On ESPN.
He said his fanbase is upset he has played too many guys early this season.
Izzo says he needs to play everyone to
develop the players and develop a bench.
He was basically saying the non conference is get to better and developing your player.
He said with covid you need your players ready to play in case you lose anyone for 2 weeks.
The man has a point, particularly in COVID times. I'd prefer to see JB using more guys as a general rule but there are three things I feel are far too often left out of this discussion:
1) There is no direct line between PT early and improvement. Yes, I would agree, that it's hard to really simulate game minutes without actually playing in games. That said, you can also improve outside of games and there is absolutely no guarantee that giving guys minutes makes them key pieces later in the season. Fab was forcefed minutes but stunk his whole freshman year. He came back as an animal as a soph. Waiters was better than Fab by a longshot as a frosh but was a whole different player as a sophomore. Even as a frosh, Waiters played at least 10 minutes in our first 13 games and 9 minutes in our 14th game, yet he really struggled throughout conference play before blowing up against Marquette in the tourney. I'm not sure what that says. But you're not guaranteed meaningful contributions or wins by spreading minutes around.
2) There really is no reason, if you have a solid 7.5-man rotation, to *need* to go to your bench. A good, versatile forward and a good, versatile guard with a serviceable big man should be roughly the rotation you go with in big games. It's pretty rare that teams don't cut down the rotation in conference play, and cut it down even further in big games or postseason games.
3) You need to show something when you get the opportunity. The fact that people are still, to this day, miffed about Goodine not getting more minutes is utterly unfathomable to me. I really like the kid and think he'll be a solid piece at Providence, but when he got opportunities last year he contributed very little. His handle was OK, not great, he really struggled shooting the ball, wasn't going to be beating people off the dribble often and while he's a better defender to the eye than Buddy and Joe, his defensive metrics (small sample size alert) weren't real exciting either. I mean, if he walked onto the floor and showed a smooth handle and was breaking some guys down from time to time, I get it more. But we saw zero from him that approached exciting in terms of his potential in year 1.
What's the right answer? I'm not sure. I'd certainly like to see Bras and Anselem/Edwards get some run to see if there is anything there for this season, but the notion that people are losing their collective minds over it confounds me.
