The Dude wrote:

GW needs more talent, its a very easy simply plain fact. 
For most of the year we had 2 good players, now Battle went down and Lindo has arrived so the number stayed at two and will eventually go back to 3. (4 depending on your thoughts on Moyer) 

Lindo has already in 2 games, made more plays than the non Battle/Bishops collectively all season

The Physical mismatch in the Dayton VCU games was SUPER clear, its a small miracle we were actually in those games relatively late.  The problem isn't X&O Coaching, it is a personnel issue, and crying about that on every game thread doesn't make it any more true.  NOW... if we still have a huge personnel issue, in a couple of years then it IS a coaching issue because Coaching in College Hoops means recruiting well.

This is of course why guys who stuck around forever like Martelli go up and down, the talent changes the caliber of the Coaching doesn't, or in the case of Hobbs, a down start a huge UP and then a big downturn, same Coach very different talent.

Or you know, any GW Coach in history, or any College coach, period.  Can great/bad Coaches make some difference at the margins? of course, but the sport like every sport is about talent, mismatches, and we are going to badly mismatched against every top A10 team this year, just as was predicted by every coach and media pre-season
 

You have said this presumably thousands of times in hundreds of different ways.  It's certainly tough to argue that less talent is a better formula than more talent, so kudos to you on uncovering this insightful nugget.

That said, there is far more to this that what you are stating.  You have to be able to create a system, have the players buy into that system, learn to play together as a team and establish continuity.  If you approach each season with wholesale changes to your roster, it makes it difficult to achieve the needed continuity.  Even with Calipari and Coach K plucking the very best high school players in the country, they have far from dominated the national scene.  One could easily argue that Coach K had more success keeping players 3 and 4 years than in this one-and-done era.  In fact, look at the early 1980's team that launched Coach K (Dawkins, Amaker, Alarie, and of course, Jay Bilas) and you'll find that this team took their lumps early on.  It wasn't from a lack of talent.  It was from a lack of experience playing together.

Want GW examples?  Hobbs brought in Pops, Mike Hall, Omar, Dokun and Alex K. for his second season and the team went from 12-16, 5-11 in the conference to 12-17, 5-11 in the conference.  And that team also had Chris Monroe and TJ Thompson.  The following season, Chris was gone but JR and Carl arrived.  More importantly, Mike/Pops/Omar had a season under their belts and were learning to play together.  Their sophomore season, the team improved to 18-12, 11-5 in conference.  Mo Rice joined the following season and the team won its first A10 Championship, going 22-8, 11-5 in conference.  Mo was quite good but could not be considered singularly responsible for the improvement in 2004-05.  By now, Pops, Mike, Omar, JR and Carl all had two seasons playing together.  The following season saw the team go 27-3.

In 2012-13, Mike Lonergan brought in 6 freshmen, of which four would turn out to be Joe, Pato, Kevin and Kethan.  Let's all remember Zeke Armwood who became eligible that season.  The result of all this talent:  a 13-17 season (10-21 a year prior) and a 7-9 conference record (5-11 a year prior).  Some improvement to be sure but nothing to write home about.  How could this be with all of this talent?  The answer is that this talent needed to learn to mesh, or play together.  The following season, the only notable addition was Mo Creek and that team reached the NCAA's, going 24-9 and 11-5 in the conference.  Could the addition of talented Mo Creek be solely responsible for an increase of 11 wins over the prior year, given that all of the other talent was already in place?  Of course not.  The fact is that the team grew together, developed, hit the weight room, became more familiar with how to play with one another, and gained the knowledge of how to best mask their teammates weaknesses. 

Today, the nucleus of this team is in place with James, Jamison, Ricky, Amir (pending health), Tyler, Lincoln, Chase, Hunter, and Noel all being able to play with one another for two more seasons at a minimum, and three high school players on track to join the team within the next two years.  We of course could lose some players to transfer but losing 1-2 of these players would be very different than losing 4-5 of these players.  The key again is to establish continuity and have these players learn how to play together.  Taking your lumps when a team is first learning how to play together is nothing new.  My sense is that there is more than enough talent on this team right now, and one can only get excited about the newcomers scheduled to arrive, to believe the future is bright.  It's hard to watch the team consistently lose but I feel that if we can keep this team together, the dividends will follow.  If it becomes the norm to see 4-5 guys leave the program annually, particularly if these guys are rotation players, it will be very hard to watch this program continue to "start over" each season. 

GWRising wrote:

We can talk X;'s and O's all day but if we are going to shoot 21% from three, 37% from the floor and 64% from the line, no amount of coaching is overcoming that against a team like Dayton. 
 

If you are saying that there is no correlation between shooting percentage and coaching, then I will have to disagree with you on that one Mayhem.  Its been a refrain of mine throughout the season that look at they take compared with the shots that we take.  The reason our shooting percentage was so low against Dayton was the quality of shots we were taking.  Although there are some nights in which even the good shots aren't falling, that certainly wasn't the case on Sunday.  Many of the shots were three point shots that appeared to be taken with the hope of drawing a foul, which either didn't happen or wasn't called.  Many other shots were rushed due to the impending expiration of the shot clock.   Others were just bad shots.   Or hero ball shots.  Maybe someone should remind Seymore that it still counts as 3 points, whether you are an inch behind the line or 6 feet behind the line.   This issues should be fixable by running an offense designed to get each player the ball at a spot in which they are most comfortable.   A look at our assist numbers indicates that hasn't happened.  This is both on the coach (who draws up the offense) and the point guards, who are running the offense, as well as the players getting to know each other a little better.    As for Dayton's high shooting percentage, many of their shots were difficult makes.   Crutcher is quite the gifted player who threw in some remarkable baskets.  But a far higher number were wide open looks where the degree of difficulty was very low.  Again, this goes to coaching.
 

Last edited by Long Suffering Fan (1/18/2021 2:07 pm)

And, not so fast LSF.  Please don't attribute GWRising's remarks to me.

That said, LSF's remarks are certainly more nuanced than GWRising's.  Sure, you can always look at poor free throw shooting as a cause for losing (or winning) because the opponent has zero influence over this.  When it comes to differentiating between poor coaching and poor shooting percentages, this is a lot trickier.  Would shooting percentages have been higher if cold shooters played less and replaced by shooters who may have picked up the slack?  Would shooting percentages have been higher if more plays resulting in greater numbers of high percentage shots were run or shots that were not as frequently contested were taken?  It stands to reason that coaching would impact these types of things.  

At the same time, if players were missing high percentages of open shots or shots that were not contested, it would be far easier to point the finger at the players.

So merely looking at percentages without further analyzing WHY the percentages were what they were does not tell the full story.  LSF commented that he felt that most of our missed shots were not of the wide open variety meaning that Dayton's defense outcoached our offense.  Based on what i watched yesterday, I would tend to agree. 

BTW, this is simply a commentary on yesterday's game.  It does not mean that JC can't coach and it has nothing to do with letting bread bake.

GWRising, let's try not to turn this into "I'm rubber and your glue....", OK?  I am not going to rewatch the game.  I have offered my perception which happens to be the same perception that LSF had.  Besides, if I did rewatch the game and reported back that say 70% of our shots were contested and 30% were open misses, you'd just say that the reason we lost was because we missed 30% of our wide open shots.  And if I said 80/20, you'd say we lost because we missed our open shots which were at 20%.  So where would this get us? 

Serious question could those who are interested please opine on JC’s ability to make useful half-time 
adjustments.I know talent still plays a role here but I’m hoping to get a better sense of his ability to 
make changes on the fly.

In any game there are going to be a percentage of shots that are ill-advised or were the result of being put in a bad spot (shot clock running down). I don't believe that number was any more or less than previous games. Yes, we took and missed some ill-advised shots. But we also missed enough that were open that we should make at a higher clip..

As for defense, that's another story LSF. I agree that the Achilles' heel for this team is time and score stops along with turnovers. If you want to point to two things that make our record 3-9 instead of 9-3 it would be that and 15 turnovers per game. Those are the two things that must be fixed for us to improve. The other thing would be preventing offensive rebounds for our opponents. If you focus on things that give us more possessions, you will find that you can offset cold shooting nights (which are going to happen). There is a tried and true recipe there - guard your ass off, don't give up offensive rebounds and don't turn it over. With the amount of offensive firepower we have (assuming a healthy Battle), we will win a lot of games if we do those things. Our opponents currently have a -24 turnover margin and and +14 offensive rebounding edge. They've attempted 60 more FGs. That's a problem.

keithgreene wrote:

You want to talk about coaching adjustments?  Look at the difference from game 1 and then game 2 vs. Duquesne.

That is true.  But overall Keith, have you been satisfied with the in game or even game to game adjustments so far?

The issue when you have a broad-based message board is that some opinions and thoughts are in fact more challenging to accept.  Bishop is a great example.  Despite the turnovers, despite not every shot being an advised one, the answer is not to play James considerably less.  Perhaps a few extra minutes so he can catch his breath and learn from the bench.  But playing James 27 minutes per game is not in GW's best interest.

Rather than patronize or even worse, condescend to those who comment about adjustments, why not understand that there are more than several here who do understand the sport a bit.  There were real adjustments made during the second meeting with Duquesne.  Moyer did a great job on Carey.  Duquesne's bigs consistently passed out of double teams in the first meeting without turning the ball over, so we stopped double teaming them the next day.  That's a great example of an adjustment.

So, what should we try differently against Dayton tomorrow?  Putting Moyer on Crutcher for additional minutes might be a start but Matt can not do this alone.  How about trying Lincoln Ball who will give up some quickness but who understands positional defense as well as anyone in our backcourt?    How about not surrendering the wide open corner 3's which Dayton feasted on largely in the first half?  We did a better job of taking away these shots after halftime but tomorrow, this needs to be a point of emphasis all game long. (Dayton was 7-12 from 3 by halftime, 2-8 from 3 in the second half.)  Ibi Watson had a quiet game against us on Sunday but he is more than capable of going off; we need to make sure to remember this.

With regard to in-game adjustments, it is a bit surprising that this has come up recently since GW came back pretty impressively against both VCU and Dayton.  I would say that "how we start the game adjustments" are more in order.