Big East Basketball questions: Key storyline, biggest surprise/disappointments
2. Which team has been the biggest disappointment so far?
Mauro
St. John’s. Think about everything they got in the off-season with Curbelo and David Jones to pair with one of the best defensive players in the country in Posh and a dominant post in Soriano. They started hot and looked like they were going to make noise on the Big East but turns out it was all just smoke and mirrors from a poor non-con schedule.
Freeman
When Shaheen Halloway built a roster that fit his style, I anticipated the Pirates to be a tough out, even if they couldn’t score. But the defense hasn’t been very good in league play, which has been a stunning development. Seton Hall was a team I thought could compete for a top-half team but that doesn’t look to be the case.
Mullenix
Butler. Heading into the season, Butler had sleeper potential written all over them. New coach. A host of transfers that a lot of programs wanted. And a new energy around the program after the last two years under LaVall Jordan. Thad Matta brought in Manny Bates from NC State, Eric Hunter Jr. from Purdue, and Ali Ali from Akron, not to mention Jalen Thomas from Georgia State. The roster completely changed in one offseason and Matta was able to keep Butler’s most important players already with the program in Indianapolis.
The Bulldogs are 10-7, and their best win over Kansas State has reached a level no one thought it would get to at the time, but after that, it’s Yale and BYU battling for the second-best win. The Bulldogs look uninspired far too often, they don’t rebound the basketball and they still can’t seem to figure out that Chuck Harris should touch the ball on every single possession. But maybe more frustrating than anything is Butler’s inability to be competitive against teams better than them on paper. In their eight losses, they’re getting beaten by an average of 19.4 points.
In the Big East specifically, it’s worse. In losses to UConn, Creighton, Providence, and Seton Hall, they have a -89 points differential. -89! Georgetown lost to Xavier by 13 and UConn by 11. DePaul only lost to Creighton by 15 and by the same margin to Providence. Those are two teams that Butler beat with relative ease, but didn’t turn in anywhere near the same kind of performance against the best in the Big East.
To be a sleeper, it implies you’ll surprise some people, especially in conference play. If anything, the Bulldogs are surprising people by how unprepared they look for the quality of opponents in the Big East.