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A little trip down memory lane courtesy of NC State...

Dino is still listed as our HC on Wikipedia. Sad..
 
PhDeac said:
People can talk about all the good that Wellman has done, but hiring a basketball coach that most people thought would fail and destroying the basketball program in the process is unforgivable.
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on this i agree with you 100%
 
PhDeac said:
People can talk about all the good that Wellman has done, but hiring a basketball coach that most people thought would fail and destroying the basketball program in the process is unforgivable.
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I agree. He is not competitive at all in trying to hire coaches. There has to be an AD available that would make better decisions.
 
It's amazing to me that people don't understand the amount of damage Dino did to the program.

There will likely never be another coach at Wake Forest that will squander as much talent as Dino did. When you get players like Teague, Johnson, Aminu, and Ish - all for more than one year - winning one postseason game on your way out the door against a terrible Texas team is pure incompetence.

Wellman's biggest mistake was retaining Dino after the 07/08 season when a Johnson/Teague/Ish team got bounced by shitty FSU (who then lost to Akron in the NIT) instead of selling the Wake job while we had NBA talent. Instead we shopped it when any coach worth his salt knew we were spiraling downward, and Wellman had to take a flier on a guy with a reputation for rebuilding because nobody else was interested. And here we are in year 3 of a painful rebuild.

Prosser was our program. That Wellman ever considered Dino anything other than an interim coach doomed us.
 
DCDeac said:
It's amazing to me that people don't understand the amount of damage Dino did to the program.

There will likely never be another coach at Wake Forest that will squander as much talent as Dino did. When you get players like Teague, Johnson, Aminu, and Ish - all for more than one year - winning one postseason game on your way out the door against a terrible Texas team is pure incompetence.

Wellman's biggest mistake was retaining Dino after the 07/08 season when a Johnson/Teague/Ish team got bounced by shitty FSU (who then lost to Akron in the NIT) instead of selling the Wake job while we had NBA talent. Instead we shopped it when any coach worth his salt knew we were spiraling downward, and Wellman had to take a flier on a guy with a reputation for rebuilding because nobody else was interested. And here we are in year 3 of a painful rebuild.

Prosser was our program. That Wellman ever considered Dino anything other than an interim coach doomed us.
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But then we got Jeff [Redacted] who has utterly dismantled the program. What's your point?
 
DCDeac said:
It's amazing to me that people don't understand the amount of damage Dino did to the program.

There will likely never be another coach at Wake Forest that will squander as much talent as Dino did. When you get players like Teague, Johnson, Aminu, and Ish - all for more than one year - winning one postseason game on your way out the door against a terrible Texas team is pure incompetence.

Wellman's biggest mistake was retaining Dino after the 07/08 season when a Johnson/Teague/Ish team got bounced by shitty FSU (who then lost to Akron in the NIT) instead of selling the Wake job while we had NBA talent. Instead we shopped it when any coach worth his salt knew we were spiraling downward, and Wellman had to take a flier on a guy with a reputation for rebuilding because nobody else was interested. And here we are in year 3 of a painful rebuild.

Prosser was our program. That Wellman ever considered Dino anything other than an interim coach doomed us.
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First, I don't know why [Redacted] would have a reputation as a program rebuilder (has yet to actually do so). Second, we were going to be young, but we were returning an ACC All-Rookie in CJ, another promising sophomore in Ari, and had a top 15 class committed. The program was in decent shape, although certainly not as good of shape as it was in '08.
 
Wrangor said:
Anyone that still holds onto the notion that Wellman did the right thing by firing Dino when he fired him just isn't dealing with reality. Wellman not only hired the wrong man, he fired the current coach at the exact wrong time. You simply can't fire a coach unless he has done one of two things:

1. Not won games (clearly Dino had great success as the coach of WFU despite his post season struggles. His winning percentage was close to .700)
2. Become involved in a PUBLIC off the court scandal. There are all sorts of rumors about Dino sleeping around, but unless it became public you have to let it slide initially.

What Wellman did was set our next coach up to fail. He multiplied his firing failure with a hiring failure that pretty much anyone with a basketball brain could see coming a mile a way. Dino was a decent college coach and a very good recruiter. We replaced him with a poor college coach and a poor recruiter. Why are we surprised that we are terrible? Unfortunately for the fanbase Wellman realizes that he will ride or die with Bz, so he almost can't fire him. We are stuck in the meantime with an inferior product that is slowly chipping away at the foundation of our once proud basketball program.

The sooner that our administration realizes this and replaces Wellman, the sooner our new AD will be able to come in and hire a new basketball coach. Until that point it is a waiting game. A very painful waiting game.
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I know it is hard to remember having watched two years of horrible basketball under Bzz, but lots of people conveniently forget how badly coached we were under Dino. The Wake basketball program under him was a one-trick pony. We had one style of play, and that was it. We were competent against any man-to-man defense and totally hopeless against anything resembling a zone. Most programs improve over the course of a season--under Dino, we would steadily get worse after New Year's as teams finally figured out that all you had to do was throw a little junk defense at us and we would fall apart. Dino's vaunted winning percentage was based primarily on success in November, December, and the first part of January. Once we had been through the conference one time, it was all over--his shitty record in tournament play is lasting evidence of that.

I have always been of the opinion that Dino really should have been let go after Cleveland State (the writing was on the wall then), but definitely let go when he was. It was the right thing to do, and the just because Wellman fucked up hiring his replacement does not change that fact.
 
DCDeac said:
It's amazing to me that people don't understand the amount of damage Dino did to the program.

There will likely never be another coach at Wake Forest that will squander as much talent as Dino did. When you get players like Teague, Johnson, Aminu, and Ish - all for more than one year - winning one postseason game on your way out the door against a terrible Texas team is pure incompetence.

Wellman's biggest mistake was retaining Dino after the 07/08 season when a Johnson/Teague/Ish team got bounced by shitty FSU (who then lost to Akron in the NIT) instead of selling the Wake job while we had NBA talent. Instead we shopped it when any coach worth his salt knew we were spiraling downward, and Wellman had to take a flier on a guy with a reputation for rebuilding because nobody else was interested. And here we are in year 3 of a painful rebuild.

Prosser was our program. That Wellman ever considered Dino anything other than an interim coach doomed us.
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What nonsense. I think 90% of that post is horseshit. We've argued about this a million times, so i'm not going to get into specifics again, but I will be here to call you out every time you post this turd for as long as these boards exist.
 
We fire a coach after he takes a decent team to the 2nd round of the tournament and has a top 15 class coming in, yet it's a good idea because some of the fanbase doesn't like his coaching style. Get over yourselves. A coach that gets his players to defend, and gets top recruits every year is going to succeed. The fact that you all can't see that is maddening. Like i've said a million times, in order to fire someone you have to have a replacement. We didn't have a replacement, but I guess that's Dino's fault as well, huh DC? You two deserve [Redacted], so I hope you've enjoyed the last 2 seasons, because that's what thinking like yours gets us.
 
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Skip's teams never played much d- but it was sure fun to watch. We gave up 100 against GT in the ACC Tourney- and still won!
 
myDeaconmyhand said:
We fire a coach after he takes a decent team to the 2nd round of the tournament and has a top 15 class coming in, yet it's a good idea because some of the fanbase doesn't like his coaching style. Get over yourselves. A coach that gets his players to defend, and gets top recruits every year is going to succeed. The fact that you all can't see that is maddening. Like i've said a million times, in order to fire someone you have to have a replacement. We didn't have a replacement, but I guess that's Dino's fault as well, huh DC? You two deserve [Redacted], so I hope you've enjoyed the last 2 seasons, because that's what thinking like yours gets us.
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I could give a shit what his "coaching style" was. He took one of the best runs of talent in Wake Forest history over a 3 year period and won ONE postseason game. And that one was over a horrid Texas team and it took a hero shot by Ish to save it. I remember the commentators describing that game as a battle of who wanted to lose more.

He wasn't going to succeed. He was already handed the most talent he'd ever see in his career on the court at one time and he couldn't get out of the first round of the ACC tournament with it.

You can continue posting about how wonderful Dino is all you want - I imagine you had a personal relationship or something which would explain the denial. DeacLaw nails exactly what it was like under Dino, and the results speak for themselves. I'd bet if you look at all the programs in history who had 4 NBA players (3 being top 20 draft picks) in the course of 3 years you won't find a single example of a team managing only one postseason win.

As for your refusal to understand that any mention of Dino's failures is not a defense of [Redacted], I assume you just do that to mask your weak Dino defense. The point is retaining Dino after his first failure of a year put us on the road to [Redacted] and our current hell. I really wonder how close Wellman was to pulling the trigger after that year. I wonder who we could have gotten at the time.
 
DCDeac said:
I could give a shit what his "coaching style" was. He took one of the best runs of talent in Wake Forest history over a 3 year period and won ONE postseason game. And that one was over a horrid Texas team and it took a hero shot by Ish to save it. I remember the commentators describing that game as a battle of who wanted to lose more.

He wasn't going to succeed. He was already handed the most talent he'd ever see in his career on the court at one time and he couldn't get out of the first round of the ACC tournament with it.

You can continue posting about how wonderful Dino is all you want - I imagine you had a personal relationship or something which would explain the denial. DeacLaw nails exactly what it was like under Dino, and the results speak for themselves. I'd bet if you look at all the programs in history who had 4 NBA players (3 being top 20 draft picks) in the course of 3 years you won't find a single example of a team managing only one postseason win.

As for your refusal to understand that any mention of Dino's failures is not a defense of [Redacted], I assume you just do that to mask your weak Dino defense. The point is retaining Dino after his first failure of a year put us on the road to [Redacted] and our current hell. I really wonder how close Wellman was to pulling the trigger after that year. I wonder who we could have gotten at the time.
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1. He wasn't handed that talent, he played a big part in recruiting all of it.
2. No one expected us to make the post season in 2007, and for all accounts that season was still a success.

Dino fucked up 1 season. 1. I repeat, 1. I don't know what college basketball you've been watching in your life, but the team we put on the floor in 2009 was a sweet 16 team at best if everything went right. We had 1 NBA player on that team and he was good for garbage buckets and that's about it. Maybe you don't remember but Texas was a preseason favorite that season, they were much more talented than us. Had we not played an absolutely brutal schedule to end the year, where we played 7 20+ win teams in a row we probably would have gotten a higher seed and avoided Texas & Kentucky. It took good recruits and a good playing style to even get us to that point. What coach were we going to get who was a better game coach, as capable of recruiting at that level, and capable of handling another coaches recruits? Who? That's a damn short list any season.

My defense of Dino is perfectly fine, it's based on facts. I don't avoid the fact that we completely dive bombed in 2008, but that's one season, and a coach should get credit for having set such high expectations when they don't reach them. We had to get pretty high to fall so far in the first place, do you even take into account Dino's part in building such a talented team? No.
 
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It was very hard to find many people beaten up about us firing Dino when it happened. Two-plus years of awfulness has changed things.

If Wellman had made a solid hire, or if Dino had been allowed to stay on another year or two, this wouldn't even be a discussion
 
DCDeac said:
It's amazing to me that people don't understand the amount of damage Dino did to the program.

There will likely never be another coach at Wake Forest that will squander as much talent as Dino did. When you get players like Teague, Johnson, Aminu, and Ish - all for more than one year - winning one postseason game on your way out the door against a terrible Texas team is pure incompetence.

Wellman's biggest mistake was retaining Dino after the 07/08 season when a Johnson/Teague/Ish team got bounced by shitty FSU (who then lost to Akron in the NIT) instead of selling the Wake job while we had NBA talent. Instead we shopped it when any coach worth his salt knew we were spiraling downward, and Wellman had to take a flier on a guy with a reputation for rebuilding because nobody else was interested. And here we are in year 3 of a painful rebuild.

Prosser was our program. That Wellman ever considered Dino anything other than an interim coach doomed us.
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Wow. Hard to believe anybody would still have that mentality about the whole thing.... You loons still arguing the 'rebuilding' line about what went into Wellman's hiring decision is close to insanity.

You seem to ignore the fact that [Redacted] jumped ship in a (widely-reported) disgraceful way after coaching his only decent teams at AF (who by the way, didn't win a single conference or ncaat game) for 2 years to seek greener pastures. You do not seem to realize that in the year before Wellman hired him, Bz had a player that he brought on board at Colorado arrested on felony charges for trying to rob the souvenir stand.

[Redacted] is not (and never has been) a beacon for winning or for 'culture'. Chill43's post is likely spot on & the only rational explanation for why Wellman had to pull out his old phone-book in a pinch without doing any due-diligence.
 
DeacLaw05 said:
I know it is hard to remember having watched two years of horrible basketball under Bzz, but lots of people conveniently forget how badly coached we were under Dino. The Wake basketball program under him was a one-trick pony. We had one style of play, and that was it. We were competent against any man-to-man defense and totally hopeless against anything resembling a zone. Most programs improve over the course of a season--under Dino, we would steadily get worse after New Year's as teams finally figured out that all you had to do was throw a little junk defense at us and we would fall apart. Dino's vaunted winning percentage was based primarily on success in November, December, and the first part of January. Once we had been through the conference one time, it was all over--his shitty record in tournament play is lasting evidence of that.

I have always been of the opinion that Dino really should have been let go after Cleveland State (the writing was on the wall then), but definitely let go when he was. It was the right thing to do, and the just because Wellman fucked up hiring his replacement does not change that fact.
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In his 3 years as head coach Dino's teams went 13-11 in the first half of the ACC season and 14-10 in the second half of ACC season.
 
Some people just refuse to admit they were wrong and will create rationalization after rationalization. To suggest that hiring Dino as an interim coach was a worse move than hiring [Redacted] or that the program was in such bad shape that we had to hire [Redacted] are just completely absurd positions.

We had a borderline top 10 recruiting class and multiple rotation players from a tourney team returning. That's a no win spiraling downward job? Laughable.

DCDeac is completely wrong about this, but at least he has dropped his criticism about not playing Ty Walker more.
 
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There should be a single thread with all of these remarkable statistics. My favorite is Bzz's road record vs BCS schools. I forget what it is exactly but it's pathetic.
 
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