After getting dropped by the Purdue Boilermakers 68-64 on Wednesday night, the Golden Gophers now sit at 6-14 overall and 0-9 in the Big Ten with nine conference games to go to avoid the ultimate embarrassment of getting swept in the conference.
Most fans entered the season with a healthy quantity of glass-half-emptiness, but few were willing to convince themselves that half the Big Ten season could go by with nary a win, including third-year leader Richard Pitino. “I did not think it would be this bad,” he said on Jan. 15.
There are many areas that Pitino can lament at this trying juncture of his tenure. His alleged top recruit Kevin Dorsey, Jr., doesn’t seem quite as game-ready as once supposed. His two seniors Joey King and Carlos Morris have routinely been no-shows throughout the Big Ten season. His lone junior Charles Buggs got benched early in the season for unknown reasons.
But his biggest regret occurred last recruiting season as he constructed his 2015-16 roster. The Gophers, as each team does, had finite scholarships to award. Instead of bringing in a junior college transfer or two to play in the post – an area the Gophers woefully lack – they awarded those full-rides to Division I transfers Reggie Lynch and Davonte Fitzgerald, who are not eligible to play until 2016-17. While both may start next year, the Gophers have suffered from the absence of any skilled big man and have routinely been outrebounded and outmuscled in the gritty Big Ten conference.
The Gophers are not in tank mode as they would be if they were a professional team. There’s no lottery system to reward bad college teams like there is in the NBA. The losses don’t serve as a glorified mortgage payment as they did with last season’s 16-66 Minnesota Timberwolves. No, these Gophers are stuck in neutral until reinforcements arrive.
“We believe these can be impact guys next year,” said Pitino of Lynch and Fitzgerald, “and we made a decision we’ve got to take those two guys because we believe they can impact. We thought we would definitely take a step backwards in order to take a major step forward.”
For now, Minnesota must play the hand they’ve been dealt, and if it were a game of Texas Hold ‘Em, they’d have a 7-2 off suit. The Gophers, stuck in youth development mode, have shown small signs of improvement over the past nine games, but when starting from Square 1, baby steps aren’t enough to slay Big Ten mainstays. At this stage, good performances seem to be more like aberrations than a true turned corner. It’s often one step forward and two steps back.
Freshman Jordan Murphy continues to dig himself into foul trouble early in games, which caused him to miss key chunks of the last two winnable home games. Sophomore Nate Mason’s shooting percentages this season are down, particularly his 3-point shooting (down from 39 to 33 percent). Starting center Bakary Konate continues to be too emotional on the court and not coordinated enough to contribute on the offensive end sans the occasional pick-and-roll dunk. Free throw shooting is a rampant problem and hindered the Gophers in their upset bid of Purdue Wednesday night when they missed 10 of 21 attempts. To continue the poker analogy, the season’s been a real flop.
This is in no way to say that Pitino’s group is hopeless. There are many individual traits on this roster for fans to be excited about: McBrayer’s ability to absorb contact around the rim, Dorsey’s lateral quickness, Murphy’s rebounding, Mason’s mid-range jumper. At this stage, though, there is no anchor keeping the Gophers from floating off course when they encounter choppy waters. Typically, that responsibility would fall on the seniors, but King and Morris do not comprise an ordinary senior class. Neither were born into the program. King transferred in prior to the 2013 season; Morris a year later. Pitino has said that while both have their teammates respect, neither are particularly vocal. The coach also benched them after the team’s 0-3 start in the Big Ten. “Seniors are hard,” said Pitino. “I think we saw that last year. Guys, they get in January, February and they go, ‘OK, where am I going to be next year? This is not going the way I want it to go, and now what do I do?’”
But the team understands, however, that their youth can’t be an end-all excuse. “We can’t really blame it on experience or age,” Morris said earlier in January. “Unless we turn it around, I’ll definitely be disappointed in the season.
“We understand that we’re really, really young,” said Pitino. “We get it. But we gotta do something about it. Being young doesn’t excuse you from playing hard all the time. Getting physical, rebounding, so those things that we’ve just got to be committed to doing.”
The Gophers have played four straight competitive games – losing by no more than seven against Indiana, Michigan, Illinois and Purdue after getting embarrassed in 25-point losses to Northwestern and Nebraska. “It’s just a matter of a few turnovers here, a missed shot there,” said King.
In a vacuum, each game has been its own moral victory. But when every loss is a moral victory, none of them are.
Until the narrow defeats turn into wins, the Gophers will still be spinning their wheels.
