Iâd also just add the thought: the very best coaches across all sport are almost always adjusting, trying to stay ahead of the trends, and adapting what they do with their team to best fit who they have on their team.
Theyâre also hyper self-reflective and self-critical. You show me a coach who looks at an offense like we trotted out last year and thinks, âwelp, I did everything I could and made all the right decisions.â Iâll show you a bad coach.
FWIW, I am pretty sure that wasnât CTBâs takeaway after last season, but nor should it be ours just because heâs, very correctly, beloved.
I donât think as fans, pointing out the obvious that CTB did not do a good job with the offense last year, is mutually exclusive with loving him as our coach and knowing that the pros FAR outweigh the cons. Weâre still going to isolate the variables some and talk about where we need to improve, just like he should be (and no doubt is), though.
yeah, I got you - itâs a pretty common line of thought though (re: because CTB does x that necessitates that itâs correct) that often spans across topics.
But the point isnât necessarily that you have to agree with my recommendations, itâs that the argument that there wasnât ANYTHING that could be done is fallacious.
Iâd also challenge that you needed the benefit of a full seasonâs worth of hindsight - a lot of these discussions were happening, ongoing, throughout the season. But, now that we do, concluding that things were done as well as they could have been⌠I donât see how one could get there.
And this ignores the fact that we donât know that nothing was done. I canât comment on everyone who frequents this forum, but I was never privy to staff meetings. I donât know what ideas were discussed. I donât know what ideas were rejected. I didnât attend practices. I donât know what was tried and what wasnât, or what worked and what didnât work. I donât know the substance of the staffâs evaluations of the players. What I do know is that Virginia struggled from behind the arc this past season. Aside from McKneely, there werenât many reliable options. If Groves wasnât hitting his shots, there werenât other viable options until Murray emerged at the end of the year. I also know that it is difficult to spread the floor and create spacing without multiple 3 point threats. (I also suspect that opposing coaches were salivating at the thought of leaving Dunn, Rohde, and Harris open behind the arc so that they might take the shot.) Finally, after skimming though your article linked above, I saw nothing which addressed the fact that Virginia didnât have enough reliable shooters on the roster. If you cannot shoot the ball, it doesnât matter what offense is in place. An,d McKneely wasnât enough by himself.
And, given all this, the fact that VIrginia finished 23-11 and 3rd in the conference suggests to me that the team overachieved this year.
I felt like for the first half of the season, TB was, like me, expecting Rohde to come out of his funk and be the player people thought he would be. Obviously he waited too long for that to happen, but I think for quite a while he thought it was going to happen (of course, I am projecting my mindset onto his - maybe nothing like that).
Sad Johnny is leaving. Obviously itâs a smart move on his part to take an NBA gig but to my understanding he was one of the more analytics-friendly members of the staff, which makes it a big loss for us. I hope we can replace him with someone similar to keep the old-timers honest.
A lot to unpack here but Iâd start by pointing out that your conclusion (the team overachieved this year) is not what weâre debating. Weâre debating the idea that CTB couldnât have improved the offense. FWIW, I think the team probably did overachieve compared to what an average coach would do - but I donât think it did for what CTB is capable of, but thatâs neither here nor there - thatâs a more reasonable, nuanced, discussion.
âWe donât know nothing was doneâ or what ideas were discussed is also not really relevant because they opted not to do those things.
We know what was tried in games and what wasnât. We know that the offensive struggles were real and significant. We know that we never tried something outside of our standard core offenses. We know that we didnât try to exploit mismatches with any regularity outside of the normal flow of the offenses. We know that we didnât do basic basketball things like throw the ball into Minor in the post with any regularity when we were slumping and see if he could get going. We know that we didnât run many if any designed plays to try to get Dunn lobs at the rim. We know that we played players (like Harris) whose efficiency was way below other options on the team. Thereâs a lot of just general basic basketball stuff that isnât overly complex and that isnât even âadapt an entirely new system mid-seasonâ that we didnât see us even try on the floor. So, practice is practice - but when your output is regularly under 50 points - the idea that none of those things could have possibly helped because CTB didnât decide to do them is a chasm of a stretch.
Practice. We DO know some things about practice. We know they practiced offense approximately 20-30% of the time (20% being the real approximation but erring on the side of generosity adding the range). This has been a known element thatâs out there, but Iâve been told that directly. Thatâs not speculation. So, if an offensive team is struggling, does practicing offense so little seem like itâs exhausting all options to improve the offense? We also know that, aside from a few wrinkles here or there (like the roll and replace), nothing significant outside of the three core offenses was implemented in practice and just not carried into game day. Which also doesnât sound like exhausting options to see if we could improve the offense (and even if we had practiced something different but it looked bad⌠why not give it a shot because the alternative was what it was).
To your other point - yes, shooting is important, but if you cannot shoot the ball (well) it absolutely still matters what offense you run and who you play. Saying otherwise is just throwing your hands up and saying, ânothing else I could doâ which isnât true.
Also, we had three shooters on the roster who shot 45% from three (if you round up for McKneely). Reece you couldnât sag off of entirely. One problem was, we played our 26% three-point shooter 25mpg and Murray 14mpg⌠and itâs not like we didnât know Murray could shoot or that he didnât get time pretty early in the mid-season. That wasnât an area we could have improved? Teams sagged off of Dunn but thereâs a lot you can do to keep him in motion, make sure his man is occupied following him, run more to free him up on back door cuts, lobs, etc. A lot other than hanging out around the three point line, letting his man sag, waiting for the offense to take a shot (likely not at the rim because of his man) and crash the glass - which is what he did the vast majority of the time. And we know, from both Dunn and CTB, that he was told to just crash the glass and focus on defense.
These are all individual tactical things that likely could have been improved with time and attention, but I donât really want to go into debating all of the different decisions and/or non-actions. Really, the reason I go in on this line of thought is just because of the logical issues with the mindset.
In order for us not to have been able to make improvements to the offense, none of any of these things above would have had to be able to provide any improvement to what we were doing, despite the fact that we didnât try them and that we didnât devote time to practicing them, and that theyâre pretty common basketball tactics - and CTB would have to know that with certainty without trying them just because⌠heâs himself. And thatâs just not a realistic depiction of how humans work. Sports and tactics are complicated and variable - and itâs one thing not to make significant changes when things are going well - but itâs another not to make significant changes when things are going abysmally and then to claim that there was nothing that could be done.
Put this way, one argument supposes that CTB is able to weigh all possible offensive options with his roster without practicing or trying them and then correctly determined that the three systems he always runs (and that have been scouted for over a decade by our opponents) were ideally suited to fit his roster, that more practice time wouldnât have mattered, that his lineups were optimized (even though eyes and data know they werenât), that standard basketball practices like trying to post up or intentionally attacking mismatches werenât going to improve things, and what we saw from the ongoing seasonal struggles including the CSU game was us actually squeezing the best possible offensive output from our group of guys.
The other much more plausible explanation is that, having limited time and resources, CTB made the assessment that his team would be better if he continued to do what they always have. Spend the bulk of the time on defense, instill those habits, and hope the offense would improve through repetition and comfort running the system (but not more than 20-30% of practice). Trust the process and press forward as we always have. Lean into defense; it travels. Potentially also thinking that trying something entirely new on offense would place too much emphasis on that side of the ball when, philosophically, we hang our hat on defense and donât want to lose that. CTB is very clearly a âstay the courseâ guy to both his credit and fault.
Now, a different debate would be whether or not the team as a whole was better because of that decision. Maybe the defensive attention was worth the offensive trade off. Thatâs still a huge stretch, IMO, but itâs a reasonable starting point.
But the idea that that was the optimized version of our offense last season given what the output was and everything we know about all of the options untried systemically and tactically, and just what we know about basketball in general⌠just isnât realistic.
And given recruits saying CTB is openly talking to them about changing, and reports about how much offense theyâre practicing this offseason, and how at least some changes are coming, it seems evident that CTB agrees (which is great news).
*Sorry - that was way too long of a response - went full flow and blacked out there for a moment, haha.
As a point of clarification, the 2019 lineup of Jerome-Guy-Hunter-Diakite-Huff looked amazing in part because a lot of their possessions together came in the second half against Syracuse:
And if the goal was to focus mostly on defense, why did we have uber-athletes Elijah and Bond getting splinters on the bench while guys like Rohde got consistently cooked trying to close out on amazing ACC athletes, like, for example (cough cough) TJ Power? Tony decided to lean into âchange feels ickyâ tendencies over his âI love defenseâ tendencies.
I am pretty much complete agreement with this. Also, the staff saw everything in the games which the fans did, plus what was happening in practice. Given the competence displayed over the past decade, I imagine that there were very valid reasons for the decisions made. And, lastly, I keep reading about the need to try something different, but I havenât seen much in the way of viable alternatives. For example, if teams are sagging off Dunn, no one is going to chase him around the floor. Lobs and backdoor cuts wonât be available. Lastly, I am unsure how Jacob Grovesâ shooting average should be viewed. It really wasnât indicative of his performances. For the most part, he was either hot or cold. I am not sure he ever hit for his average. For the most part, he was over 50%, 60%, or, even 70% from behind the arc, or he had a goose egg in the 3 point column. When he was hot, Virginiaâs offense looked good.
If you take the top two best players on this years roster, would they be any better than the top two in any year prior under TB? Probably only Bennettâs first year (w/Michael Scott hurt) off the top of my head.
Whoever is our âtop dogâ this year is probably the least talented âtop dogâ for a Bennett team in my opinion.
