I see your logic on the signing. It looked to me like Coach wanted the ball in Henry's hands as the initiator. He put Larry in the corner out of the way to open the driving lanes for Henry. That was all dandy as long as Henry made the right decisions. But I disagree that he "needed" a ball handler such as Peterson. I think he thought he had what he needed on the floor.
I think Larry was under-utilized so Henry could handle the ball most of the time. We'll see if Henry can "adjust" to D1 next year, and that's what I'm going to consider as the problem.
But if we are going to talk about what this team needed then it's not necessarily the team offense. We needed more consistent shooting from outside (Neese and Hobbs and Thomas) and layups (Thomas and Larry). We needed rebounding and defense (everyone). We needed more size inside.
And, for the record, I think Larry was our most consistent player on rebounding and defense. I don't know why SSOM is so down on him. We had plenty of major problems in rebounding, fouling, defense, you name it. Besides not being able to make shots, we were beat all over the floor. And most of that was not Larry's fault. I thought he had more consistent hustle and productivity than several other players.
I won't name them but we had deficiencies in shooting by a few players and we had problems with TO's with a few players. We just need to fix that. I'm hoping some of that was the adjustment to D1. I don't know what happened to our veteran.