Forum › Forum › Lehigh Sports › Lehigh Men’s Basketball › Mid-Season Evaluation › Reply To: Re: Mid-Season Evaluation
If a Division One team could start five guards or four guards and one small forward, we’d be the best team in the PL – but the truth is you need at least two guys getting boards (and at least one guy off the bench doing so) to have a championship-winning team, and quite frankly Lehigh, despite C.J.’s awesome play, doesn’t have it yet.
C.J. is a special player, but he can’t do it alone. C.J. should not be our leading rebounder, with fellow G Michael Ojo at No. 3 on that list. Knutson is having a whale of a season considering he doesn’t get a heck of a lot of support underneath.
The key to this season, in my opinion, is the development of F Holden Greiner at the No. 5/sixth man position. If he can become a decent rebounding threat next to Knutson – to average, say, five boards a game the rest of the way – Lehigh has a chance to repeat.
Troublingly going into league play, I don’t think any of our big men – Greiner, Adams, Maneri, Hamilton, Safstrom, McCarthy – have established themselves as a "you’ve got to get me PT" sort of underneath presence. Greiner has come the closest, but I think there is opportunity still there for one of these six guys to stop focusing on being a go-to scorer and instead become a crucial guy netting five rebounds a game.
A temptation is to start Safstrom, and to give more PT to McCarthy off the bench, and see if he can make up some of the rebounding difference. But ideally, Adams becomes that 5 rebound a game guy off the bench, Greiner becomes a sixth man sparkplug, and Safstrom gets plugged in to disrupt the inside game of some of these PL teams.
