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Welcome, ladies and gentlemen of the Big Blue Nation, to Big Blue Madness 2014. Since I have been your humble correspondent here at A Sea of Blue, this will be the seventh Big Blue Madness we have celebrated, and it promises to be the biggest and maddest of them all.
Tonight is mostly for fun, but being the basketball analyst that I am, I’ll be trying to ascertain what I can from this scrimmage about how we are likely to play this season. This year, somewhat different from previous BBM’s in that the Wildcats played a rigorous schedule in the August foreign trip. We have an idea of what we are going to see, and what to expect from almost everybody.
Here’s what I’m looking for tonight:
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How easy do Trey Lyles and Willie Cauley-Stein move? Do they look rusty? How rusty?
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How ready are the Harrison twins. Do they look better, the same, or worse than when they played in the Big Blue Bahamas?
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Can we shoot? It doesn’t mean that much, but we need to improve perimeter shooting. If we see a lot of 3’s hit nothing but net, I’m going to be excited. If most of them draw a lot of iron, I’m going to be less excited.
3-point shooting is potentially our weakness this season. Yeah, Aaron knocked down huge shots, but can he continue to do it, or will he find the sophomore slump. Devin Booker and Tyler Ulis have to make threes, because if UK has no credible threat to make threes, we’re going to be stuck with packed-in defenses all season.
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Body language. We should see nothing but happy, upbeat body language. One never knows when dissent might creep in, or where it might creep from. That will be a very important subplot this season.
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Alex Poythress — Is there any chance of moving him to the three? We really need him in that spot.
That’s about all that comes to mind. Enjoy the madness, and we’ll be leaving this up through the 11:00 replay on the SEC Network, so those who don’t have the ESPN3 access can comment on it. Everyone please do remember that there will be a replay of BBM tonight on the SEC Network starting at 11:00 PM.
Enjoy