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Danny Manning Credibility Watch

MichDeac25 said:
The one thing I don't understand is Tulsa's transformation into a good defensive team in Manning's second year there. I, maybe some others, thought we would make a transformation into that by now.
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It's bizarre. It was really impressive actually and was pretty much the same players, just with an extra year of training in his system, development by his coaches, and time in the weight room.
 
WFU Lurker said:
Manning brought both. He gets credit for both. I have never hesitated to give him credit for recruiting. We are comparing [Redacted]'s Y4 coaching job to Manning's Y1 coaching job. You think Manning did an impressive job because the team was less talented. I agree there was a talent gap but don't think it was particularly big, especially when you factor in the additional experience gained by the two best players on the team.

Obviously impossible to prove the hypothetical on either way on freshman Dinos vs junior Cav since junior Cav never existed.

Freshman Dinos averaged 9.7 pts / 4.6 rbds in 22 minutes on 44.2% shooting. Sophomore Cav averaged 8.8 pts / 3.8 rbds in 21.2 minutes on 42.2% shooting. I don't remember if Cav was any good on D, but, at least from an offensive perspective, it seems pretty clear that Manning had just as good of a stretch 4 as [Redacted] did.

Anyway, this is a silly discussion, and I don't really care. I hope Manning turns it around. These results are not good enough for year 4 (something we all can agree on), but we won't / shouldn't do anything about it anytime soon (something most of us can agree on).
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We don’t have results from year 4 yet.
 
WFU Lurker said:
Manning brought both. He gets credit for both. I have never hesitated to give him credit for recruiting. We are comparing [name redacted]'s Y4 coaching job to Manning's Y1 coaching job. You think Manning did an impressive job because the team was less talented. I agree there was a talent gap but don't think it was particularly big, especially when you factor in the additional experience gained by the two best players on the team.

Obviously impossible to prove the hypothetical on either way on freshman Dinos vs junior Cav since junior Cav never existed.

Freshman Dinos averaged 9.7 pts / 4.6 rbds in 22 minutes on 44.2% shooting. Sophomore Cav averaged 8.8 pts / 3.8 rbds in 21.2 minutes on 42.2% shooting. I don't remember if Cav was any good on D, but, at least from an offensive perspective, it seems pretty clear that Manning had just as good of a stretch 4 as [name redacted] did.

Anyway, this is a silly discussion, and I don't really care. I hope Manning turns it around. These results are not good enough for year 4 (something we all can agree on), but we won't / shouldn't do anything about it anytime soon (something most of us can agree on).
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Manning traded a senior McKie and 5th year Coron (our two best players), and a sophomore Cav and Moto (our two best bench guys) for frehmen Dinos, Wilbekin, Hudson, McClinton and 5th year Leonard.

Yup that seems pretty even talent wise. I addressed this issue in depth towards the end of Manning’s first year. I’ll update that thread when I have a chance.

Join Date
Oct 2011
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"Coaching" vs. "Talent"
There's been a lot of handwringing about Danny Manning's coaching ability after the last three games. This strikes me as an overreaction to a small sample size, but the ensuing discussion raised some interesting questions about how much should be read into a coaches ability to "get the most" out of a team's talent level.

I've had some time on my hands (spring break) so I went through each of the last 11 seasons and calculated each teams overall talent level. I gave each player a talent score (recruiting ranking in stars + .3 for each year of experience).

Codi, for example, was a 4 star recruit and has 2 years of experience so he has a talent rating of 4.6.

I then took the weighted average for each team based on minutes played. Here are the results of the past 11 years along with wins, SRS (basketball-reference's simple rating system), and kenpom ranking.

2014-2015: Talent: 3.16; Wins: 13; SRS: 5.19; Kenpom: 118

2013-2014: Talent: 3.69; Wins: 17; SRS: 5.49; Kenpom: 118
2012-2013: Talent: 3.59; Wins: 13; SRS: 3.41; Kenpom: 134
2011-2012: Talent: 3.76; Wins: 13; SRS: -.75; Kenpom: 217
2010-2011: Talent: 3.76; Wins: 8; SRS: -4.43; Kenpom: 271

2009-2010: Talent: 4.17; Wins: 20; SRS: 11.45; Kenpom: 59
2008-2009: Talent: 4.15; Wins: 24; SRS: 15.63; Kenpom: 27
2007-2008: Talent: 3.73; Wins: 17; SRS: 9.29; Kenpom: 69

2006-2007: Talent: 3.51; Wins: 15; SRS: 6.08; Kenpom: 102
2005-2006: Talent: 3.96; Wins: 17; SRS: 8.16; Kenpom: 82
2004-2005: Talent: 4.45; Wins: 27; SRS: 20.24; Kenpom: 7
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Pilchard said:
Duke has been an offense first program for awhile. Their weakness for awhile has been defense (the term "weakness" has to be taken in context with how good their offense has been). Think that partially has to do with their trend toward one and dones as elite freshman players are typically more focused on offensive production than defensive prowess (Jahilil Okafor being a prime example). Also, it takes awhile to learn team defense that's why programs with Wichita State, Wisconsin and UVA that has a lot of older players typically excel on defense.

Here are Duke's defensive ratings since 2012:

2012 - #79
2013 - #26
2014 - #86
2015 - #11
2016 - #86
2017 - #47


Each one of those years Duke's offense was in the top 8. You can get away with playing less than elite defense when you have lottery talent that can score at will (see John Collins last year). WF, and most other programs, don't have lottery talent that can outscore opposing teams at will.
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Good post.

Which strategy seems the best for long term success at Wake. Wichita St & VA with pack line (or some other strong defense) or Duke with 4-5 5 stars per year and try to out score your opponent?
 
Trying to outscore your opponent ala Skip was fun to watch, so there's that! :thumbsup:
 
I think trying to mirror our program after Wichita State and Virginia is much more sustainable in the long run than trying to grab 3-4 top 30 players each and every year at Wake Forest.
 
You guys succeeded. RCHill and I agree. This has become a LOWF thread. We should be happy if we compete. WAAAAAAH.

If you aren't going to try to win, why play in a P6 (Big East is a power conference in bball)?
 
And I hate to break it to all of you but UVA and WSU’s success had far more to do with Malcolm Brogdon, Justin Anderson, Joe Harris, Ron Baker, Fred Van Vleet, and Cleanthony Early than it did Bennett or Marshall’s defensive system.
 
Seems there's a lot of arguing about silly stuff here. Granted, this is a sports message board so that's kind of the point of the whole affair...ultimately it seems there's agreement about the major points:

1) Wake Forest teams under Manning have uniformly played horrible defense - pick your measuring stick: advanced stats like KenPom, eye test, etc.
2) Given that, the absence of a top 10 offense will put a hard cap on success that will prevent the team from achieving the level of success that we all hope to reach.
3) A top 10 offense is reliant on NBA talent that his hard to come by, though Manning has already proven that he can recruit some legit talent and that is really fun and exciting (hope springs eternal!)
4) We've seen what happens when legit talent is squandered (also known as the Dino years) so legit talent in and of itself isn't a sufficient cause for assuming everything will work out.
5) This year looks like a lost cause after five games. The only way they'll turn this mess around (to quote the B52's) is if Manning and company can teach/coach/implement/find/manufacture a competent defense. There's precious little evidence that this will happen. What lineups/schemes can provide it without completely sacrificing offensive efficiency? I don't know, but I'm not getting paid big money to figure that out.
 
I'll add that consistency matters. Wake has obviously never competed for national championships year in and year out, so that's an unreasonable expectation, but (assuming there's not a miraculous turnaround) years like this one are devastating. Living in Richmond I'll note that while VCU has never subsequently matched its final four run (clearly lots of good fortune involved there), the excitement around the program hasn't diminished because the team has been competitive year in and year out.
 
Bras_is_Old said:
Seems there's a lot of arguing about silly stuff here. Granted, this is a sports message board so that's kind of the point of the whole affair...ultimately it seems there's agreement about the major points:

1) Wake Forest teams under Manning have uniformly played horrible defense - pick your measuring stick: advanced stats like KenPom, eye test, etc.
2) Given that, the absence of a top 10 offense will put a hard cap on success that will prevent the team from achieving the level of success that we all hope to reach.
3) A top 10 offense is reliant on NBA talent that his hard to come by, though Manning has already proven that he can recruit some legit talent and that is really fun and exciting (hope springs eternal!)
4) We've seen what happens when legit talent is squandered (also known as the Dino years) so legit talent in and of itself isn't a sufficient cause for assuming everything will work out.
5) This year looks like a lost cause after five games. The only way they'll turn this mess around (to quote the B52's) is if Manning and company can teach/coach/implement/find/manufacture a competent defense. There's precious little evidence that this will happen. What lineups/schemes can provide it without completely sacrificing offensive efficiency? I don't know, but I'm not getting paid big money to figure that out.
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I don’t agree with any of those actually.
 
A drop off this season was expected with the loss of two underclassmen headed to the pro ranks and Arians..... but 5 games in we've not only dropped off, we've dropped off the face of the earth. :(
 
TBDeac said:
What is your basis for saying that defense under Manning has been anything other than horrible?
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I guess I more disagree with the premise that a horrible defense of the type we had the first two years under Manning prevents you from being a top 10 team.

I certainly don’t buy the fact that it’s easier to have a top 10 defense without elite talent than a top 10 offense without elite talent.

Coaches/teams that find consistent top level success without consistent top level talent are the exception to the rule (if they exist at all). The path to success in college basketball is accumulating as much top end talent as you can and then not fucking it up. Manning is following the first part of that path, it remains to be seen whether he can do the second.
 
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