I don't think its quite fair to say that we don't have the cattle anymore. Given that the majority of this current Boomers team compete in Europe, should give a fair indication of the level of talent we have.
I believe the Boomers have three main issues, which we're clearly highlighted for everyone to see in the last world championships in Turkey;
- Lack of a go-to player. Someone you can rely on in crunch situations to get you a key bucket.
- Lack of outside shooters. Once a feature and strength of our play, this is now almost our greatest weakness. The fact that Gibson and Martin and getting games as 'shooting guards' shows how far we have fallen in this area.
- Lack of a dominant rebounder. Whilst our 'bigs' are supposedly our strength at the moment, there is not one superior rebounder amongst them. The amount of times we gave up crucial offensive rebounds in Turkey was quite alarming.
And with all the reports around, it sounds like you can scratch Bogut and Jawai from the London squad. So realistically, our team will most likely be the 12 guys who took on NZ in the Olympic qualifiers, plus David Andersen, with one player (most likely AJ Ogilvy) to be cut.
I'm not entirely sure that we've addressed any of these issues since Turkey, but I believe Aron Baynes could be the rebounder we need. He has the biggest and strongest body out of any of our big guys. And I wonder if Brett Brown has enough guts to bring a young guy like Drmic into the squad to try and address our lack of scoring/outside shooting. He appears to be our best prospect at the shooting guard spot, so why not throw him into the mix now as a twelfth man off the bench and see what happens.