For a team that was minutes away from the NCAA tournament at home in the America East championship game against Albany, returns six seniors and stands as the conference’s preseason favorite, Vermont head coach John Becker stresses that his team has a long way to go mentally and physically to get back into that position.
“Going back and watching tapes from last year – it’s hard to watch at times,” Becker said. “We were really undisciplined.”
“We’ve challenged guys to change and challenged guys to take on, especially veterans, new roles. The challenge is when we get into competitive games, the lights go on, staying with that and not reverting to old habits. I’m cautiously optimistic.”
Becker said there have been days when their offense has played better than their defense. That’s important, because defense has been the cornerstone of their program and the Catamounts ranked second in defensive efficiency during conference play a season ago.
He tasked the senior guard combination of Sandro Carissimo and redshirt senior Candon Rusin with adjusting their games and those adjustments have paid dividends thus far. Carissimo has been more aggressive in looking for his own shot and Becker said that he has seen signs that Rusin shows the chance to be a consistent player as oppose to the sporadic scoring option he was last season.
While senior Brian Voelkel will go down as one of the best players in school history in multiple statistical categories, the one category Becker would like to see him increase is his scoring.
“It’s always score, be more aggressive rather than always be pass first,” Voelkel said are the goals he and Becker discussed. “Be a threat offensively and also working without the ball better, not just staying in one spot.”
The one concern for Becker about his team is their lack of a true post presence, a void that was going to be filled by Northeastern transfer Ryan Pierson until he broke his leg during summer workouts. He is expected to be back from his injury by early January and is currently out of a walking boot and rehabbing, but not able to do any basketball related activities yet.
“I like our bigs, but they’re thin and I like to play inside out,” Becker said. “It’s tough when you don’t have a back to the basket presence, at times I get concerned that we’re shooting too many jump shots and we don’t have anyone to throw the ball inside to. I think hopefully by whenever Ryan’s back that problem will be solved, but hopefully just a short term concern.”
The other concern for the offense to move forward will be their perimeter shooting, where they ranked eighth in league play shooting 29.4% from three-point range. Carissimo has been the team’s most consistent three-point shooter while Becker is confident that Rusin will improve as a shooter this season.
Senior Clancy Rugg said the team’s offensive woes stuck out to him with their inability to make jump shots in the championship game.
“We just need to get more consistent with our shotmaking. The one example that sticks out really far to me is the America East championship game last year, I think we only made less than 5 jump shots all game,” Rugg said. “When you go through stretches where we had difficulty scoring from the outside, it really puts a lot of pressure on the bigs.”
“We really need to be able to score from the outside and have that consistent inside game. We have a lot of talented bigs so I have a lot of confidence in the guards that they’ll be able to do their thing out there and play really well off each other.”
Ryan Restivo covers the America East for Big Apple Buckets, read his America East preview on ESPN.com as part of the ESPN Insider College Hoops 2013-14 Preview. You can follow Ryan on Twitter @ryanarestivo or contact Ryan at rrestivo[at]nycbuckets.com.
NYC Buckets Archive 