smh

Wanna know how you know we just switched from "middle of basketball season" to "almost baseball season"? When you lose to the most miserable team in all of BCS-level basketball.

As I said before the game, the conditions were the opposite of ideal. Wake had a ton of time to prepare, and they ran quite a few plays that showed they knew our tendencies and how to take advantage. We had less than 48 hours, and had to travel. They were fired up for their best chance at an ACC win. And none of that would've been an issue if we had a good enough team to meet the goal of making the postseason and finishing .500 for the season. A pox on the pieces of Mike Scott's ankle that aren't in their proper places. I hope next year makes this year worth it.

The problem, as ever when you're talking about lousy basketball, is defense. And I wish I could pinpoint an issue because half the time it looks like the defense is playing pretty well. Assane Sene is turning into a real presence in the middle, for example. But the results don't lie, and the cold hard stats are regressing without any indication of where the bottom is. The sad part is all the wasted effort. Too much went right for that to have been a loss: Sene's monster career day, generally very good shooting, excellent scoring distribution. Just a lack of defense at the wrong times, and too many fouls. The latter is bad defense's cousin, and they go hand-in-hand.

I guess what it means for the rest of the season is that we're now Wake Forest, in the sense that we'll be trying to snatch whatever chance for a win that we can find. Fortunately there aren't any more 2-day gaps between games, but we do get another break of a week - right before the trip to Tallahassee argh. So we'll see, I guess. I should have seen all this coming, so it bothers me. And really I did see it coming, so it bothers me that it bothers me. So many freshmen, so few veterans, so little consistency - didn't we expect that would be the case? Find a decent rhythm offensively and disintegrate on the defensive end. It might well be that the opponent won't matter at all for the next six weeks (except for the matchup nightmares like Maryland), because this team will either put it all together and win, or not, and lose. I might just go with that line the rest of the way, because the idea that we can beat most of these ACC teams on a really good night is comforting, being that we expect a much greater proportion of really good nights as the team gets older. Just like I said earlier, though, I hate that we have to wait til next season to find out how good next season's gonna be.