I don’t think Manning necessarily wants to play a four guard lineup. The problem from early on this season is he only trusted 5 guys on the roster (chaundee as the 6th to a much lesser extent due to his youth and getting a bit lost off the ball on d) and the ones he trusted most were those four guards. As bad and as inexperienced as we were at the three and four that makes sense. Thompson (ugh), Mitchell (unproven esp at start), sarr and eggleston (not ready early) forced that a little too. It’s a bit of stubbornness around only playing who he can trust bigger minutes, which can be a positive with a deep, well-rounded, experienced roster. See Duke/Syracuse as a couple programs with more talent than us that are obviously run in that manner. The downside to it with less talent: TVH plays over bad/inexperienced scholarship players.
As it pertains to this year, the four biggest issues with it were 1) this is Manning’s roster; 2) he demonstrated a continued pattern of being too slow to develop that trust; it’s got to be faster when situations dictate; 3) not trusting Doral until 4-5 Games may have cost us some of our 1-4 start; and 4) most importantly, playing four guards that can’t guard or rebound at the same time clearly wasn’t working, and it cost us dearly in so many late game situations.
I doubt we play 4 guards much next year and hopefully a more balanced roster makes avoiding this easier. Woods absence will remove at least one more guard he trusts. Hopefully we don’t have gaping holes at consecutive positions next year which should provide a lot more flexibility. It was a huge defensive hole at the 2-3 for the better part of the three years prior to this one, and an overall void at the 3-4 that killed us this year. At the least we should avoid having that issue next year, and we better start winning once we have a bunch of pieces that finally fit together.