George Mason’s roller coaster season is now over with a quarterfinal loss to St. Joe’s yesterday afternoon 68-49. Not the way they wanted to go out with such a poor display on offense. They were outscored 42-24 in the second half, shot under 30% from the field and were 2-for-25 on three-pointers on the day. Otis Livingston II struggled to only score eight points and only Jaire Grayer and Goanar Mar reached double figures. The relentless rebounding effort we saw on Wednesday wasn’t there in this one but they did grab more offensive rebounds than the Hawks.

Now it’s on to Part 2 of this “Two Year Season” and there’s plenty to be hopeful about looking forward to next season. Here are Dave Paulsen’s comments after the game:

“Next year, we’ll go from being young, small and lacking depth, to being older, with two seniors. We’ll have a four-year transfer player and we’ll have more experience, size and competition in practice,” Paulsen said. “Nothing’s guaranteed, but I feel comfortable that we’ll have the roster where I want to have it, in terms of guys who buy into our culture and have the size and athleticism to compete at a high level in the Atlantic 10.”

You, me and the rest of the fan base will debate those comments all off-season. Returning everyone will be huge because I think this group learned a lot from this season. The freshmen really developed and now Mason can add a legit big man in the starting lineup to allow the rest of the team to play at their more natural spots. Hopefully Jason Douglas-Stanley can help the three-point shooting problems we’ve seen this year and provide scoring depth off the bench. But the experience is the big key for next season, no more excuses about being young.

That’s not to say a lot has to improve from the team’s key players. Defensively they were they struggled to make stops late in games and it seemed as though they really lacked a solid on-the-ball type defender. With the makeup of the roster being a little different next year that will probably help but certain players need to know their roles better.

On offense I think we’ll see a much different approach than we did this year. Perhaps they will be able to run more of the offensive sets we’ve seen in Paulsen’s past days. We shouldn’t see them living and dying off three-pointers and we also shouldn’t see them relying on one or two guys to put points on the board. They should have better balance on regular basis next year.

Still plenty of question marks heading into ’18-’19 but there’s a lot of positive takeaways from this year.