You are right it’s always a blow to lose your main PG…however…I would like to point out that Butler is a good veteran basketball player but he’s not John Wall like many are implying. He’s not good enough for us to be this bad by losing him.
And Kerr Kriisa just wasn’t very good at all. We’d be in trouble if he was the starting point guard anyway.
Appears to me something else has happened to this team.
Kriisa had not YET performed good at all (in just 9 games). But he had enough of a history at P5 schools to know he was MUCH better than that. I think he was struggling because he wasn't used to coming off the bench & playing <20mpg. Having a good attitude about it (which he seemed to have) isn't enough. It's a different mindset. For those 2 reasons, I think he would have performed better when Butler got hurt, if he had been healthy.
And the Carr injury also played a role, although much less of a role. But for a 3 game stretch, that was 33% of the planned contributors, 40% of our starters, and 100% of our PGs. Also Butler played a game or two hurt, and you could tell on how he played.
We are "managing" with Robinson as the PG on offense. We struggled a bit early on vs the pressure, not just TOs, but also using 20 of the 30 seconds just to get into our offense. But we eventually figured that out.
What we did not figure out was how to pressure them causing TO's. I don't think I've EVER seen ANY TEAM have only 1 TO in a game. But Ole Miss did. Vs Ark they only had 7 TOs. 5 vs UT, and 5 vs Vandy.
So since the Alabama game, which is when Butler got hurt, our opponents have ONLY 18 TOs in 4 games (4.5 per game). That is about 10 less per game than where it should be. And the Alabama game was just 10, I don't know how many of those 10 came before vs after Butler's injury, but I do know the game was tied with 5min remaining and Butler was already hurting by then.