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"Coaching" vs. "Talent"

All I know is if Manning doesn’t play Hoard and Sarr at the same time next year because he thinks they are both 4s, I’m going to scream. A starting five of BC, (if he stays, which I think he will) Woods, Chaundee/Hoard, Sarr and Moore is going to be a talented bunch. No excuse if he can’t produce results with next year’s team.

And coaching in college is way more important than talent, IMHO.
 
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I agree that Manning sucks at developing talent if you ignore the talent he’s developed. We can quibble over anecdotes all day. The first post of this thread is that over a large enough sample size recruiting rankings and experience are a good proxy for talent and that talent is a good predictor of performance.

If you recruit five 3* and five 5* players then on average you are going to have a 4* quality team. If your 3* end up playing like 5* and vice versa that doesn’t disprove the general premise.

I’m receptive to the criticism that the way I’ve chosen to weight by minutes means the latter example (3* playing like 5*) would appear way less talented than the former. At some point I’ll take a look at how each team’s actual talent score compares with a hypothetical maximum talent score (i.e what’s the highest rated lineup on paper a team could realistically roll out). Y’all keep having fun cherry picking examples to fit your narrative.
 
SkyDivingDeacon said:
All I know is if Manning doesn’t play Hoard and Sarr at the same time next year because he thinks they are both 4s, I’m going to scream. A starting five of BC, (if he stays, which I think he will) Woods, Chaundee/Hoard, Sarr and Moore is going to be a talented bunch. No excuse if he can’t produce results with next year’s team.

And coaching in college is way more important than talent, IMHO.
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The data suggests otherwise. Or it at least suggests that if coaching, not talent, determines success then Skip/Dino/Manning were about the same coaching-wise.
 
Ayo said:
So no one has actually outperformed their recruiting ranking under the great developer Danny Manning besides JC? Bueller. Good luck on replications of John Collins coming through regularly.
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Crawford probably has. Moore is this year. Wilbekin was a 2* in some services. Dinos was a complete unknown. You could argue all those guys over performed to a certain extent. What Collins did was virtually unprecedented and our team vastly outperformed its talent (on paper) last year because of it.
 
Are you at all concerned about using KenPom as your primary metric for the team's performance, since it doesn't take into account wins and losses? We have been poor in close games, especially this year. I was curious so compared our Luck over Manning's tenure:

240
106
290
333

Too small of a sample size to be more than just Luck?
 
RChildress107 said:
Crawford probably has. Moore is this year. Wilbekin was a 2* in some services. Dinos was a complete unknown. You could argue all those guys over performed to a certain extent. What Collins did was virtually unprecedented and our team vastly outperformed its talent (on paper) last year because of it.
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No on Crawford. No on Moore. No on Dinos. Wilbekin, yes.
 
"Coaching" vs. "Talent"

RChildress107 said:
Actually they are. This team has [Redacted] level talent on paper (I.e. recruiting rankings combined with experience).
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4 recruiting classes into the tenure of a great recruiter and big man developer.
 
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Ayo said:
No on Crawford. No on Moore. No on Dinos. Wilbekin, yes.
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Childress is out performing his +200 ranking (or what ever it was). Moore is probably right on target. A 7’1” and 73rd ranking out of high school averaging 10 pts and 9 boards a game doesn’t strike me as exceptional but it’s pretty good.
 
RJKarl said:
Bird, I've shown you time and time again empirically how Danny has done throughout his career with big men, but no amount of actual data will change your visceral, gut opinion of him. There are legitimate complaints about his tenure at Wake, but your refusal to acknowledge his ongoing success with guys is not one of them.

You just can't give it up.
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You’ve swayed me RJ. I believe that, generally, when he has raw talent to work with Danny does a good job developing big men. That’s not enough to make him a good coach of a team though. We keep touting these strengths (recruiting, big man development) as reasons to give Danny a chance, but here we are 4 years in and we suck and just kicked the best ranked recruit (a big man by the way) from the 2016 class off the team.
 
TBDeac said:
Are you at all concerned about using KenPom as your primary metric for the team's performance, since it doesn't take into account wins and losses? We have been poor in close games, especially this year. I was curious so compared our Luck over Manning's tenure:

240
106
290
333

Too small of a sample size to be more than just Luck?
Click to expand...

Short answer: No. Its the best publicly available predictor of future performance that I am aware of.

I’m not sure what to make of the poor “luck” numbers but I think it’s just as much a mistake to interpret that number as a measure of performance in close games as it would be to chalk it up to pure randomness. Plenty of top 10 teams have shitty luck numbers.

If the goal is to win 6 straight games in March you are better off being #1 in KP with a shitty luck number and a few more losses than expected than #15 with a great luck score and a few more wins than expected.
 
Ayo said:
No on Crawford. No on Moore. No on Dinos. Wilbekin, yes.
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I’m not going to run the numbers on expected performance of a guard ranked in the 90s, or a big man ranked in the 70s, but I’m extremely confident Crawford exceeds that and fairly confident Moore exceeds it this year.
 
birdman said:
4 recruiting classes into the tenure of a great recruiter and big man developer.
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For a 12 man roster you are averaging 3-4 recruits a year depending on turnover. If you inherit a roster of 3 star players on average, and you recruit 4 star players on average, it’s going to take you 3-4 years to turn over the roster. That’s also compounded by the fact that it’s harder to recruit to a program with a bunch of 3* talent than one with 4* talent.

I don’t know that I’d call Manning a great recruiter, I certainly wouldn’t call him a great coach, but his results on both have been similar to what we saw under Skip/Dino.

He’s done the job of getting the program back to the same place Dino left it talent wise, and his performance the last four years suggests he will have similar results. Given where we were, that’s good enough for now.
 
RChildress107 said:
For a 12 man roster you are averaging 3-4 recruits a year depending on turnover. If you inherit a roster of 3 star players on average, and you recruit 4 star players on average, it’s going to take you 3-4 years to turn over the roster. That’s also compounded by the fact that it’s harder to recruit to a program with a bunch of 3* talent than one with 4* talent.

I don’t know that I’d call Manning a great recruiter, I certainly wouldn’t call him a great coach, but his results on both have been similar to what we saw under Skip/Dino.

He’s done the job of getting the program back to the same place Dino left it talent wise, and his performance the last four years suggests he will have similar results. Given where we were, that’s good enough for now.
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If your last paragraph is true, how can you also say we have [Redacted] level talent?
 
birdman said:
If your last paragraph is true, how can you also say we have [name redacted] level talent?
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The talent got progressively worse under [name redacted], such that after attrition Manning was left with essentially a 3* roster (3.17), almost half a star lower than any team [name redacted] coached (3.59). Manning actually inherited sub-[name redacted] talent. Next year, the talent on paper will be right around pre-[name redacted] levels of 09 and 10 (around 4.15).

I still don’t think people truly appreciate how bad [name redacted] was as a coach and how much he decimated the talent base and reputation of the program. His talent was never all that bad, on par with Skip’s worst teams, he just sucked that much as a coach.

At the time, many said it would take a decade for Wake basketball to fully recover. Manning seems to have done it in 4-5 years; we will know for sure based on next year’s performance. I have no idea if he’s the guy to lead the program to new heights after that, but he deserves to be measured based on consistent, measurable, and reasonable expectations not the game to game nebulous analyzing of his ”in game coaching”, “motivational skills”, or “substitution patterns.”

I’ve been consistent from the get go about what those consistent, measurable, and reasonable expectations should be and consistent in stating that Manning is not meeting those expectations this year (after exceeding them last year). If he doesn’t meet them next year then it might be time for a change.
 
So you are saying the talent [Redacted] had was worse even than [Redacted] level talent? Makes sense.
 
2017-2018: Talent: 3.7; Wins: 9; SRS: 8.54; KP: 88
2016-2017: Talent: 3.41; Wins: 19; SRS: 14.19; KP: 36
2015-2016: Talent: 3.36; Wins: 11; SRS: 5.53; KP: 118
2014-2015: Talent: 3.16; Wins: 13; SRS: 5.19; KP: 120

2013-2014: Talent: 3.69; Wins: 17; SRS: 5.49; KP: 117
2012-2013: Talent: 3.59; Wins: 13; SRS: 3.41; KP: 137
2011-2012: Talent: 3.76; Wins: 13; SRS: -.75; KP: 211
2010-2011: Talent: 3.76; Wins: 8; SRS: -4.43; KP: 259

The bolded is Manning’s first year.


This is actually the first year Manning has had talent on paper equal to what [name redacted] had. Next year will see a major jump because at least half our rotation will be upperclassmen and we are essentially replacing Wilbekin (up to a 3.5 star given his experience) with Hoard (a 5*).
 
FFS

you're making the claim that all of Bz's teams had more talent than last years' squad

that is a laughable assertion

CJ Harris as a sophomore vs. Crawford as a sophomore
JT Terrell as a freshman vs. Keyshawn Woods
Gary Clark vs. Austin Arians
Travis McKie as a freshman vs. Mitoglou
Carson Derosiers as a freshman vs. Collins

this is a joke
 
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