Basketball is a individual game with a team concept. Bruce has no understanding how to teach fundamentals on offense or defense. The forwards lack positioning. They never put their body on big men by meeting them 15-18 feet away. They completely give up position over and over. The perfect example of that is McLemore. When we played A&m he let Robert Williams run willy nilly around getting to the block. A man that size and talent has already won when he’s on the block. The big men also have no clue how to block out. The quality of your team defense shows the most when there’s an offensive rebound. Numerous times this year any time there was an offensive rebound, we gave up easy points every time. The players never see the ball and man on defense, and that leads to many easy lay ins. Players also never defend the three point arc well. We constantly let teams have their best 3 point shooting against us.
No kid wants to play defense, it’s all effort. So it’s the coaches job to instill the importance of it. That’s where Bruce lacks. He tries to be their friend, and his plan is to out talent other teams and run up and down on them. That leads to losing to elite teams that can run and defend. It’s why Jay Wright Beilein are top 5 coaches in the NCAA. They mix great defense with great offense. Coaching is all about matchups, player development, substitutions, and timing of timeouts. Bruce is poor in all of those aspects. Part of the reason why we were so piss poor in San Diego was all his subbing. This is basketball, players need to get a rhythm. Subbing in and out every minute hurts that. We have 8 players, and these kids are used to playing 7-8 games a weekend in AAU. Not to mention they’re 18-21 years old. If you get that tired with timeouts, you just don’t want it bad enough.
On offense, the biggest problem is there’s poor ball movement and player movement off the ball. Basketball is about screens on and off the ball, with moving the ball without taking a dribble. Jared, staph, and Brown do such a terrible job of it. They always have to take meaningless dribbles. You’re either dribbling to drive and create penetration, or you’re wasting the shot clock. Think about the amount of times we did nothing for the first 15-20 seconds of the shot clock and kicked it out to Harper. Bruce is yelling from the sideline like a psycho all game, when he should be taking care of these problems individually In practice.
The problem was this year Jared was the only player on the team that could pass. So, eventually coaches figured out to get on Harper before half court, wear him down, and use your size to keep from penetration. Then take away Brown catch and shoot, and we look terrible on offense.
Look at the development of every player closely. Spencer has barely progressed and looks like he’s never played basketball in his life. Staph has barely progressed, still shoots iso 20 footers, and cannot use his right hand efficiently.
Basketball is not football. It’s a simple game made difficult by players not knowing how to play the game correctly. Look at Michigan and Villanova play. Those boys are coached, ours are not.
Bruce is a top 20 coach, and a perfect fit for our situation. Hopefully the new assistant takes care of some of the problems I mentioned. College basketball is 60% recruiting and motivating. Bruce is one of the best at both.
I think Avery is a terrible coach, but he outcoached Bruce. Him not picking and rolling Sexton over and over is criminal. I think he will be rookie of the year in the NBA next year depending on where he lands.
Good coaches make a team with horrible talent better. In his first 3 years, not one time did the team get better. Was hard to watch, and without talent on the floor Bruce’s coach is magnified.
