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Report User This isn’t a half-bad team:
Tony Freeman
Jeff Peterson
Jake Kelly
David Palmer
Jermain Davis
Anthony Tucker
Aaron Fuller
John Lickliter
Tyler Smith
Ben Brust
Chanse Creekmur
Now, it certainly does not fall completely on Todd Lickliter’s shoulders for the transfer/de-commitment of each of these players. Tyler Smith’s dad got sick. Jake Kelly’s mother died in a terrible accident. And some of these guys headed for the exits after Lickliter was shown the door. I’m not here to tell you why they left, to second guess any of the decisions, or to lay blame at shoes. I’m just here to tell you that when a program loses eleven players over a three-year span, it’s a tough task to win games. That’s especially true when, as is the case with Iowa, several of those players were the ranking best or second-best player on the team.
So with that as the backdrop to Iowa basketball under the Lickliter regime, it’s impossible to say whether it could have worked. John Wooden misses the NIT with this revolving door. And it’s not as if Lickliter was some loon off the street--the guy won the horizon league 3 out of the 6 years he was at Butler. The reason Lickliter failed at Iowa had very little to do with what happened on the court. So I’m not going to break down the roster and Iowa’s tendencies, because it just doesn’t matter.
But it is worth looking at new head coach Fran McCaffrey’s likes and dislikes. For one thing, expect McCaffrey’s teams to be the Big Ten version of Ricky Bobby--they want to go fast:
| Year | Siena Possessions/game | Big Ten possessions/game |
|---|---|---|
| 2009-10 | 70.5 | 62.1 |
| 2008-09 | 71.7 | 60.7 |
| 2007-08 | 68.8 | 62.7 |
| 2006-07 | 69.6 | 61.5 |
| 2005-06 | 68.5 | 64.0 |
Most of the time, the new coach comes in and claims that they’re really going to push the ball in transition and play more uptempo. In McCaffrey’s case, we can probably believe him. Another aspect of McCaffrey’s system that will be a stark departure from the Lickliter template is that of three point shooting. The former’s Siena squads kept things inside the arc, but the beauty was that they didn’t pay for it with increased turnovers. Of course, the Saints also weren’t getting to the line or pulling down a lot of offensive rebounds. Do we have another mid-range team in our midst? Something to keep an eye on.