My frustration is that this is all simply a failure of roster construction, talent acquisition and player retention. He’s still a great strategist and in-game coach and has one of the best minds in the game. But he’s struggled to assemble the kind of talent he needs to execute what he wants to do on both offense and defense. He should listen to his assistant coaches more on roster construction and talent retention. I’m sure they were begging him to handle Kadary, Woody, Griffin and others differently. And it’s an abject failure to have the gift of the transfer portal and then not take full advantage of it like he failed to last season. We needed some players who were good at both offense and defense.
i feel like overall...JB has become a "system guy" (not sure if he was always like that - I dont think he was as he didn't used to play zone all the time)
he has "fine-tuned" his system...so that it is the same year to year. there are plusses and minuses to this.
I guess most coaches have a system that doesnt change...but not all do.
Personally, I think it is better to fit the system to the talent available ...not vice versa.
when JB has his perfect roster...his system is great.
when he doesnt have his matching roster...its not really working.and since talent acquisition hasnt been good lately ...his players arent good enough to play his system accurately...and he doesnt have answers to that.
his approach has gotten more and more robotic and more and more autopilot...more detached from the reality of what his team is doing.
For instance, puttin gjoe back in vs UVA was pretty much game over...but in his eyes, he did it anyway. not sure why.
rigidly doing things because that is his system or whatever doesnt seem the way forward. i think there is the possibility that the system is just a crutch. it makes it easier to make decisions and schemes...without having to actually think.
without a bench, it makes it very hard to be a good ingame strategist...but i think this fromer strength is not as strong as it once was for JB.
For the life of me, cannot understand how anyone could watch the houston vs syracuse sweet sixteen game and go less athletic with next years roster. it shows that there is just a failure to accurately see what is happening with the program on the court imo.
there are good things about the system...when its highly polished, the team functions very well on defense and the coach can impact games very well.
but now at this point, teams like uva and teams like colgate now apparently, know how to attack the system and its weak points and they can adjust to it better than the team itself can. its become a weakness when it was supposed to be a strength.
slight adjustments like going 1-1-3 threw opponents off...it shows that being unpredicatable and not sticking to one set way...has a lot of benefits.
is JB only around now because he couldnt coach any other way? is the job so hard that he needs his system to even stay around? because right now it doesnt seem the system he employs is truly enhancing win chances...