Quote:
Originally Posted by Prison Bitch
This season - and esp the NCAAT - exposed some serious fault lines in Bill Self's coaching philosophy. His lack of offensive imagination, total disdain for ball security, and inability to recruit any shooters put him at a major disadvantage vs the top teams.
Tomorrow night, Pomeroy's #1 offensive efficiency team in his 13 years of ratings (Wisky) will play for the title. They will face Duke, his #3 team this year. #2 Notre Dame came within an eyelash of knocking off Kentucky last week and probably should have. Any pattern here? Self's obession with defense and not giving up the easy bucket wins at a tremendous clip in the regular season and it's damn consistent on an annual basis. But in a tourney it's a flop.
Wisky put up 1.28 points/possession this year. They faced Kentucky who allowed only .86/possession. So we had the top offense in Pomeroy history vs the top defense. Wisky ran at an insane 1.22 clip last night and won by 7.
Net: If BIll Self believes "defense wins championships", he isn't watching the Tourney this year. He needs to change with the times.
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I don't understand this at all.
What about 2012? That team was carried to the national title game on the strength of its defense. And we lost to another team because of their defense.
Bill WANTS to play with an efficient offense. That's why he wants to put it inside to the big men. That's where you score the most efficiently. It's not from jump shooting.
The fatal flaw lately has been a lack of a post presence come tourney time. Missing Embiid and now missing Alexander with a hobbling Ellis. The problem isn't that we don't have good shooters. We do. But the inside-out game only works when the defense has to collapse inside to stop the post scoring, which we haven't been able to force. That's what frees up the shooting. When our big guys can't go 1-on-1 in the post, the offense stalls.
It's not that the offense is flawed or somehow inherently prone to failure. It's the lack of the personnel to run it. Bill's flaw is not being able to adjust to the personnel he has. When he has the personnel, it's going to work beautifully. And I think we'll be getting back to that much sooner than later. No one was complaining about our outside shooting when Bill was running the same offense in 07 and 08. Chalmers and Rush shot great outside, but it was the inside game that made the offense work. It will happen again.