UMass Basketball: State of the program after end of 2019-20 season

Importance of Carl Pierre

One other question-mark that this team has to deal with is the inconsistency of Carl Pierre. He had several disappearing acts throughout the year and was too often a non-factor during the final stretch of the season. Because of how hard he works and because of his ceiling, it’s hard to not to agree with Coach McCall when he says that he isn’t worried about him, but still, as the captain and vocal leader of the team, it would have been nice to see him come through in a few more big moments.

Week’s return should be good for Pierre – they work well in tandem as opposing defenses are either unsure of which one to focus on or just plain unable to focus on both. Let’s hope that having that partner on the perimeter will help gain him his confidence back. If Weeks can continue to shoot close to as well as he did (I don’t expect that 48% from deep is quite sustainable – that’s just ridiculous) and Pierre can shoot closer to the way that he did over his first two seasons, that could be one of the keys to UMass being an A10 title contender instead of just a solid team.

My intuition is that Pierre probably won’t get back to shooting a mid-40’s percentage from three, but I think he will at least find some semblance of consistency and shoot his way to more 3-5, 4-7 type of nights.  Some fans have passed around the idea that he might transfer to give his psyche a fresh start, but he’s just about the most difficult person on the team to envision transferring because of his connection with McCall and the fact that he’ll still be a significant part of the rotation. He almost certainly won’t lead us in minutes because of how deep we should be in the backcourt and on the wings, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see him averaging 24+ minutes per game on the season.

Those are all of the major thoughts and concerns that I have about this team right now, but as I said earlier, the excitement should outweigh the worry for the fans reading this. Just consider the fact that we doubled our win total from last season with a freshmen-based roster, that we have our most talented Center since Marcus Camby, and that we finally started to form a culture of consistent effort and toughness toward the end of the season.

Even if some players transfer out, it wouldn’t be the type of transfers that occurred after the 18-19 season – transfers that were reflective of a toxic culture that no one wanted to be a part of. These would be the type of transfers that any good team should have to deal with – guys not getting as much playing time as they could somewhere else.

Unless the body language and interactions that I saw on the court and on the bench this season were entirely misleading, I feel confident in saying that this is a connected group that wants to help each other thrive. Regardless of things like team-rebounding and shot creation, that right there is a sign of progress.