Ceerqqq
Scout Team
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- Mar 16, 2018
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This is really the meta-issue behind the whole kerfuffle.I think that JB would be best served by saying what Dino usually (but not always) says: "we don't discuss guys who are not with our program. Next topic please."
Just move on. I am pretty much that way. I don't think about guys who leave unless they go to the NBA.
One thing I will say...and this is NOT about Richmond but rather players in general...we fans see them for a few minutes a week and think we know everything about their game. The coaches see them for several hours every day. How hard they work, how good they look in practice, what mistakes they make over and over in practice, what details the coaches have to talk with them about repeatedly, how often they make the same mistakes once they are inserted into a game, etc. It is a whole different world that we are not privy to.
Some fans like to imagine that coaching a team to success is simply a matter of identifying which players have the most 'potential' and them plugging them into the starting lineup, regardless of how experienced they actually are in playing with the other guys.
Oh yeah, and after that, give all the players deep on the bench lots of game PT to help them develop, whether or not the "best players" on the starting team might actually need those minutes more to iron out their mistakes. So when Kadary demonstrated certain athletic advantages over Joe last year, they started demanding that Boeheim start him.
Implicit in their criticism last year was the assumption that either 1) Jim Boeheim "couldn't see" that Kadary was the more talented/gifted player in spite of watching him perform every day, or that 2) he could see it, but had some kind of "misguided sense of loyalty to Joe" that was pushing him to willfully ignore 'obvious facts' and endanger the team's ability to optimally develop as a team because of it.
It's an astounding assumption to make, one that can only be embraced if you are completely ignorant of the complete set of variables that a coach needs to manipulate to get a team to play their best by the end of the season.
Because Boeheim sees it every year, he knows how much learning his best five need over the course of a season to eliminate the mistakes that are costing them wins. That's why he 1) gives his starters all the PT they need to develop, and 2) always gives the variable of experience more weight than other variables, even over raw athletic ability.
It blows my mind that fans who know almost nothing about coaching basketball can adopt a superior attitude toward a coach who's repeatedly demonstrated his ability to develop teams over the course of a season relying 100% on his own evaluations of all the variables at his disposal.
It leads them to dismiss his comments about players as incoherent butt-hurt spasms of excuse-making instead of actually listening to his assessments and giving him credit for being right in his judgments in the past.
Irony of ironies, the whole Kadary-based indictment of Boeheim's coaching skill last season occurred in the middle of a season where the man showed once again his stunning ability to turn whatever mix of talent he has to work with into a competitive unit that can beat some of the best teams in the country in the NCAAT.
Seriously, at mid-season NONE of Boeheim's critics could have imagined him coaching that team into a Sweet Sixteen appearance. That he did do so, doing it his way, once again vindicated his coaching wisdom over the carping of amateurs sitting in their living rooms.