Posted by franco12:
Posted by Bippity10:
franco12: Did you watch the last couple games when Frye, Robinson and Lee were given a chance to play without threat from the vets. I don't think they really took advantage of the situation. If they had, they would have gotten more minutes last night. You have to earn your minutes. You can't quit for 5 games, get blown out and then expect your job to be safe the next week. Until we have consistent players, we will not have a consistent rotation.
You know I haven't been watching too much of the games lately- its hard to find time to watch bad basketball.
I'm firmly in the fire larry brown & isiah camp at this point. There have been times that out of time outs, we run a set play for malik rose and the result is aweful.
when frye sucks- he has an excuse- he's young. when malik sucks, he has an excuse- he has no gas left & is not talented.
But that's the thing about rebuilding, you can't coach for this year. Rebuilding teams make the same mistakes over and over again. They hand their young guys minutes and these guys never develop. Everyone looks at Lebron and Kobe and thinks players will develop like that if they just got time. You may notice that the guys that develop into winners the quickest are the guys that have to earn their minutes on veteran teams(having a good team doesn't hurt).
Basketball is a game of habits. You must break players of bad habits and help them develop good ones. If a player has bad habits on the court you cannot cure them by sitting back and letting this continue just because the player is young. Instead you go back to the drawing board in practice and when that player starts to lose that habit he begins to earn his time back. This is how players develop. Fighting for minutes. You cannot play hard when you are fighting for minutes and then regress when you get those minutes and still expect to get time.
If you watch Jim Calhoun at all he coaches the same way. By tournament time this guy has a set 8-9 man unbending rotation. During this part of the season there is no rhyme or reason to his substitions. You make one mistake and you immediately come out, only to go back in when the next guy makes a mistake. Some games no one plays more than 3 minutes at a time. Why does he do this? He does it with number one teams and he does it with unranked teams. Why? Because he demands perfection early so that these guys are not making the same mistakes come tournament time. In the last 17 years how many times has Uconn played a poor game and gotten upset in the tournament? There is a reason why that answer is none.
We are in a rebuilding stage right now. It is time for our rookies to learn how to play the game right. They must scratch and claw for everything they have so that they understand how to win games. Getting blown out of games and showing no effort just because your captain misses a couple games is not winning basketball and should not be rewarded by being handed 35 minutes a night. We are trying to build a long-term winner. Firings and handing gusy minutes because of age is not the way to do that. Hate Malik all you want but the guy earned his time last night because he was the only person willing to defend.
[Edited by - bippity10 on 01-26-2006 11:41 AM]
1/25/2006 6:34 PM
