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I can't believe how bad this team has turned

There is enough talent on this team to do damage and the coaching has sucked.

We need to do this:

Play Crawford and give him the ball. Codi never has the ball in his hands in the half court game.

Moore into the post and guards the rim

Devin can guard the 3 spot. If they get by him, no fouling, just funnel him to Moore or Collins in the post, then Dino's has to rotate.

Lineup of Crawford, Watson, Dino's, Devin and Moore. Collins in for Devin or Moore.

Codi in at the 3 for Dino's and MW for Watson for a another shooter. Codi can guard bigger guys, finish on the break, and score in the paint coming off of picks. He can't score from the 2 spot and his ball skills at the point have disappeared.

McClintocn and Hudson get little minutes.

On offense Devin in the post Dino's out, the opposite on defense.
 
There are very few 3's in college basketball, let alone in the ACC, that Devin is capable of guarding. I do think Devin and Moore should play together for periods each game. They've looked good together so far and it's nice to let Devin finally play his natural position.
 
But.. But... We swung for the fences with this coaching hire. Surely there isn't anyone better out there!
 
Devin guarding the 3 is not the answer to our defensive ineptitude. Finding some guards who can stop the drive or challenge a shooter is. If you put even the sophomore version of Josh Howard on this team and didn't let him shoot a single shot every game we might be NCAA tourney bound.

Remember when McClinton was billed as a freak athlete and the best defender on the team, just like a young Josh Howard? Ahhhh, those were the days.
 
DCDeac said:
Devin guarding the 3 is not the answer to our defensive ineptitude. Finding some guards who can stop the drive or challenge a shooter is. If you put even the sophomore version of Josh Howard on this team and didn't let him shoot a single shot every game we might be NCAA tourney bound.

Remember when McClinton was billed as a freak athlete and the best defender on the team, just like a young Josh Howard? Ahhhh, those were the days.
Click to expand...


I'm talking about this team now today. Devin is quick enough to guard the 3 point shot and then retreat. I agree that he can't stay in front of most 3 men but neither can anyone else. He has to funnel them to the shot blocker. Now when there is a beat Devin is the last defender and we need him on the court. Moore and Collins have 10 fouls. Use them. Make teams shot 15 foot 2 point jump shots. No 3s, no lay ups. Syracuse does this with zone.
 
Sorry, but moving our best (and only elite) rebounder out to cover someone on the perimeter is a complete non-starter. No coach would ever do that.

Collins also hasn't had much of a problem using his fouls. Had 4 again in just 18 minutes against UNC helping them to a +12 free throw margin against us. Heck, Moore fouled out in 7 minutes against Vandy.

The only thing I agree with is giving Doral more minutes.
 
Might as well try some different stuff as pretty much all of our players are deficient in some regard w/r/t playing defense. Either it's poor lateral quickness, over-aggressive overplays for steals (Craw loves to do this), lazy rotation on weak-side help, or over committing for a block when it would simply be better to get to a spot and stand tall with hands up (Collins, Dinos etc). Throw some junk zones at teams that struggle to shoot, ahem Carolina, from the outside. Use a trapping 1-3-1 and token back court pressure to slow offensively efficient teams down and force them into a shorter clock. Hell, at this point, as good as we are in transition, I'd make this the base offense and just try to force turnovers and deflections with our length and athleticism.

But what I really don't want to see anymore of -- wishful thinking I know -- is the over reliance on super-aggressive big man hedging on the perimeter against the high PnR. Our big men are lousy rotating and even if they get back to thwart the PnR, the scrambling D seems to get exploited when trying to defend the dribble penetration from the wing after the ball has reversed. Some of that is inexperience and indecisiveness but I've seen Devin get beat on slow rotations or give up the baseline way more than you would hope of a senior. If we could simply cut off the baseline, force penetration inside rather than down the edge of the key with a space eater like Moore in the middle, it might just help us enough in the middle of the first half when starters are getting rest...maybe avoid the big run that digs us the hole we can't climb out of against better teams.

Then again, the problems are so extensive on defense, we can only probably expect gradual and marginally better defense by the second half of the ACC sked when the teams aren't quite as offensively dynamic.
 
We are where we thought we would be when the season started: a team with a modicum of talent in a talent-filled league that would lose more than they would win, but, hopefully, would be fighting, scratching and clawing for 40 minutes. The last part has been lacking most recently.
 
deacsrus said:
We are where we thought we would be when the season started: a team with a modicum of talent in a talent-filled league that would lose more than they would win, but, hopefully, would be fighting, scratching and clawing for 40 minutes. The last part has been lacking most recently.
Click to expand...

Oh we're scratching for 40 minutes. We're scratching our heads . . . or other parts of our anatomy.
 
diverdeac said:
There is enough talent on this team to do damage and the coaching has sucked.

We need to do this:

Play Crawford and give him the ball. Codi never has the ball in his hands in the half court game.

Moore into the post and guards the rim

Devin can guard the 3 spot. If they get by him, no fouling, just funnel him to Moore or Collins in the post, then Dino's has to rotate.

Lineup of Crawford, Watson, Dino's, Devin and Moore. Collins in for Devin or Moore.

Codi in at the 3 for Dino's and MW for Watson for a another shooter. Codi can guard bigger guys, finish on the break, and score in the paint coming off of picks. He can't score from the 2 spot and his ball skills at the point have disappeared.

McClintocn and Hudson get little minutes.

On offense Devin in the post Dino's out, the opposite on defense.
Click to expand...
Good thinking. We def need to go big. It's our strength. Might need to zone more on defense. NCSU pounded the ball inside vs Pitt and went inside out for threes a lot. Worked.
 
Good discussion.

We seem to get torched as soon as we zone people. Maybe because we don't play enough of it. I would play zone all day long now. Make people beat you with inside the arch jump shots. Nothing at the rim and nothing at 3 point line.

Moore allows this. He fouls when he brings his arms down. I believe he is learning to stay away from his man. He could be really good, and I would go with him now.

Codi has to accept his role. Manning clearly has not been good at developing chemistry.
 
Is it crazy to just try to install the "pack line defense" that Gaudio coached for 3 years? His team's defensive ranks per Kpom for his 3 seasons were 60, 31, & 34. That is better than any Skip team and of course blows any team out that we've had since his firing. I know talent matters, but I think the '05 roster shows that even w/ talent that defense comes down to strategy & coaching. If we can at least learn to stop someone that should help heal many of the team's wounds.
 
diverdeac said:
There is enough talent on this team to do damage and the coaching has sucked.

We need to do this:

Play Crawford and give him the ball. Codi never has the ball in his hands in the half court game.

Moore into the post and guards the rim

Devin can guard the 3 spot. If they get by him, no fouling, just funnel him to Moore or Collins in the post, then Dino's has to rotate.

Lineup of Crawford, Watson, Dino's, Devin and Moore. Collins in for Devin or Moore.

Codi in at the 3 for Dino's and MW for Watson for a another shooter. Codi can guard bigger guys, finish on the break, and score in the paint coming off of picks. He can't score from the 2 spot and his ball skills at the point have disappeared.

McClintocn and Hudson get little minutes.

On offense Devin in the post Dino's out, the opposite on defense.
Click to expand...

Codi hasn't been very good, but I'm not ready to say Watson should be in over him.
 
The pack line defense is basically man with zone principles tied in. You usually need athletes with length who can recover quickly after helping, which is pretty much the exact opposite of what our team has.

The other huge problem with this Wake team playing zone is that we only have one actual rebounder. It's nice to just say "Doral is tall, stick him in a zone and no more layups" but that's not how it really works. Doral is learning, but he is slow to cover even just outside the lane and slow to retreat. He and Collins both get pushed out of the lane easily and neither rebound all that well even when they know exactly who they should be boxing out - they really struggle when we get caught in transition without matchups and they have to find a guy to box out. When we go zone we usually have guards that can't effectively get out and challenge wings on skip passes, so it better be a horrible shooting team that we want going up to challenge Devin (who plays solid interior defense and boxes out, but struggles outside the paint).

You have to have a 2nd rebounder for a zone, and right now the only guy who could come close to that role is Dinos - and he's probably the worst zone defender we can put on the floor.

There's a reason an absurdly high percentage of teams play 90%+ man. It's not as easy as saying "Syracuse does it, so we should too." Not to mention Syracuse lost their first 4 straight ACC games. They have gaps personnel-wise for their scheme this year, and our gaps would be twice as bad.
 
I see seven winnable games left on our schedule - Clem, FSU, BC, ND, VT at home, GT, NCSU on the road. Not saying we'll win all of them, but they're *winnable*.

Sweeping those seven puts us at 8-10 in the ACC, 17-13 overall. Certainly not NCAAT quality. So we'd need to sweep those seven and steal 1-2 from @ Miami, vs UVA, @ ND, @ Pitt, or @ Duke. This team certainly hasn't shown that it can beat quality ACC opponents on the road.

All that is to say that the VT and Cuse losses really suck. There's still a modicum of hope for this season, but reason indicates that "hope" equates to the NIT vs no postseason at all for a six straight year.
 
I think the nature of this team makes coaching VERY difficult. We have a lot of players with some talent but glaring areas of weakness. In addition, even in areas of strength, our players tend to be very inconsistent. This makes it borderline impossible to put together effective line-ups. It would take a detailed spreadsheet and some application of higher math to figure out who should be on the court together. Instead, we seem to do it randomly - according to who needs rest and/or made the last mistake.

We also seem to be fragile mentally - we appear to be in a very bad slump of confidence at the moment...
 
Can someone explain how Buzz is getting it done in year 2? Does he have better talent than us?
 
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