The frustration for UCF was palpable during their final game of a doomed and difficult 2016 season. The Knights had struggled to shoot and take advantage of their size advantage on the glass or even their potential shooting prowess on the wings.
They had struggled to put everything right at the right moments.
And the frustration only grew as they finally took the lead only to see the Tulane Green Wave burn off a 16-8 run to retake the lead in the final five and a half minutes and win 65-63 in an upset at the American Athletic Conference Tournament at Amway Center.
The Knights had won only six games conference games all year, all against the three teams beneath them in the standings. They had shown a propensity to win the games they should have, but do nothing really more than that. So was the limits of this group, racked with youth, injuries and inconsistency.
What was there to make of this team? Was this a team that should have performed better than it did? Was this a team that was too young and needed experience? Was this an offensive team? A defensive team?
These questions still swirl around the team, heightened by the team’s firing of coach Donnie Jones shortly after Thursday’s game.
Can this team continue to grow with such a unique player as Tacko Fall manning the middle? Can the players improve enough to take that next step up?
What are the realistic expectations for this team moving forward? What are the realistic expectations for this team in 2017?
This was a season of growing pains in every way that could be imaginable. A season of twists and turns that did not seem to have a clear finish line.
“I don’t really get frustrated,” Jones said, talking about what was at that time his team’s future. “Obviously you want guys to play well. Sometimes you get young guys and you want them to experience it. I let them play through a lot of stuff because I knew it was not necessarily about the now at it was about the future. Sometimes when you have young guys, they haven’t experienced it, there is usually inconsistency. And that’s sometimes knowing how hard to play, how hard to compete and sometimes being consistent. We struggled as a group sometimes because we probably asked more from our young guys than our older guys.”
At various points in the season Jones turned to younger players more and more over older players, trying to find the right combination. They entered the season knowing B.J. Taylor and Adonys Henriquez, both sophomores, would be key players for the team. Taylor ended up missing the entire season with a leg injury.
Tacko Fall, the freshman center towering above everyone else, started and displaced upperclassmen Justin McBride and Staphon Blair. The senior Blair struggled to crack the rotation consistently.
Senior forward Shaheed Davis started the season in the starting lineup, but slowly faded with his inconsistent offensive abilities and the need for more shooting from players like Matt Williams, Jr.
This was indeed a young team. A.J. Davis was likely seen as a leader as a redshirt sophomore. A sophomore who sat out a year after transferring from Tennessee and played sparingly in his freshman year at Tennessee.
Maybe UCF was facing an uphill climb the entire way and the result of the season — a 12-18 record and 6-12 in the conference — was the necessary experience needed.
“These guys did an amazing job with what we asked of them every day,” Jones said. “It obviously may not have showed up in the win column. These guys came here to help build a program and change a progress. That obviously is not going to happen in one night. It’s going to take some time. I love the pieces that we have here with this group.”
There are still some interesting pieces. And who knows what adding a player like Taylor back into the fold will do?
Yet, there is still that undeniable frustration. That undeniable sense that UCF has stagnated — and stagnated at a pretty low level.
The Knights have gone 12-18, 12-18, 13-18 the last three seasons since winning 20 games in Isaiah Sykes’ senior year in 2013, the team’s final in Conference USA. The Knights have not seemed to replace that stellar scorer or take the step up with the competition in the American.
There certainly should be and is pressure to take that step forward.
And there are talented players and capable players on the roster to help accomplish that. Players that have to work to improve their games to get to that next level.
“I think both of us know we have a lot of room to improve, and there’s a lot of things we could do better on the floor,” A.J. Davis said referring to himself and Adonys Henriquez. “I think a lot of it for us was experience. We’re young. We have pretty big roles. That’s not an excuse by any means, but I think just the experience and growing, and just getting to know our team and having team chemistry over the summer is going to help us a lot.”
Most of this team will be back. They will have the opportunity to build on the successes they had this year. The question that needs answering is will that be enough?
The Knights pushed the top-seeded Temple Owls in two meetings this season. They could have used the showcase to play the Houston Cougars in the second round.
Instead they leave the season with this thud. This gap of frustration. Losing because Tulane played some strong defense but also on their own mistakes — 21 turnovers and just 15 second-chance points on 16 offensive rebounds. This was a game the Knights had all the factors they could want for winning, they just did not put the ball into the basket consistently and made key mistakes down the stretch.
With the way Tulane was shooting itself, it gave UCF every chance to win the game.
Learning how to take it is part of the growing process. The Knights were just in so few of those in conference season when everything seems to matter more.
“You always have emotions going off, more than anything for those three seniors,” Jones said. “The thought process as coaches is looking ahead. Once this is over, how do we get better? How do we put ourselves in a position to learn from this? We’ll be here again next year and have a chance to do soemthing about it and grow this team from this experience.”
Where do the Knights go from here? How do they build for the future?
Those will be big questions. Questions that will get some pretty loud answers from the athletic department as much as the coaching staff and players. That is where the offseason will start.
The question clearly presented is whether experience alone will get this program pointed back in the right direction.
The answer to that question is as uncertain as any other facing this team heading into the murkiest of offseasons.
