Beseda UP Blog

The O's Jim Beseda is doing more coverage on oregonlive.com about the Pilots throughout the season... Jim was at practice yesterday and blogged this: Beseda Blog. (FYI, Jim, yesterday was Tuesday, and the EWU game is today, Wednesday).

I really hope Ethan is back in time for the BYU game... but really the timing is pretty good, I guess, with a full week off between the Idaho and BYU games (that must be finals week, too?)

Go Pilots! Beat EWU!

Good article... great to see some game-day coverage like that. Interesting bit:

"I think it needs to be a little bit by committee, with Luke (Sikma), Jared, B.J. (Porter), and guys stepping up," Reveno said. "Nik is pretty versatile. He can play the 'three' (small forward) pretty easily. Defensively, he can guard a 'three' man. He'll get after it and be physical and do whatever is necessary. So, Nik gives us some flexibility, and then we'll try to piece it together from there.

"It's all match-up dependent. And Eastern Washington had certain lineups where we could go bigger. And I think you'll see that at some point. Whether we start with it or not ... we've been pretty stable. You don't want to mess it up too much. But at the same time, that's a good time to control things, in terms of you know who they've got in and what plays you want to run."

While I expect to see Nik play the bulk of minutes at SF, I'm interested in the bolded part.

Does "going bigger" mean a front line of Kramer, Luke, and Robin? I know Smeulders played the three for the Dutch national teams he played for. Would be interesting to see us experiment with that.

But reading this article makes me nervous about missing Niedermeyer. I agree that we're really going to miss his toughness, hustle, and ability to knock down open shots. Jared and Nik will have to step up.

I love when he says, "Now the Pilots are looking for ways to make up for Niedermeyer's 7.4 points, 2.0 rebounds, 1.4 assists, 1.2 steals, and 3.4 personal fouls a game," like missing those 3.4 personal fouls are going to hurt. That shouldn't even be included. I guess its just the beacon writer in me. Also why does he mention the in bounding situation. I understand that someone who is smart with the ball needs to do the imbounds, but we were in that situation against UNR at the end, and Robin did a great job, making sure the ball got in.

purplepride13 wrote:I guess its just the beacon writer in me.

BEACON FOR LIFE! Dude, bust out the 2003-2005 archives. You will be amazed at how amazing The Beacon was back in the day. OK, OK... the paper wasn't good per se (it looks about 500000% better now with the color... wow what a difference that makes), but we did expand it to 16 pages from 12 and we also made a ton of money selling subscriptions. That was cool.

But really... what you need to do is bring back the Bluff Sightings!!!!!!!! Aside from helping found Purple Pride, that was my single greatest contribution to the UP campus. Yet they were tragically discontinued after I left. Pick up the 2004-05 issues and look in UPFront... sigh... so good.

Anyway... as for Baseda's blog. For me, including the fouls was tongue-in-cheek. Nothing wrong with that. And mentioning the in-bound plays is just more tangible way for him to introduce the fact that Ethan's contributions aren't always found in the box score... it's in little things like hustling, helping on defense, and taking part in in-bounding plays.

We started the big front line, but we didn't stay with it for long. And I feel that missing Ethan made a real difference in losing to EWU. As the biggest of our outside shooters, he can get shots off when others can't. Near the end Jared had to adjust a shot in mid-air due to a defender flying at him, and missed. Ethan may have been able to get a clean shot off.