This is a review of the last five years in the big picture. I think JT3 is a great recruiter and good developer of students and a very good person to head a program. I think he’s average though at in-game tactical coaching. Sure some of the time he does well, but far too much of the time he does not and I think it’s 1 of his main areas of improvement.
We also for 5 years have had the same problems with fundamentals. Outside of the Jeff Green/Hib/Jonathan Wallance tandem (two of whom already had top-rate fundamentals when they arrived) in 06 and 07, we’ve had the same problems with fundamentals. Since 2007, we have for the most part underperformed based on our talent, including 4 early exits in a row in tourney play, plus a first round NIT exit. That’s 5 years in a row, and the coaching staff needs to improve its approach to teaching and instilling fundamentals, and to in-game coaching:
FUNDAMENTALS
A) Rebounding. For 5 years we have not boxed out more than about a third of the time. Even when we do, most of the time it’s half-hearted boxing out. Boxing out needs to take place quickly (or you lose 2-3 feet which can be the difference in getting the rebound, it needs to be done right or the guy goes to the side of you, and it needs to be done hard - you press against the guy, not just resist him pushing you. Porter helped the rebounding this year, but 1 guy cannot do it alone.
When we give up around 8 more rebound, that’s gives them 8 extra possessions, and roughly 7 to 8 extra points. It’s hard to go far in the tourney when you start the game off down 8 points.
B) Leaving good shooters open. For 5 years we have far too often left the other team’s best shooters open from 3. Even leaving a good shooter wide open from 3 means instead of hitting 33% of them, he’ll hit 50%. It’s like we treat all 5 of their guys as the same. I have not seen this change.
C) Our centers starting with the ball beyond the 3 point line where they can’t hit a shot. It wastes 10 seconds of time, and means we have 2 passes that can be picked off – the one to him and the one that he has to make. They’re 5 feet off him, so we’re playing 4 vs. 5 guys for 10 seconds – about 1/3rd of the shot clock. Our shooting percentage probably doubles when our center gets the ball within two feet of free throw line or closer. I’d say we score about 30% of the time when our center has the ball beyond the 3 point line, and about 60% of the time when we do cuts, back doors, picks (including off the ball picks which we don’t do enough of still), and/or drives (whether for layups or dishing it to open guys).
Another smaller byproduct of the above is the center naturally starts deciding he will drive from way up there. When he manages to make a couple of drives during the regular season, he then starts thinking he can do this when needed. When the post-season comes, he gets called for charges or turns the ball over trying to do the same. They don’t have the dribble skills to pull up and pass to a guy for an open 3. They also often don’t have the soft touch to consistently finish on long drives.
Releted, sometimes guys like Lubick who can’t hit 3s play beyond the 3 point line, putting us a man down as his guy plays 6 feet off him. Playing 4 vs. 5 players for about 5 to 10% of the total game puts us down several points before the game starts.
C) Taking 3s from beyond the NBA 3 point line, sometimes 5 feet back. Players should learn to take 3s when you’re close to the line. Play at the line, don’t play 3 feet back, so when the ball comes to you, you’re ready with a half second to take the shot.
D) Taking rushed 3 point shots under pressure. We like almost everybody else shoot twice as good when the guy is not rushing it or doesn’t have a guy in his face.
Between the above, about half or more of our 3s are bad ones. If we take 16 in a game, that means 8 bad 3s, and means we start each game down about 3 points if not more.
We many times make up for being down 10 or more points before the game starts by our overall talent level, effort and the high shooting percentage when we do cuts, picks and drives.
All of the above have happened since JT3 arrived. We can now say for sure it’s a coaching problem. Part-way through the season it might make sense. If we are still doing it at the end of the year, the coaches are off. If the coaches, every time any of the above happen in a practice, blow the whistle and make everybody runs 4 laps, all of the above would be over by half way through the season. Likewise, when they blow off any fundamentals in a game, pull them, let them know and sit them for 1-2 minutes, and keep doing it until doing fundamentals is a habit.
The reason why Porter excels, even though others are more athletic than him, is the fundamentals are in his muscle memory and his blood. By the end of 7 months of coaching, the coaches should have the other players much closer to the same. It’s why Mike Brey and many other coaches frequently get more than they should out of their teams. Coaches need to force players to change and learn good habits.
You can’t say we don’t have talent this year. We have talent 9 deep and we should definitely make it to the Sweet 16, and have a good shot at the Elite 8, and if coached well and a couple things fall our way, we could go to the championship game. Porter and Whittington are out of the box talents, and Twawick, Starks and Thompkins are good too. Hollis, Clark and Sims are also of course talented. The #10 preseason pick was based on people not knowing how good our 4 freshmen were going to be, and not realizing how good Sims was. Plus Sims started the year strong, so you can’t say our coaches really improved him in season. You also can’t say we haven’t had talent in the other years when guys like Hib and Monroe are 1st round NBA picks, and had good players around them.
The main reason for our declines in the last third of the seasons are that other teams get better through the season and master their fundamentals, and we either stay the same or go down some, and have not fixed our fundamentals. Interestingly, it’s pretty regularly the same fundamentals.
The other core area is JT3s in-game tactical coaching, which I rate him a C at. Particularly I think he needs to:
1) Find mismatches and exploit them continually until the other team makes a change to stop it. We have a very tall starting team and are bound to have mismatches, and we should go after the mismatches early on and not stop until they can regularly stop it. This means we might pass it to Hollis Thompson 8 times down the court in a row if he has 3 to 4 inch advantage. If he’s not in good position the first time, get it back to him.
I rate us a 2 out of 10 at doing this at present and is an area that could increase our chances of going to the final 4, and for that matter making it through the first two games.
I find we have had a fear for the years JT3 has been here of passing the ball into the post. This year has been our best year of being willing to pass it into the post, in part because it seems like Otto and Whit aren’t afraid of it. And hopefully that keeps up so we use our height advantages to win some games. That has to come from the coaches.
2) A related but different phenomenon is finding the guy with the hot hand. If someone is hot, we should keep getting them the ball more often. If you ever played hoops, you know what I mean. Some games you’re hot and you’ve got it. Other games you don’t. The coach should train the team that exploiting this fact should be a regular thing. Players will like that if they’re hot they get it more. And that if they’re not and they get it somewhat less, they won’t worry because they know their time will come. While I hate Cuse, it seems like they work this angle more than we do. When some guy there like Gerry Mac is hot, they work it like a dagger. We’re probably a 5 out of 10 on this, better than the mismatches thing, yet lots of room for improvement.
If a guy who’s hot gets 14 shots and makes 8, instead of only getting 7 shots and making 4. And some guys who are cold get the other 7 shots and only make 2, that’s 5 points and can win or lose some games.
3) If guys are not cutting hard, don’t have their hands up and out on the zone D, are not playing on their toes in man-to-man D, or aren’t getting down the court quickly on offense and back quickly on d, then he should a) put in fresh legs and give them a rest; b) signal to the guy that if he doesn’t need a rest, he needs to amp it up.
With a 9-deep bench we should be always have fresh bodies going 100%. It’s not the players fault if their bodies start to let up 10% or 20%. It’s the coaches role. We see this when the players start passing back and forth on the perimeter or they do cuts that aren’t fast enough to get open or throw the defense off. They’re cutting because they know motion is better but it’s not full tilt and they don’t get open and the D is not phased at all adjusting to it.
Multiple fast cuts, mixed in with some picks and good passing is unstoppable for us. We are a top 8 team when we do that. When we don’t, we are more like a team in the 20 to 30 range. Pretty easy to guard. We still have a chance because of our defense, but we’re basically a team that doesn’t go past the 2nd round and a good amount of the time gets upset in the first round.
If we get the ball on offense and the player isn’t jogging with a spring in their step, they probably aren’t ready to go balls to the wall. You also see it on rebounds and loose balls. A big key to the 2-3 zone is the whole D have their arms up and wide to both cut down the passing lanes and also it helps pysch out the other team. The other key is quickly shifting with the ball so that there are no open shots. View Cuse and those are probably the 2 of the 3 biggest things that make their zone tick. In the 2nd half against Cincy, our players had their arms down too much creating big holes in the zone.
4) Speaking of the zone, the other thing we sometimes do wrong on it is we come out way too far. Cuse has a great zone because they keep it tight. They only come out far on the guy with the ball, and even on that guy, they don’t come out further than he can take a good shot. They don’t overplay you and let you go by them easily. The other benefit is that if the guy on the ball isn’t way out, and the opponent passes it, that defender is not out of position, he’s already within range of being able to help out the other guys in the zone.
We seem to do this right about 2/3rds of the time and sometimes we come out too far both on the ball and off the ball. It’s a pourous zone and much easier to beat. It’s probably a natural tendency of guys wanting to make things happen, but it hurts us. The second Thompson sees them go off track, he needs to holler something they know in advance means they need to tighten it up. Let the other team take bad shots from 3 feet outside the 3 point line and shoot themselves in the foot. And it keeps you ready to stop them from taking good 3 pointers or dribble driving to create 2 on 1s that kill you.
The difference between doing the above right 100% of the time and 2/3rds of the time can be a key difference at this time of year. I guess this one should go into fundamentals, vs. tactics.
5) Press. I’m less sure about this one, but with a team that’s 9 deep, it seems like we could press more often and create more turnovers, take time off their possesions so they end up with worse shots, mess with their heads and tire them out. We’re fast, we’re tall and we’re deep, so it doesn’t seem like there could be a better team to tactically work this to our advantage. At the very least it seems we should 2 man press nearly the whole game against most opponents, and mix in some full-court press.
Ditto that our offense goes into standing/light cutting mode and we get poor shots. The other team typically have been told for 3 days to not fall for the back doors so when that’s gone, our offense often fails. If we don’t take advantage of mismatches and hot hands, and lots of motion/hard cuts and picks, the end result is an early exit for us.
We seem to do great in the first third of the year when playing against teams who haven’t seen us, and who haven’t got their fundamentals down yet. When back doors are not there, we need multiple cuts mixed in with multiple picks. But we’re only ready to do that kind of motion half the time. I think some of it comes from our coach not making it mandatory during the regular season, plus he should be hollering for it from the sidelines, and after whistles and in time-outs
I like JT3 as a person and as the type of person to head a program from an integrity perspective, so I’m not calling for his exit. That said, I’m tired of watching the same things over and over each year. Every year I find myself watching fewer games because of how I know the season probably going to end, unless we happen to be hot enough from 3 to overcome our systematic problems.
I more enjoy having a less talented team that overachieves via fundamentals and great in-game coaching that bows out in the 2nd round after having risen above their combined talent level.
I would gladly welcome anybody taking the above points, modifying them as much as you like and mailing them to the members of the coaching staff. I also would love people to chime in on what they think are the 3 worst areas of fundamentals for us, and where JT3's in game coaching needs to improve.