Dave in Green

Gilliam is the closest thing I can imagine to a direct replacement for B McKnight as an instant offense guy. Like B McKnight, he's a little undersized for his position in height, but is the heaviest player on the team (235 lbs. vs B McKnight's 245). The main difference on offense is that Gilliam is more athletic and prefers to take it to the bucket as much as shooting from outside. So in shooting he's much more versatile. It remains to be seen how he will compare to B McKnight on rebounding and defense. But Gilliam may fit the role of 6th man spark plug off the bench as a direct replacement for B McKnight even better than Q, who GoZips has been advocating as 6th man. Gilliam could also easily be a starter. I think that KD will juggle the starters for awhile to see which combinations produce the best results.

Technically I suppose there's never really an "official" game thread started by a moderator. Most games have an "unofficial" thread started by someone, and everyone else just joins in on that thread. This thread developed into the "unofficial" game thread when someone bumped it just prior to the start of the game, and everyone else joined in.

If you post your questions in the game thread, many Zips fans -- including myself -- would welcome the opportunity to try to help you out with answers. Most of us are following the game thread pretty closely by continually refreshing it, so we're not all seeing your separate threads as they pop up. I really do appreciate your enthusiasm for the Zips!

No hidden meaning. Just a friendly description of an unusual situation and an offer for help if there was some kind of technical problem causing it. It makes it more difficult to follow the flow of Zips fan comments when there are multiple threads during the game.

That was intended to be a friendly and helpful post.

It wasn't pretty, but it was a win, which is more than Illinois State got at Carleton. In two of the other three games Carleton played against U.S. teams, the refs were also pretty lopsided on the whistles, so this was no surprise. No doubt the Zips were a little tired after four previous games in quick succession. Obviously the Zips would also have been a little better off with the Serb playing. With that taken into consideration, I'd say there's no cause for great alarm or great joy over the results. Now we can sit back and enjoy the comments from the extreme optimists and the extreme pessimists, who I'm certain watched very different webcasts.

I couldn't help but notice that you've started five new threads on tonight's game even though there was already an active game thread where everyone else was posting. I noticed last season that you started a new thread every time you had a new question or comment about the game instead of posting in the game thread, and apparently that's continuing into the new season. Just curious if you have some kind of technical problem where you can't post in the active game threads. Maybe someone here can help you out.

Q and Gilliam are both juniors with only one season left to play after this one, and Walsh is a sophomore with two seasons left after the current one. So I don't think it's too early to be planning to reload at the 2/3 positions, especially when some of the 2s can also play backup point.

I've lost track of who's playing offensively and who's playing defensively. No, not on the Zips football team. I'm talking about ZN.O posters.

Hard to believe that the 6-5 Gilliam is the heaviest player listed on the Zips' current roster at 235 -- 5 lbs. heavier than the Serb at 230. After those two, Zeke is next, listed at 218. I'm guessing that the roster weights are a little outdated, though, as Zeke looks to be more than 218. Then you have Tree listed at 210 and Egner and Green at 200 each. Everyone else is listed under 200 lbs. So the Zips appear to be a bit on the slim side as a team with the departures of B McKnight (245) and Bardo (240). Hopefully they'll make up for lack of bulk with speed and hops.

Latest to be interviewed in Canada is Chauncey Gilliam. You get the idea that he's really hungry to win after his UMBC team fell apart and lost more than 80% of its games during his sophomore season.

You guys aren't going to believe this, but there's actually a Search feature on ZN.O! First mention of Rico was April 14, 2010: Abreu Commits And Ennis decommit mention was June 6, 2010: Ennis Decommits EDIT: And Zip Watcher wins by 3 minutes.

Improving from last season's final season RPI of #101 to this projected #90 is not a giant leap. It represents basically a 10% improvement, which is certainly a realistic prediction -- at least as long as you're not a major optimist or pessimist. Can't finished the season with an RPI of #67, which was substantially higher than the Zips. So the Golden Felons could slide 10% down in the preseason projections and still be ahead of the Zips. In other words, RPI may be a good measurement of total season accomplishments, but not necessarily so accurate on which teams tend to peak at the end of the season. I was at least somewhat impressed with the writer's knowledge of the Zips' situation this season. He didn't get it all right, at least from our perspective. But he at least showed some knowledge of who to expect to perform this season. I'm sure that few national journalists would go so far out on a limb as to predict great things from a relative unknown (on the national scene) freshman like Nick Harney. So, all in all, I have no problem at all with a somewhat optimistic 10% improvement over last season's final RPI for the Zips, nor do I have a problem with Can't being ranked higher. The key point is that the preseason expectations for the Zips vs. Can't are going to be higher at the beginning of this season than the final RPI from last season. That, folks, is called progress. Now we just have to make sure that we knock off the Felons when it counts most this season -- in the MAC tournament.

Let me rephrase and expand on my original statement: Winning is not something that can automatically be counted on as a marketing tool. It's primarily the goal of sporting competitions to win. But simple math dictates that all teams cannot have winning records at the same time. A byproduct of winning is that it tends to attract larger crowds because more people like being associated with a winner than a loser. Therefore, a marketing department can capitalize on a winning program by making sure that more people hear about opportunties to be associated with that winning program. A much bigger challenge for a marketing department is to attract more customers to a program that's not winning. "Free" giveaway items will always tend to attract more customers to some degree. The more value in the giveaway items, the more interest is likely to be generated. But customers who come to an event primarily for free items are not likely to return unless they either continue to receive free items of value, which can get costly, or they find the overall experience was enjoyable beyond the free items they received. "Free" items to the customer are not really free. Someone has to pay for them, and sponsors who pay for things expect value out of them in the form of increased customer sales. Since ideas are cheap, brainstorming marketing concepts is the simple part. Long lists of raw ideas are relatively easy to generate. Selecting and properly executing targeted marketing that produces desired results at cost-effective prices is the hard part. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it. And a quick look around at all the product marketing programs that customers are bombarded with every day shows that good marketing is far from universal.

Winning is not a "marketing tool." Winning is the goal of sporting competitions. Winning attracts larger crowds because more people like being associated with a winner than a loser. Larger crowds can be attracted to both winning and losing teams by focusing on promoting factors independent of winning and losing. It's rare that marketing can make up for all, or even most of, the attendance loss of a losing team. But it can almost always make up some percentage.

While I enjoy both football and basketball, I happen to like basketball a little more than football. So I always anticipate basketball season with a little more enthusiasm than football. But even with Zips football being down right now, I still lhave my season ticket and look forward to attending the home games and cheering for them to do better than most people think they will.

Good stats analysis, Quickzips. Stats help fill in some of the gaps, but there are still lots of questions about how they looked playing together. We should be able to tell more after seeing video of Tuesday's game. Tree's free throw shooting (0-5) obviously stunk. But I remember Rico clanking his first few college free throws, too. I won't worry too much about Tree's free throw shooting unless it looks bad after a number of regular season games. On the other hand, Tree was 4-5 from the field, and I don't think he was shooting jumpers. All the video highlights of Tree so far show him finishing really strong at the rim. The Zips have been sorely lacking that inside game. So it's not necessarily a terrible tradeoff to have a good finisher who might be a little shaky at the free throw line.

Thanks for the additional stats! I think I see why Carleton University is serious about its basketball team. Their combined regular and post season record over the last 11 years is 288-29. That's a darned impressive record at any level of basketball.

Still no Zips box scores. But at least a hint of stats in the results story at GoZips.com: Junior forward Chauncey Gilliam led the way with 17 points, going 7-for-10 from the field in 16 minutes. Sophomore forward Josh Egner was the only other Zip in double figures, pitching in with 14 points and six boards. Egner was 6-for-8 from the floor. The nice thing about Tuesday's game with Carleton University is that they actually take their basketball pretty seriously. Not only will the game be webcast, as mentioned in another thread, but Carleton actually posts complete box scores immediately following their exhibition games. The box scores for their games with La Salle, Illinois State and Central Florida are already up: Carleton University Box Scores

Tree interview below. Like the way he says at the end he wants to bring some swagger to the team. Also, today is Rico's 20th birthday.

Even if we're not outright racist, we all have our share of at least mild prejudices and tend to believe at least some degree of stereotyping about various people and things. One interesting point in this discussion is GP1's firsthand observation about Mexicans generally being hard workers in the construction industry, and thinking that many of them have familes they're trying to support. This, of course, debunks the old stereotype about Mexicans being "lazy." And while most of us may be strongly against having so many illegal aliens in the country, Americans have a hard time not admiring men who work hard to provide for their wives and children. That's part of the American dream for most immigrants and their descendants, whether legal or illegal.

Speaking of who's getting how much playing time, I'm dying to see some stats. GoZips had me expecting stats from what he wrote in another thread:

I don't happen to have the SOS formula in front of me right now. But since MSU had an off year, it wouldn't have been as big a bump as usual. Doing some rough math here, Millikin had no effect on the Zips SOS because they're a DIII team, which I believe does not count on a DI team's SOS. So the bump would all come from MSU. But it would have only represented one game out of about 30 regular season games, or a little over 3% of the schedule. So it would have probably given the Zips an SOS somewhere in the lower-mid 100s as opposed to the higher-mid 100s (#170). Still a fair way off from the sub-85 SOS that I believe represents a really tough schedule. But I give a lot of credit to KD for even trying to schedule MSU. The Zips are reaching the point where they should be able to handle at least one really tough game like that every season along with a generally stronger OOC schedule..

And some people think the Zips are so hopeless that they should just hang it up and drop down to DII.

While everyone would love to have a 6-9 PG like Magic Johnson, Joey Rodriguez, a 5-10 PG from Puerto Rico, took VCU to the Final Four a few months ago. You really don't have to be that tall to distribute the ball. The important thing is to have 4 other players on the floor who know what to do with the ball when it magically appears in their hands. The biggest challenge is at the defensive end, where a 5-10 PG has to be really clever to offset the offense of taller PGs. We know that Rico is pretty good at picking pockets and frustrating opposing PGs by quickly planting his feet where they want to be. I really believe if Rico dedicates himself to physical conditioning, he could lead the Zips to the promised land.