“[Gerald Henderson is] a unique player in that he’s strong enough to put it on the floor and get by you and use his body, he can jump over you and he’s really knocking that jump shot down which makes him even tougher. You get up on him, he’s got that first step. He’s playing three or four. He can cause you a lot of problems as you saw tonight. He did exactly what a player of his caliber is supposed to do. He took over the game for a period there and that’s the one guy I talked about in pre-game to the media. He can change the game and he did it again tonight. That’s what he expects of himself and I’m sure that’s what his team expected. He did exactly what a leader is supposed to do. He took over.â€
And that’s exactly what State doesn’t have. As admirable as McCauley and Costner can be, neither one is truly a leader. Last year, when they both basically sulked as J.J. Hickson proved to be a better player and took their minutes, and at any rate, neither of them can really alter State’s main flaw, because neither of them bring the ball up and neither is going to ever control it in the halfcourt game, even though McCauley is a more than adequately rounded big man.
It must be the most frustrating thing in the world for Lowe, who wore his big-game red jacket to Cameron. If you look back at his stats when he was at State, they were never overwhelming. Yet he was a superb leader for his team who got his guys to be steady and when they were in a close game hell would freeze over before he made a critical mistake. He was not just a good leader, he was an excellent leader.
He sits there and he is bound to see the mistakes coming, and he’s surely told his guys what to do and not to do. And they are effective for most of the game. But at the end, when his knowledge and experience should be most valuable, they simply can’t do what he has tried to teach them. They rush, they dribble too far, they try to make passes that are a stretch, and slowly, his team crumbles under the pressure and fails.
You can think back to any number of reasonable point guards in the past (or contemporaries for that matter), and they don’t have to be great ones, just good ones, and imagine them at State. How much better would they be? What about Terrell McIntyre? Bobby Frasor? T.J. Bannister? Charlie Ward? Keith Gatlin? Larry Drew II? For that matter, Sidney Lowe?
Just one steady guard who knew what to do in the clutch would make this team a viable tournament team. One steady guard and one reliably intelligent small forward could put them deep into the tournament.
For a competitor like Lowe, sitting and watching incompetence, when he sees the error almost every time, must just eat him alive. After this game and a number of close shaves this season, we have to say this: he’s staying in games despite a critical flaw in his team. We’d have to say that’s the mark of a good coach.
