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Steve Forbes credibility watch

Give him another year, but that’s gotta be it. Don’t want to put ourselves in a Keats situation.
 
PhDeac said:
I have a tough time blaming Forbes for a problem that has plagued multiple Wake sports over multiple coaches.

A Wake team with everything to gain is getting beat up by a team with nothing to lose is typical late Feb/March for hoops and late Oct/Nov in football.
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This is fair. And we all waste a lot of time watching it happen over and over and over.
 
PhDeac said:
I have a tough time blaming Forbes for a problem that has plagued multiple Wake sports over multiple coaches.

A Wake team with everything to gain is getting beat up by a team with nothing to lose is typical late Feb/March for hoops and late Oct/Nov in football.
Click to expand...
But just like football a major problem is depth. Bball has less of an excuse for that.
 
buckets said:
I mean.... one could say Alondes, Appleby, Laravia, Sallis, and Efton have all gotten better under Forbes.......
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Not sure about Efton. He's played half a season. But I'd add Cam. I think it's pretty dumb to say he isn't developing players, actually. His HS recruiting has been lackluster, but the transfers make up for that a bit. The problem is that when the HS kids don't pan out, then they haven't been developed.
 
We’re worse than the sum of our parts. That’s coaching. And by coaching, I don’t just mean in-game decisions or strategy. I mean roster management. Our teams don’t play enough together to develop cohesion, which is the price you pay for relying on transfers and NCAA waivers. Our high school recruiting is ungood and we have little reason to believe there will be sufficient roster continuity to build anything for next year. We’ll be in the same situation in March ‘25.
 
I realize that Forbes gets at least one more year and I thought he deserved it. However, after the last 3 games against inferior talent with a ticket to the dance on the line …he goes 0-3 and shits the season away. He needs to go now!

Forbes will never make the tournament in the ACC…so why waste any more time. Thank him for leaving the program much better than he found it and move on
 
1 win in our last 3 and our season still has life. And somehow Forbes’ team does the unthinkable.

We shouldn’t kid ourselves though and think this team had the mental toughness to do anything in any tournament.

This is a coaching problem. Not talent. Not a curse.


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we lost a heartbreaker that we desperately needed for our tournament hopes, but I suppose we could continue to distract ourselves by making dumb arguments about Daniel Jones and off campus arenas.
 
PhDeac said:
I have a tough time blaming Forbes for a problem that has plagued multiple Wake sports over multiple coaches.

A Wake team with everything to gain is getting beat up by a team with nothing to lose is typical late Feb/March for hoops and late Oct/Nov in football.
Click to expand...
But that's why we hired him - to be different, to pull us out of that institutional mire.

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Yeah, depth is a problem and that ultimately is roster management. It is shit luck about this year, though. Efton didn’t get the waiver until late, Ituka got hurt, etc…but we also had four other guys on scholarship who added nothing down the stretch - Keller, Marion, Canka and Clark. I think at most you have two developmental guys on your roster (IMHO, that’s Keller and Marion) but everyone else should contribute in some way. Canka and Clark need to go and we need to grab 3-4 portal players to have any shot at recapturing momentum next season.
 
I can actually see our portal success now being a crutch. "That coach had 2 ACC POYs and Sallis and didn't make the tournament - you don't want to play for that loser of a program." This was the year it had to happen. What a fuck up.
 
IckerDeac said:
I can actually see our portal success now being a crutch. "That coach had 2 ACC POYs and Sallis and didn't make the tournament - you don't want to play for that loser of a program." This was the year it had to happen. What a fuck up.
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This a great point. Forbes can credibly tell kids that he will unlock their talent and elevate their game. They can go from buried on the bench to a real shot at individual post-season honors. It isn't a guarantee as he hasn't hit on every transfer, but certainly enough to make a very convincing case. Conversely, an opposing coach can argue that you may achieve some individual success at Wake but you have no chance of the limelight of NCAA tournament play. Sure, that's predicting the future but a coach could certainly point to the recent past with Forbes to make a very credible case.
 
awakegirl said:
Lack of player development is a good point that isn’t brought up enough.
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Yeah this is by far the most interesting criticism of Forbes to me. I mean, he won 30 games at ETSU, I don't believe x's and o's dictate road losses but not home wins and I'm certain the man knows basketball and can build a winning program. He's responsible for the roster but the Monsanto disaster, the Klintman fiasco, the Ituka injury, the Cam injury... I mean goddamn we really are cursed and I'm sure Forbes is salty about how the year played out personnel-wise.

But there's still the roster management just from this year that is definitely eyebrow-raising. For a hot second we were all-in on Keller, and that was after there was a falling out with Marsh since he had been starting. Marion hits a 3 and gets 8 boards against UGA and he seems legit. Then gets shelved until this week basically which has also been disastrous. Marsh reclaims his spot somehow off like 1 good and 1 mediocre outing, and Keller disappears again.

Seems like such a clearly binary system of playable/unplayable but the flipping back and forth during the season is hard to make sense of. I get the argument of "the coaches see them in practice every day, the fans don't" or whatever. I also realize that when you're pushing top 20 Kenpom and you're in the bracket per Lunardi despite all the challenges it's tough to give minutes to developing players and risk the tenuous hold you had on a bid.

So obviously at this point it's hindsight. But if it was just going to be an NIT year anyway it's hard to argue some of the flip-flop bench guys couldn't have improved with consistent game minutes.
 
deacz said:
This is fair. And we all waste a lot of time watching it happen over and over and over.
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Every time these teams make us feel like fools for following the NET and CFP rankings and rooting for other teams to boost our metrics and such. So much wasted energy and time.
 
DCDeac said:
Yeah this is by far the most interesting criticism of Forbes to me. I mean, he won 30 games at ETSU, I don't believe x's and o's dictate road losses but not home wins and I'm certain the man knows basketball and can build a winning program. He's responsible for the roster but the Monsanto disaster, the Klintman fiasco, the Ituka injury, the Cam injury... I mean goddamn we really are cursed and I'm sure Forbes is salty about how the year played out personnel-wise.

But there's still the roster management just from this year that is definitely eyebrow-raising. For a hot second we were all-in on Keller, and that was after there was a falling out with Marsh since he had been starting. Marion hits a 3 and gets 8 boards against UGA and he seems legit. Then gets shelved until this week basically which has also been disastrous. Marsh reclaims his spot somehow off like 1 good and 1 mediocre outing, and Keller disappears again.

Seems like such a clearly binary system of playable/unplayable but the flipping back and forth during the season is hard to make sense of. I get the argument of "the coaches see them in practice every day, the fans don't" or whatever. I also realize that when you're pushing top 20 Kenpom and you're in the bracket per Lunardi despite all the challenges it's tough to give minutes to developing players and risk the tenuous hold you had on a bid.

So obviously at this point it's hindsight. But if it was just going to be an NIT year anyway it's hard to argue some of the flip-flop bench guys couldn't have improved with consistent game minutes.
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There's no problem with a 7 man rotation in college basketball. It's certainly not a problem if that 7th man changes based on how they're doing in practice.

But for some reason, Wake teams struggle to hold up on the road and in March.
 
Something happened after the Duke game with this team. Either something big or just like some internal dynamics that hit a boiling point.

But there have also been some potential chemistry shifting moments that are clear to me:

Cam’s injury, Damari’s injury: it’s hard to thrive when your leaders give it their all and it’s taken away.

Sallis’s ascent - maybe this disrupted the team’s vibe and coincided with Cam’s injury (remember that Cam was getting some mild draft buzz at the time)

Boopie’s yips - just brutal.

Forbes’s chaotic start to the season and family situations - poor bastard

Idk, but this team has seen some shit. I wonder if we’ll ever learn what that shit is
 
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