[Cactus Jack]

I don't need any game to know the best player on the team needs to start both halves. Please god make it stop.

Just so we're clear, who are you calling the "best player"-- Dillingham, Sheppard, Mitchell, or Ivisic? I'm assuming that Reeves isn't in the conversation because he started.

No matter who you pick from this team, I see a lot of talented players with some very apparent flaws in their game. I'd even say the more talented they are, the more you have to hope that they play well enough that their "good" overrides the "bad" and/or that you can put enough pieces around them to mask their deficiencies.

If Sheppard could defend like most lottery picks, you'd think we could have just put him on their leading scorer or hottest player and that'd have been enough to essentially take them out of the game against an opponent of this caliber. I want to see him do well, but his on-ball defense and other parts of his game have a very long way to go. Getting a steal from sweeping passing lanes in a college game is going to be much different than defending in space in the NBA; same for creating his own shot or finishing though defenders (especially if help comes).

I'm not saying that UK wouldn't have done better with different line-ups at certain points, just that I saw repeated lapses from every player on the floor.

Ideally, the team would have been healthy and eligible all season. If so, we'd probably have a definitive answer on what we have with Ivisic and Mitchell wouldn't have been run into the ground from playing so many minutes out of position against bigger players.

I could also be dead wrong about all of this though-- coming into the season, I expected Justin Edwards to be the best player on the team and on his way to being a consensus high lottery pick.