Thursday, January 20, 2011

Fez Continues to get National Love

CBSSports.com's Gary Parrish writes how Festus Ezeli is a "rare project . . .coming up big."

8 comments:

AD said...

any injury update on our big guys? From the radio call last night, it sounds like Fez played well but gingerly, and Stevie T's twitterfeed is full of evidence of an injury that is both lingering and getting worse.

With those two healthy, we can play a very strong inside-outside game. Without them, and without Walker, we have to lean heavily on Lance and Odom, and their inconsistency is obvious to all observers.

Anonymous said...

Very worried about the injuries...and what is Walker's status? Shouldn't he be back soon?

Unknown said...

Fez was outstanding at the line last night; he consistently drove to the basket and created outside opportunities for Jenkins and others. Defensively, though, is where he looked less than one hundred percent: he didn't fight for many rebounds in the air.

Lance very readily picked up the slack (he had something like 16 rebounds).

Tinsley tended to take too many long-range threes. Jenkins was, as always, getting it done outside, but we need more than Tinsley to create assists for Jenkins. Taylor should be cutting more, and then, like Festus, dishing it out when the defense collapses.

Team looked weak mentally, again, when Ole Miss briefly took the lead. Stallings (finally) called timeout, though, when momentum was poised to shift, and gathered the team together to get their heads on straight again.

Our offense didn't react well to Ole Miss in a zone defense. We're going to have to figure out how to score in the paint against zones. Didn't happen much last night.

All in all, this was an ugly win (despite the score), and we were lucky it wasn't closer.

St. Mary's will be brutal for us, even at home, and possibly exactly what we need right now: a true Tourney-style test.

Anonymous said...

Even though last night was a step back in the assist/ turnover ratio, Tinsley has been playing better as of late. If last night was a bad night in that department and he still managed to put up 14 points, I think we will be alright. The biggest problem I have is still with Taylor. He refuses to dominate against weaker competition, and for a team that’s a banged up as we are… he needs to start. We beat a team by 10 who hasn’t won an SEC game. We still have a lot of work to do as Ole Miss made it a close game with less than 10 minutes. There is still a lot of talent to do great things but with Andre, Steve, and to a lesser extent Fes, all banged up some guys are going to have to step up and lead this team like they should…
Props to Lance and Fes last night and the games they played. Here were two guys who understand what it means to play tough, gritty basketball when their team needs them.

Anonymous said...

everyone continues to talk about taylor taking over games, when are you going to figure out he cant he is a great athlete but only an average basketball player

Anonymous said...

I'm still hopeful that Taylor can break out (although that hope dims with each passing game). He's averaging about 14 PPG. We really need him up near 20 PPG.

Anonymous said...

For those of us not in Nashville, will it be possible to watch the game on TV/online versus St. Mary's this Saturday?

AD said...

Anonymous @ 8:44: it looks like ESPN3 is not carrying it, but channel surfing dot net tends to work. If it comes down to it, you should be able to stream the radio feed.