them and almost daring them to shoot.
I've already done this for you about a month ago, I'm not going through the routine again. MG was an avg B1G PG. Avg isn't terrible. It would have been acceptable if we had a decent backup PG or an above avg 2G. Fran has screwed the pooch by not recruiting enough talent at the guard position. This isn't even arguable. When the best you can say is he's landed 1 avg guard (PG or SG) through his entire tenure, then that isn't good. He's needs to vastly improve in this area if he wants to take the program to the next level.
Great post. The highlighted is something I've been saying for 3 years. MG would never start on a really good basketball team but he would be a nice backup PG on any good basketball team. He's the perfect backup PG or combo guard. A guy who can run the offense, plays excellent D, doesn't turn the ball over, but isn't asked to do any scoring.
The problem wasn't MG or even that Fran gave him a scholarship. The problem was in how Fran utilized him because of Fran's deficiencies in recruiting guards. Fran didn't help MG by surrounding him with complimentary players. MG would have benefitted playing with a 2G who could shoot beyond the arc, or one who could create his own shot off the dribble. Instead Fran surrounded him with a 2G who was a clone of MG. MG also would have benefitted from a backup PG who could create off the dribble to spell him for some minutes and allow MG to move to the 2G.
So, the criticism isn't with MG, as he did the best he could with his limited skill set, Fran did a p*ss poor job of putting him in the best position to succeed. The fault lies with Fran, and his poor recruiting of guards or at least guards who complimented MG game, not MG.
When you look at the advance basketball metrics equivalent to baseball's "WAR", MG ranked something like 7th or 8th in the B1G among PG's. Meaning, he was avg. It's not "bashing" MG, it's bringing a little reality to those who claim he was "great". I'm far more critical of Fran, as stated above, and his inability to recruit enough talent at the guard position. The problem wasn't MG or even AC, it was Fran.
Thank you, oh most knowledgeable one. Curious, how long do you intend to keep repeating your insightful posts about Mike Gesell, now that he is no longer on the team.
MG will make the most money when all said and done he is incredibly intelligent in the class room
As long as people (like yourself) keep overhyping MG, or more importantly, ignoring Fran's recruiting shortfalls. I do thank you for the compliment about me providing insightful posts on this subject. It's a tremendous responsibility to be one of the few voices of reason on the subject.
