Utah Hoops: Life Without Delon

Feb 13, 2014; Los Angeles, CA, USA; Southern California Trojans guard Chass Bryan (3) and Utah Utes guard Delon Wright (55) battle for the ball at Galen Center. Utah defeated USC 79-71. Mandatory Credit: Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports

I had another topic in mind for my first post of the day, but then something happened last night on twitter and I thought it was worthy of a topic of discussion.

Last night I made the following tweet,

"I think if Utah didn’t have Delon Wright, they might have won 10 games."

It seems several people, most notably Tony Jones from the Salt lake Tribune, took issue with this tweet.  Tony essentially saying that this was proof of my hated of Utah basketball and Larry Krystkowiak.  And others agreed.

Now this seemed odd to me as this was pretty much a throwaway tweet, like when you sort of just say some TV show sucks or is the greatest ever.  Further, it was meant entirely to compliment Delon Wright and what he has meant to this Utah team.  Finally, if you’re going to pick a tweet to show my hatred of Larry and Utah Basketball, I’ve got about 100 or more which are worse.

Then I gave it some thought, which is more than I did with the actual tweet.  Is it really that outlandish to say that we’d have 10 wins without Delon?

First, I’ll go out on a limb and say there are no losses that would have turned into wins without Delon.

If you look at Utah’s Pac-12 schedule, there is one game that didn’t see a big run late, USC at home.  Even the Oregon St. game saw them close before we had a couple of shots that pushed the lead back to 11 or so.  Utah currently has six Pac-12 wins, is it out of line to say we’d have lost 4 of them without Delon?

That would put the Runnin’ Utes at 13 wins.

Then we go to the OOC.  As we’ve pointed out our OOC is horrible, according to Ken Pomery the second worst in the nation.  So maybe we wouldn’t have lost 3 more games.  But last year Utah blew a 20 point lead to Sacramento State and also lost to Cal State Northridge at home.  So maybe the Utes don’t lose three games in this years OOC, but the idea that we’d have dropped 1 to 2 more of those games, that seems pretty rational to me.

I think saying Utah would have 11-12 wins right now without Delon Wright isn’t exactly crazy talk, nor is it proof of my hated of Utah Basketball or Larry Krystkowiak.

And wouldn’t that mean, my throwaway tweet meant to compliment Delon, is also pretty close to accurate?

I’d be curious to hear anyone’s thought’s on what Delon has meant to this team, tweet me @macathoyos or leave a comment, or go to the Hoyo’s Revenge Facebook page.