Al Agnew

Yeah, with typical water conditions in Missouri streams and lakes, it's pointless using red for anything but lures that run less than 3-4 feet deep...deeper than that, it looks indistinguishable from black nickel hooks. I actually would prefer nickel or chrome hook color if I want the hook to be less visible.

Actually, the first one is a painting, the other two were done in Photoshop.

I know, we've hashed it over before. But I gotta say I have a big problem with shooting fish of any species with bow and arrow or speargun simply to discard them. The only time I think that's okay is if the fish is an invasive species that is directly harming the ecology of the waters it's in, and it's been biologically shown that thinning the population of that fish will help significantly. It's the same with so-called varmint shooting, such as prairie dogs. I just don't like the idea, as MoCarp said, of using live animals for nothing but target practice...that's what they make targets for. And what REALLY bothers me is glorifying the practice. I've seen those t shirts that say something like "happiness is a fine red mist" with a picture of a prairie dog with crosshairs on it. I find that as I get older, I have more and more problem with killing critters, unless I've got a REALLY good reason to do so. Not that I'm turning anti-hunting or something. I still think too many people care too much about individual animals and not enough about species and ecosystems, and common species or species that need thinning because we've messed up their ecology too much already are perfectly okay to kill, as far as I'm concerned. But use them after you kill them.

The other way I use Photoshop is to plan and compose actual paintings. Back in the old days, I'd usually start planning a painting by either looking through all the reference photos I've taken over the years, looking for something that turned me on as a starting point; it might be either an animal photo or a landscape photo that looked interesting. Then I'd look for an animal to fit into the landscape, or a landscape to put behind the animal. Then I'd start doing little quick sketches, drawing and redrawing the animal in different sizes compared to the background, and in different positions compared to the background as well. I might end up doing a dozen or more of these little sketches, changing elements of the background, changing pieces of the animal like making a leg come farther forward or turning a head some more one way, before finally settling on a composition I liked. Then, if it was a complex painting with plenty of different colors in my head, I might do a small (like 8 X 10 inch) quick painting to work out the colors, with little or no detail, just major blocks of color. I might spend a day just doing that. Then I would start drawing the animal and landscape, the size of the finished painting, on paper. This would be a very detailed drawing of the animal, and doing such a drawing might take a couple days to get it right, especially if I'd changed a lot of stuff from my original photo or photos. One thing that I'd have to work out at this stage was the lighting. I might have a landscape with sunlight coming in over my left shoulder, but my animal photo had the animal in cloudy weather so that there were no strong shadows on it, or it was in sunlight but coming from a different angle. I actually have a number of little toy models of animals like wolves that I've picked up over the years, and I might be able to pick out one of them that was in a position similar to the one I was going to paint, and shine a light on it to see both what the shape of the shadows on its body was, and what the shape of the shadow it threw on the ground was. But usually I wouldn't have a model that was anywhere close, so I'd take the time to sculpt one out of modeling clay, and shine the light on it. Once I got the drawing done, I would transfer it to canvas and begin painting. Now, here is the compositional image for a painting I just started. It began as before...I knew I wanted to paint a wolf, but needed a landscape to fit it into. So I looked through my photos and came upon one I'd taken last autumn off the Beartooth Highway in Montana. There was gorgeous autumn colors on the foliage, but it was snowing fairly heavily, a gray, misty day. That photo is the background of the composition, up to the rock that the wolf is standing upon. But the foreground in that photo wasn't going to work, so I found another photo taken the same day in the same area that had this nice rock in the foreground, and that's the rock in the composition. But the foreground needed some more interest...I wanted to get some of that deep red foliage in the foreground, and also needed something else. A third photo I had from that day had some closeup foliage, and another one had that nice log. So...I took pieces of those photos, cut them out in Photoshop, and composed the painting's background and foreground. Now for the wolf...I had a photo of a captive wolf on a gray day that I really liked, but it was more of a closeup, with the lower legs and tail cropped off. I found another photo of a wolf standing broadside like that one, but showing the lower legs and paws. I cut them off and stuck them onto the other wolf. Then I decided that the head of the original wolf wasn't quite the way I wanted it, so I found another wolf photo in my collection that had a nice head, and morphed it onto my original wolf. Then I played around with the size of the wolf compared to the background, zooming in or out in Photoshop, and also moving it around in the composition...all this, that would have taken me hours doing little sketches in the old days, took just a few minutes in Photoshop, and I could make very small adjustments that made a difference in the composition but I would never had done just sketching. So after a couple hours of work, with more sitting and studying the image than actually drawing or painting, I had a composition I was pleased with. I could, at this point, have further adjusted the color of the wolf...you'll note that the lower legs are a different color than the rest of the wolf and so is the head. But I didn't see the need to do that...it will be done in the actual painting. I then stuck a grid over my image in Photoshop, and used graph paper to draw the image the size it would be in the final canvas, making a few adjustments to the wolf as I drew it. Transferred it to canvas and started painting. The whole process took a short day, instead of several days.

Here are three of my images. Quick quiz...one, two, or all three were produced in Photoshop. I did NOT use any photos at all in producing the one, two, or three that were done in Photoshop, it was all done using the Photoshop brush tools starting with a blank screen. Which were done in Photoshop, and which, if any, were done as traditional paintings?

Just finished it. Splash and water droplets took much of the afternoon. Each droplet has an outline and three colors, except for the smallest ones, so it takes some time to do them. Sorry about the copyright notice splashed across the painting, but it makes it a little more difficult for people to steal the design. Look for it on the BPS fly fishing catalog, coming out in another month or so.

Okay...the highlights on the trout are now finished. Note the sheen on the back which actually a reflection of the sky on the slimy, wet surface of its back. Fish out of the water show these reflections, and in fact, that wet slime will reflect almost like a cloudy mirror, though it mainly reflects anything that is considerably lighter than the body color underneath it. Fish underwater, on the other hand, do not reflect with a sheen like this. I've painted a few fish lying in a couple inches of water, and I have to be cognizant of this...the parts of the fish that are out of the water reflect that sheen, while the underwater parts don't. At this point, it's all done by the splash and water droplets...but that is one of the most tedious parts of painting an image like this.

Here is a closeup of a portion of the side of the original design, and my modifications. Note the number of colors added to each scale. This might look like it would take forever, but actually for each color you see, I can do about two scales per second, because I'm not carefully trying to make each stroke exact. Plus, when "painting" on the computer, you don't have to keep dipping your brush in the paint!

Okay, I've now gotten a lot farther along on the trout. Rainbow trout, like most fish species, vary a lot in coloration depending upon their native stream, the time of year, water conditions, and just individual differences. So I had this photo of a nice rainbow I caught on the Missouri River in Montana, and I really liked its coloration, plus it was in more of less the same light conditions as in the background of the design. So I decided to use it as my reference for the colors of my trout: Compare that to the colors on my original t shirt design: So first I had to darken and enrich the colors by adding a lot more color, but transparently so the scale details still showed through--note that I've also begun to add more black spots at this point: Here is the fish with most of the colors added to body and fins, except for bright white highlights, which is where I am now with it. Note also, when comparing to the original t shirt design, I made some structural changes. I lengthened the upper and lower jaw, and shortened the tail portion.

Well, I'm in the middle of doing my 6th Bass Pro Shop catalog cover of the year, and needed to take a break and thought I'd just post, for the fun of it, how I'm doing it. I create these covers on the computer. I have a Wacom Cintiq pen display with a screen about 13 X 18 inches that I use as my desktop monitor, and another smaller Wacom that I can use in other places with a laptop. With these tablets I can draw directly on the screen with a "pen", actually a very smart stylus. I use Photoshop and depend upon the Photoshop painting tools, especially the airbrush tool. With it, I choose the color, degree of transparency, size of brush, even the shape of each stroke. The display tablet is pressure sensitive, and I can set it where the harder I push down on the pen, the darker and/or wider the line or swath of color will be. It is most like painting with colored pencils. Of course, I can also incorporate parts of photos into the design. Sometimes I do that, especially if I want a very involved background but don't have the time to spend creating such a background from scratch. As for the fish, I usually create them completely by painting with the pen, without using photos of fish except sometimes for reference. Other times I've been known to go out to the pond by the house, catch a bass, and "pose" it for a photo. Unfortunately, I seldom catch a BIG bass out of my pond (lots of 10-15 inchers), so even if I have a good photograph of the bass I want to put into the design, I still have to modify the photo to make it look like a big bass--the big ones are proportioned differently than the smaller ones. However, this cover is for their trout and fly fishing catalog, so I'm doing a rainbow. For this one, instead of creating the trout from scratch, I decided to use this old design I did many years ago for reproducing on t shirts. This original was done on paper with art pens, and as a t shirt design, it had to be very clear, with sharp lines and high contrasting colors. It was not the same style I'd do for a finished painting, nor would it work as is for the catalog cover, but it was a good start because it already had all the details of scales, fin rays, head structures, etc.So I wouldn't have to take the time to redraw all those scales, which on trout are very time-consuming. Of course, it would still require extensive modification to make it look like a painting and not a t shirt design. As for the background, I didn't have a lot of time to spend on this design, so I decided to look through all the photos I've taken of trout streams and try to find something I could extract from a photo or two to use, with a little modification, for the backdrop to the fish. I had to keep in mind that the parts of the design that are behind the BPS logo and title of the catalog have to be able to contrast well with those elements. I found this photo of a nice rocky bank at the edge of a riffle on the Yellowstone River. The trick here is to get the perspective right, though. If I used the whole photo as the background, and put the trout in big enough to cover the main part of the image, the trout would either look like it was ten feet long, or jumping 8 feet out of the water. So I had to select just a small part of the photo and blow it up to cover the background. When I did that, I found that I didn't like that area of water behind the rocks...zooming in that close left me nothing but water behind the rocks, with the far bank outside the image. I could have just moved that far bank down a bit, but I didn't really like the way that looked (one nice thing about composing in Photoshop like this is that you can just cut out a piece of a photo and move it around to other parts of the photo.)So instead, I went searching for another of my photos that I could splice into the background. I found this one: Now, I needed to flip the trout horizontally to make it work better with the cover copy, and when I did that I found I also needed to flip the elements of both photos I was using to make a better composition. I selected a small piece on the right edge of the rocks, flipped it, blew it up, and made the foreground. Then I selected another small piece on the left side of the other photo for the background bank, and decided I DIDN'T need to flip it. I played around with the size of the pieces of the two photos until I had them the way that looked the best to me. Then, I had to modify the colors of the photos so that they matched and made the background look like one image and not two spliced images, and after that, I decided to modify the bank area by blurring it somewhat to make it recede further into the background, and paint over the water and rocks, both where the two photos came together and over the rest of the image, to get rid of a lot of the "noise" inherent to blow-ups of photos and smooth out the water, plus add some details to wavelets and rocks. I even stretched one of the background rocks to make it look better to my eyes. So this is what resulted...the background is now pretty much finished: I've been working on the trout, and will get back into it now. When I'm closer to being finished with it I'll post what it looks like. Hope everybody enjoys this little window into my creative process.

No and no. I've never seen a difference using red hooks, and I hate it when the red starts coming off and they get ugly. As for line visibility, I don't think it makes a bit of difference to the fish (within reason...you probably shouldn't use 50 pound braid on a clear trout stream). No line is "invisible", and fish have pretty good eyesight in clear water, so they can still see 2 pound test fluorocarbon, it ain't invisible to them. If it really bothered them, they'd never take a lure or fly, because they can surely see the line (and hooks hanging off a topwater, and a hook coming out of the butt of a fly). I use straight braid all the time, never use a leader, and catch plenty of fish in clear water, although I don't go heavier than about 4/15 Power Pro. I use 8 pound test or 10 pound test co-poly in ultraclear smallmouth streams and the fish don't care. Of course, you wouldn't want to use a super heavy line that would be as noticeable as the lure itself, but the main reason I see to use lighter lines is so that your line has less of an effect on the attitude or action of your lure or fly. I almost never go lighter than 5X tippet on trout streams, and the only time I go that light is if I'm using very small flies, like size 18 or 20. Most of my trout fishing is done using 2X to 4X tippet, and if the water is fairly murky like it often is on the Yellowstone River and I'm using streamers, I'll go 0X.

I haven't had experience with Nova Craft canoes, but they have an excellent reputation. That Fox 14 really looks like a great solo canoe for what you want. I don't know what the price is; I didn't delve that deeply into the website. But the specs look just about perfect. If I was in the market for another canoe, I'd look very seriously at that one.

I make my own seat backs that I think are better than any of the store bought canoe seat backs. Used to use Sitbackers...they were okay. One thing to keep in mind...although you will like sitting a little higher on a bass seat or whatever, if you get the seat too high the canoe becomes pretty unstable. There's a maximum seat height that varies a bit from person to person, so you'll have to do some experimenting.

I still remember something that happened when I was a kid, maybe in my very early teens. The Missouri Conservationist magazine always came to the house and I would spend hours perusing it, and one issue had an article that was illustrated with a small section of a topographic map. I'd never seen a topo map before and had no idea that there were maps that showed the actual shape of the land in such precision. For whatever reason, I immediately figured out how to read it and what the little lines signified, and from then on I was in love with topo maps. But I can still picture that little section of map in my mind, and feel the wonder I felt then. Not long afterward, I found that one could order such maps from the Missouri Geological Survey. At the time, they were, as I remember, 25 cents apiece. I quickly ordered a free index map, and started ordering maps with money I got from mowing lawns. Many of the maps back then, in the 1960s, were still the 15 minute quadrangles; probably less than half the state of Missouri was covered by the more detailed 7.5 minute maps. I preferred the 15 minute ones because I could get one of them that illustrated the same area of land that four 7.5 minute ones covered. I would order the maps 4 or 5 at a time, starting with the area closest to where I lived and gradually accumulating maps the eventually covered almost all of southern Missouri. Then I started on Arkansas, since that was where a lot of the lakes and streams I dreamed of fishing were located, and it was a part of the Ozarks, too. That was my strongest interest in buying the maps, to make sure I had maps that showed every floatable stream and fishable lake. There are still a few small gaps in my map coverage--they were maps that did not include any floatable stream. I would spend hours poring over all these maps, and they fired my imagination, thinking of floating those rivers, seeing the bluffs shown on the maps and the springs and small creeks coming into them. Yes, they were useful as I got old enough to drive and go exploring. They showed stream courses, valley shapes, gradients, even tree cover. I could measure the mileages--I bought a little map measuring device with a tiny wheel and dial that you could run along the stream course and it would show the miles. I could even guess at where good gravel bars for camping would be, though I quickly learned that you couldn't depend upon gravel bars shown on the map to actually be there, especially if a decade or more had passed since the map was made. I also got interested in geology, especially as it pertained to streams and the Ozarks in general, and the Geological Survey catalog was like a Christmas catalog to me. I ordered books on geology, and also geologic maps. I discovered the larger scale maps, 1:100,000 scale, that showed 100 foot contours and bought a set of them covering the entire Ozark region, that I put together and taped to a wall in the apartment I was living in at the time. I also found some of the old, historical topo maps still for sale, and several of them are still prized possessions to this day, maps that were made back in the first decade of the 1900s. Stop and think about it...this was before there were airplanes! These maps had to have been made by guys walking nearly every bit of the ground covered in the maps, and drawing them mostly by hand. Considering this, their accuracy was amazing, though they are not nearly as accurate as today's maps. Perhaps I became almost obsessed with topo maps. I would doodle stream courses and topographic lines while killing time doing something else. I drew my own topographic maps, first of float stream stretches, later of my own land and of places that friends and relatives owned, carefully measuring elevations and drawing the topo lines at 5 foot or even 1 foot contour intervals. I decided that it would really be cool to have those 1:100,000 scale maps of the whole Ozarks, but without all the "extraneous" information like roads, cities, political boundaries, and even forest cover...just the topographic contours in brown or black and the streams in blue. So I bought another set of the large scale maps, and painted over them with gesso. I could put the map on a light box, and see all the information beneath the gesso...and trace over all those tiny contour lines. I probably worked on that project for hundreds of hours, laboriously tracing every contour line as carefully as possible with a technical pen, so that when I was done, I had all the topo lines in black on a white background, and the watercourses in blue, just as I wanted. Then I put them together and glued them to one whole wall of my house. I depended on topo maps whenever I went anywhere. If it was someplace outside the Ozarks and I planned on spending time outdoors, I ordered the maps that covered the area. If I was driving to anyplace in the Ozarks for any reason, I took along the maps that covered my entire driving route, not just the destination. I carried topo maps on every float, every hike, every hunting trip. I became good enough at reading them that I could tell you whether a specific location was sandstone, limestone, or granite, just from the shape of the contours. When GPS came onto the scene, I didn't bother to get a GPS device, nor to learn much about it, because a topo map and compass were all I needed to tell me where I was at any given point. I now own some GPS units, but still seldom use them. But I've discovered all the online map resources that have largely taken the place of all those paper maps I accumulated. Heck, with the National Map website, I can download a section of map at various scales, import it to Photoshop, and isolate the contour lines to make my own contour map without all that other stuff--the process that took me those thousands of hours 40 years ago can be done in an hour or so now, and I could print it out in a few minutes. I made some map illustrations for the book I'm trying to finish on the Meramec River system, float maps covering different sections of the river, a geologic map of the watershed, and an elevation map of the watershed as well, in which I isolated the contour lines from the National Map as a base for producing those maps. So yeah, I'm still almost obsessed with maps. I find them beautiful over and above their usefulness.

Kinda like ivory-billed woodpeckers. Ever so often somebody supposedly sights one and gets hopes up, but then nothing. I highly doubt that any passenger pigeons would still be surviving, because they were birds that lived in large flocks, and would have to completely change their habits in order to survive as isolated individuals or pairs. Not like bears, or even ivory bills, which live (lived) as lone individuals or pairs even when abundant.

I've had spiral wrapped rods before, and have to say I don't see enough of an advantage to them to make it worthwhile. I never noticed any real difference in performance or anything else.

Not rude at all...I like short rods for use in the canoe. I can fit them into the canoe with the tips all inside the gunwales so I don't get tips snapped off or get tangled with a big fish I'm playing, plus I find them to be less tiring to use and more accurate when you're sitting down in the canoe. On the other hand, my jetboat rods are all longer, because I'm standing while fishing in the jetboat. Basically, my topwater canoe rod is 5 feet, and the rest of my canoe rods are 5.5 or 6 feet, while my shortest jetboat rod is 6 feet and most of them are 6.5 feet with a couple 7 footers.

Nope...it's going to go on one of my canoe rods instead of my jetboat rods.

Looks like it's gonna rain like crazy the next few days, so I did something I very seldom do...I went fishing on a weekend. Took the jetboat to lower middle Big River. Just had to get in a trip before the rain and possible river blow outs. Cool, cloudy day, water temp was 46-47 degrees, river about normal for this time of year and visibility about 4 feet. Usually by this time of the season, the water temps are up into the 50s, and I've found crankbaits and spinnerbaits to really start producing as the fish move to more active feeding areas. And what I've also found is that sometimes the calendar (length of daylight) is more important than water temps, so I started out the day fishing crankbaits and spinnerbaits, although I'd usually pound them with jerkbaits with these conditions. Well, it worked out okay. I only caught 17 fish, but 12 of them were over 15 inches. The two biggest were an 18 1/2 inch, very chunky smallmouth, and another just as chunky but a half inch shorter. And the only other people I saw was a guy who backed his boat down the ramp just to see if the motor would start, and two kayakers camped out on a gravel bar. I'm glad I broke my no weekend fishing rule.

I gotta say it's been a tough winter for me for fishing. Water too low and clear, weather too cold and frozen, something always seemed to come up that I had to do when the weather would moderate, then water too high and too much rain, and finally I had surgery that was supposed to be no big deal but took me out of action for two weeks. So yesterday morning I was looking at a weather forecast, and it looked like the next week was going to be rain and more rain, and yesterday was going to be partly cloudy and cool with a northwest wind, which isn't all that great, but it might be my only chance to go in the next week or two. I called Hog Wally to see what the water looked like on his part of the Meramec; I knew it was up more than a foot, but was it clear enough. He said it had about a foot or a bit more visibility, but with his characteristic optimism, he said it should be perfect. I'd hoped he could take off and go with me, but alas, he had to work. So I started to get the boat ready, and found my starter battery was dead. Well, I wasn't in any huge hurry to leave, since I figured the sun would warm the water up and it would be better fishing in the afternoon. So I let the battery charge for an hour, and then took off for the river. I ran up several miles from the access, headed to a certain winter hole. The thing about this hole is that it is short, though deep, and has a bit of everything a smallmouth would want, all in a small area. A nice riffle coming into it with a nice eddy and drop-off on the gravel bar side. A beautiful run against a mud bank with cover on the other side at the bottom of the riffle. A rocky bank with strong current. A rock point forming a big, deep eddy with logs and rocks. A steep clay bank with sunken logs and gentle current with plenty of depth. So, you can fish that one hole thoroughly without taking too much time, and usually find out where the fish are, and translate that to other places. Hog Wally, though, had told me where he'd found the fish a few days before...the rock point. I started in the deep eddy below it, and no action. But when I got up to the point, a cast across it with a crankbait got my first strike. Nice fish, nearly 18 inches: About two casts later with the crankbait, I got a heavy strike. It was obviously a big fish, but I quickly figured that it probably wasn't a bass. I was right: The darned drum had completely engulfed my crankbait, so far down its throat that I couldn't even reach it with my forceps. It took me forever to get the lure extricated. I got no more strikes on the point, so I moved up and fished the gravel drop-off. Nothing. Over to the deep run on the other side, nothing. I fished down the rocky bank with strong current, and in a small eddy I caught another 18 inch class smallie. I got it unhooked and started to photograph it, but it flopped and left the boat. You'll just have to take my word for it! I went back to the point and tried an HD Craw, but got nothing. Fished out the rest of the pool, nothing. Headed to another wintering pool. One thing I'd learned about this stretch of the river is that some of the fish stay in the wintering pools all year, and both the first one and this second one had spots where we had found the fish staged pre-spawn. The point in the first pool was one of those spots. So I had hopes for the staging area of the second pool. I fished some other parts of the pool first, with no action, and then reached the staging area. Bingo. I caught three smallies, but none very big, maybe 13 inches. So I started the motor and headed to another wintering pool with all the good stuff in it. I stopped to try one other spot, which wasn't a good wintering pool but usually produced fish in the spring. Nothing. So on down to the wintering pool. This pool has a great rocky bank, with one section of it being the staging area. But I started at the top of the pool. Fished the faster water with no action. On the other side was a gravel drop-off into deep water, with a backwater alongside it. I'd fished it with Hog Wally during the winter with only a few mediocre fish to show for it, but I was just sure it would eventually produce something. As I started across to try it, I noted a school of minnows scattering across the surface, right on the point. I slipped into the backwater to make a cast across the point with the crankbait. It came right through the spot where I'd seen those minnows scatter, and they scattered again...at the same time that I got a hard strike. This one was bigger, I could tell. Those first two nice smallies had obviously been males, but this one was fat 19 inch female: It was the only fish there. I fished the staging area, and caught only a couple small spotted bass. By this time it was getting well up into the afternoon, and I had one more pool that had everything, even a small tributary coming into it, that I wanted to fish. The area at the mouth of the trib was a flat, 3-6 feet deep, with a couple scattered logs lying around. Fish were there, but I only caught two largemouth and three 10-12 inch smallies. I went down into the main part of the pool, but could catch nothing but small spotted bass. The sun was going down, so I started the motor and headed back to the truck. It had been a pretty darned nice day! This post has been promoted to an article

Knew I shoulda braved the rain and gone today.

I think you're right on the fantail darter ID. Looks like one to me; the rows of tiny dark spots that look like lines is typical of them. I've kept darters in my aquarium many times over the years, but they feed almost entirely on tiny live aquatic insects, and it isn't easy to train them to eat fish food. Eventually some will get hungry enough to eat the small frozen critters (brine shrimp?) that you can buy in pet stores...they come in little cubes and you have to thaw and separate them before putting them in the aquarium. And since every other minnow or small fish in the aquarium loves them, most don't even make it to the bottom where the darters can get them. For the most part, I haven't had much luck with keeping darters healthy in my aquarium. Madtoms, however, make terrific aquarium fish. Though they'll spend most of the time hiding when the lights are on, they are very hardy in the aquarium and will eventually stop hiding and roam around. I've caught them when they were an inch long and kept them for years, until they got to be 6 inches long, longer than they probably ever get in the wild. The sunfish is definitely a bluegill/green hybrid.

According to "Reptiles and Amphibians of Missouri", there are two subspecies but both have dark spots. However, a lot of the ones I caught on Black River and on the Diversion Channel were lighter in color and the spots didn't show up much. They were mostly 8-10 inches long. The one in the picture looks exactly like the photo in that book, but not so much like the ones I caught. I believe mine were probably the Red River subspecies instead of the common species that we're talking about here. The Red River ones are only in the southern quarter of the state.

Guess we'll always wonder what might have been this season. What if MPJ had played the whole year? What if Harris or even Phillips had worked out at point guard? Heck, what if Barnett hadn't done something monumentally stupid, and what if Van Leer hadn't gotten hurt? It was obvious MPJ just didn't have his legs yet, no explosiveness whatsoever, and he got totally worn out playing that many minutes. Tilmon was the victim of a couple of questionable calls as usual, but also made a couple of stupid fouls as usual, and was not a factor except in a bad way. And Jontay seemed to be intimidated by the whole scene. Robertson hit some beautiful threes, but made two or three REALLY stupid, careless passes for turnovers. And they just weren't ready to play a team that pushed the ball down the floor that well off missed shots. But it was a fun year to watch them. We watched Tilmon (mostly) improve, Jontay become a force, Robertson and Barnett shoot lights out AND buy into Cuonzo's expectations of working extra hard on defense, Puryear work his butt off to get the most out of limited size and ability, Van Leer become a role player who always knew what to do even if he was a non-factor scoring, Nikko do some good things, and Geist may have been my favorite of all of them, because he gave you 100% plus for 30 plus minutes every game playing a position he shouldn't even have been playing, getting the absolute most out of his ability, becoming a good ball handler. He wasn't a point guard, but was forced to act like one. You can't learn to be an effective point guard in one year, you gotta have point guard instincts, skills, and understanding, and play the position for years. Excellent job coaching through all the turmoil by Cuonzo. Not many people thought the team would do any better than it did even WITH MPJ (and Harris and Phillips). I'm still not sure of Cuonzo's Xs and Os, but he apparently can recruit and he can motivate players, and seems like a fine man. Now...if only MPJ and Jontay would both decide to stay one more year...