This is what you get

Quick, outside of Rose and Evans, who never played together, name a meaningful NBA player from Cal's tenure in Memphis.

 

UT IE 95 and the rest of the mental invalids over at VN flat nailed that. Got the whole thing about Bruce Pearl being on Bill Self's level as a coach correct, as well.

 

Somewhere, Billy Ratliffe is laughing his ass off. Elsewhere, Clint Stoerner is sobbing.

 

Come on. You know as well as I do that guys get to the Final Four with starting lineups comparable to Carmelo Travieso, Edgar Padilla, Donta Bright, Dana Dingle, and Marcus Camby every day. It's not like Cal took over a jerkwater program that had the worst overall record in all of D-I for the decade prior to his arrival and got them to the Final Four.

 

Good God, I am defending Cal.

Since the 95-96 seasons, he has gone to 4 Final Fours (unofficially).

Off the top of my head and a little help from wikipedia, here are the other coaches to accomplish that since the 95-96 season.

Izzo
Coach K
Williams
Calhoun
Pitino

Awful coach. I tell you what.

 

Dajuan Wagner (6th, 2002 NBA Draft)
Earl Barron (Undrafted, 2003 NBA Draft)
Antonio Burks (36th, 2004 NBA Draft)
Shawne Williams (17th, 2006 NBA Draft)
Rodney Carney (16th, 2006 NBA Draft)
Darius Washington, Jr. (Undrafted, 2006)
Derrick Rose (1st, 2008 NBA Draft)
Joey Dorsey (33rd, 2008 NBA Draft)
Chris Douglas-Roberts (40th, 2008 NBA Draft)
Tyreke Evans (4th, 2009 NBA Draft)
Robert Dozier (60th, 2009 NBA Draft)

CDR, Dozier, and Dorsey were all extremely talented and on his later teams, which are the ones he took deep into the tournament. I don't know if they have made an impact since being drafted or not, and I don't have time to look, but those guys along Rose and Evans were plenty of star power that most coaches probably could have taken far.

 

(1)
The usual choking? Ha! What was their record again this year? Did they win the national championship? Was the game close?

If he is such a poor coach that chokes so often, why is his record so damn good?

Did you expect him to go on the court and shoot John Wall's shots for him? Is that now allowed? Is there a new rule on that or something?

Explain to me how John Calipari choked away the 2008 national championship game.

(2)
No, you speak unsupportable gibberish. Obvious truth is this: he is good enough at coaching that he can get paid almost 4 million dollars just to do it. He wouldn't command that type of money for his services if he had blatant flaws as a bench coach that resulted in his teams habitually blowing close games.

 

Well said.

 

The Memphis team that lost to Kansas in the final game had less NBA talent than did Kansas. Sure, D. Rose was great, but Kansas had three NBA guys that I can name off the top of my head. And I'm probably missing somebody. Calipari did a great job with that 2007-2008 Memphis team.

 

Joey Dorsey was a complete stiff. CDR and Dozier were both good, not great college talents. Check out the NBA guys on the Kansas team that won the 2008 title, then get back to me about who had more talent at their disposal that night.

 

Sorcery.

He was supposed to shoot their free throws for them. Then, instead of merely telling his players to foul on the final possession of regulation, he was to run out on the floor and tackle Chalmers himself.

 

What are some things that other coaches do schematically that you are impressed by? I'm asking that this in complete seriousness.

I'd be a liar if I claimed to be any sort of basketball X's and O's guru, so when I watch a game I tend to make my observations at a higher level of generality. Does the team appear to have a plan of attack offensively? Are all the players on the same page? Are plays being executed crisply? Are the players unselfish and playing together? Are there ever instances when it appears that the players don't have a clue what is going on? How is their intensity on defense? Are the palyers fouling excessively? Are they communicating on screens? Are they continually leaving guys wide open for treys? Are they getting burned backdoor for oops?

I think I can tell whether a team is well-coached just by watching them and making observations in accordance with the above. I also think that Xs and Os are a touch overrated in basketball. And what I mean is that any number of schemes can be winning schemes if the players understand what is going in within those schemes and play hard to execute them crisply. Maybe I'm naive in that very last part. Do you think that I'm naive in that last part?

 

Ahh, I knew it!

 

What I look for in a well-coached team (which, is obviously, incredibly subjective) is how well they execute the basic fundamentals of man-to-man defense and balancing the floor offensively. With Cal's team defensively, specificially in the NC game, they don't play ball screens very well. They don't hedge properly; in fact, almost every single time Kansas was able to turn the corner off the ball screen and get to the rack. UK overcame this simply having a guy that it's impossibly to get a shot over in the paint. That's not coaching; that's great players making up for fundamental mistakes.

Also, I look at their offensive scheme and see how complicated it is. With Cal's offense, there seems to be one principal that I can decipher: balance the floor and if someone drives towards the baseline, the baseline player cuts backdoor. And, most of the time, when they need a bucket they do a simple dribble hand-off that high school teams do for a 3 or simply iso Miller, Gilchrist, Jones, or Davis and let them go one on one. It obviously works, so that doesn't make him a bad coach. It just doesn't make him some tremendous schemer. You want to see an elite coach schematically? John Beilein. What does that tell you? That great players beat great schemes. And John gets great players.

 

And, who might that be? It sure as hell wasn't me, but it wouldn't be the first time you made up shit people said.

 

Exactly. It isn't rocket science to see that Calipari isn't some kind of coaching guru. He recruits stellar players, lets them play and has trouble coaching in big moments time after time. Take a look at UK last night in their second half vs. first half. I could've told you that Kentucky would let them back into the game.

 

If you weren't a reactionary, retarded [uck fay], you'd have seen about two posts later exactly who I was talking about.

 

Kansas didn't get to the final game by being a bad team. And while there is certainly no question that Kentucky is an excellent excellent team this year, I don't think that they're 18 points better than Kansas. So I also could have told you that Kansas would get back (almost) into the game. Except that I wouldn't say that Kentucky "let" them back in the game,...because I don't like saying things that are stupid. Team A dominated Team B for most of the game. But then Team A went cold from the floor, and Team B made its inevitable push. Team A played great defense, kept the reins on the inevitable push from Team B, and now Team A is the National Champion.

You see coaching flaws? You must be looking REALLY hard. I see a common narrative in a game of basketball between two excellent teams. Is it possible for one team to simply annihilate the other team in the national championship game? Sure it is. UNLV did it to Duke in 1990. Just opened the floodgates. Beat the [uck fay] out of them. But that's the exception, not the rule. And winning a national championship game by less than 30 points does not make the coach a suspect in-game coach. In fact, I can't even believe I'm writing this. It all goes without saying.

 

Fair response.

Not to prove anything one way or another, but here is an interesting piece breaking down a possession from last night's game: How Kentucky Used the Post Threat of Anthony Davis - The Triangle Blog - Grantland

 

Funneling guys to shotblockers is good defense. Why in hell would you get guys scrambling around screens and getting out of position when you can simply let guys come to the basket and get it fed to them by any one of three shotblockers?