2022 NCAA Tournament Thread

When we do finally break through it will be that much sweeter.

 

Olivier being able to step out would have helped open up more space. He can hit the top of the key 3, wing or corner but we don't have another 4 or 5 who can so the defender just sags and clogs up space and lanes.
If BHH stays, he should perfect that shot this summer among other things. It's an easier shot than many of the midranges he takes.

 

Un is 100% right. The rest of you are just being apologists, likely, for fear of TN running him off and putting our bball team through the same clown show as football. Understandably so. Or you’re just stupid.

The struggles in March are 100% Barnes. How many years do you need to see it in order to believe it? 5? 10? 15? 25?

The “just unlucky” stuff is particularly amusing.

The man had KD, an NBA Hall of Famer, and couldn’t get out of the second round. The. Second. Round.

He’s won exactly one (1) tourney game against a higher seed. Ever. In his career.

This is what got him ran from Texas.

He just got out coached by Juwan Howard, himself a complete clown, and with an utterly mediocre Michigan team, no less. Y’all probably think they lost 14 games by “bad luck”, too.

Barnes hasn’t recruited good big men since he’s been here. Michigan exploited that yesterday. While the two frosh are promising, they need years of work to even hope to be somewhat as good as several freshmen big men were this year. Turns out that having really big, tall, athletic bodies in the middle helps to win basketball games. They can get you a block shots, get boards, body up on other big men….and get you high percentage buckets….you know, like when you’re shooting 11% from 3 in a tight tourney game.

How many more generational guards and wings do y’all think we’ll land - and completely waste, again - while Barnes transforms those frosh bigs from raw & mediocre to polished & slightly less mediocre?

Barnes is a truly terrible offensive coach. That’s why his teams routinely - routinely - go several minutes a game without a live basket. That’s why he had absolutely no answers yesterday when “shoot 60% from three” and “count on other team beating themselves” didn’t work. It is unlucky that shots didn’t fall….but that happens to every team on a given night…so they do something else. Barnes just claps harder.

Good defense no longer beats good offense. Barnes will always be severely limited because of his emphasis on defense and terrible offense.

And his teams don’t just look bad, but consistently overwhelmed in big games. Scared, even. You knew three minutes into yesterday’s game that they were beat, didn’t you?

You think it’s bad luck that he’s 1-6 vs Pearl?

But maybe if we just hang around long enough, we’ll just good luck ourselves into a deep run. All we’ll need is for several teams of increasingly greater skill to beat themselves for 5-6 consecutive games, or simply have Barnes coach both teams. Then we’d have a chance.

But, but, but…..he did win the first SECT in 40 years! Yeah, he beat Miss St. who later fired their coach, a truly overrated KY team (whose next game was getting got bounced by a 15-seed) and a leg-weary and utterly mediocre aTm team who didn’t even qualify for the AA Tourney. Yay? Barnes is awesome? And y’all are going on about his bad luck?

I get it. He’s s great dude, excellent leader, awesome culture, truly likable in every way - save winning games when it matters. You just like being invited, thst’s enough. And maybe it should be, given the lowly status of poor ol’ Tennessee. I mean, it ain’t like we’re paying Barnes Top 10 money - $5.2M/yr with $1M+ in bonuses. That’s $5.2M per NCAA Tourney win, which is great work if you can get it, I suppose.

I’ve been told that you get what you pay for, but not always, I guess.

Oh well, clearly, it’s just damn bad luck.

Chin up - I’m sure that we’ll get’em next (regular) season.

 

Would love for HH to develop the Wayne Chism trail 3. That’s who he should aim to model his game after.

 

I completely agree here, and think it was the difference for us offensively. I saw a few “open” looks like people are saying, but even some of those were with guys flying in who were long enough to make you feel them. The refs were letting the boys play for the most part yesterday too which made it hard to dribble by and draw contact. More functional bigs would help us take these drives and turn them into offensive rebounds/putbacks imo. Again, matchup issue/Achilles heel for us in the post.

 

“Good defense no longer beats good offense” is false.

Kentucky had a top 5 offense in the country. They were 162nd in defensive efficiency over the final 10 games. That’s what opens the door for a St Pete to beat you.

 

What do you expect UT to do? Write a $22 million check to get rid of a basketball coach?

 

Yes - plus we likely rushed a few of those open looks because they were making us uncomfortable all night behind the arc.

 

No. Of course not.

I’m not advocating for Barnes to be ran off, at all. He’s fantastic for our program - in every category except winning when it matters. Something to be said for that.

I’m saying let’s be honest about his own, very real, persistent and so-thoroughly-true-as-to-long-ago-be-undeniably-self-evident shortcomings. It’s not bad luck and they aren’t going to go away unless he makes fundamental changes, and which he has thus far seemed unwilling to make. Or even recognize.

 

Yep. He will always need to be facing the basket to be most comfortable and could be nasty if he develops the 3 and make himself a lot of money. It's the only way he makes an nba squad and needed next year coming off a top 20 offense that lead the league in assists and 3s per game.

 

Both things can be true, it’s hard for a HC to overcome his team shooting 2-18 from three point range, and yesterday was just another in a long line of tournament disappointments for Barnes. In 26 tournament appearances he’s over performed his seed exactly once. While under performing his seed twelve times.

 

I didn’t say “good offense can overcome no defense”.

 

He made quite a lot of fundamental changes this year. Y’all wanted him to stop relying so much on the mid range game and go to more 3 point shooting. He did that.

 

I do think he’s changed up his game this year. We shot over 800 3 pointers this after only going for at most 650 all years prior (many under/at 600). I think that was an emphasis this season from the jump and has been my complaint with his offense since we got housed by Auburn in the SEC championship back when. This may end up being an outlier, but it was actually something I was glad to see despite how shitty we looked doing it at the beginning of the year.

 

Barnes has been a bad offensive coach. Barnes changed his offense significantly this year, and it was actually fairly good by the end of the year. But they were held back by the lack of quality in the post, enough that one disaster night from the outside—coupled with two opposing players having excellent games—was enough to end it.

I give Barnes immense credit for the evolution on offense. Should he have done it earlier? Of course. But I don’t really expect a guy at his age to change at all.

The recruiting in the post is a real problem though. And to be fair, Huntley-Hatfield is the highest-rated post we’ve signed and is still 18, so maybe he turns into something. But apart from that, it’s been all multi-year projects, one of which turned into an NBA player and the rest of which have been split between “decent by their senior year” and “left the team.”

(and “decent by their senior year” oversimplifies a guy who was dominant on D and mediocre on offense, as well as a guy who had flashes of dominance but didn’t have the body got Covid twice and never fully recovered, but broad brushstrokes here)

 

Ah. Okay. So how do we get better?

 

For the record I think the offense improved when we actually started taking more mid ranged jumpers. Mainly JJJ and Chandler.

 

We did have a plan when shooting went south. The plan was to drive to the basket with Chandler. It worked multiple times, and then it didn’t, twice, at the end of the game. He missed 2 in a row and then fouled on one possession, and then Dickinson threw him off on another, and he got stuffed by the rim.

I don’t have a problem putting the ball in the hands of our best and hottest player to try to finish a game. It just didn’t work.

 

Barnes hires an offensive guru assistant coach or we wait till he retires which is not far away. He has the program in a place where finding a top quality coach should not be hard.

 

I wouldn't have had anyone other than Chandler shooting at the end of the game either