ClayK said:

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I still fail to understand why Kyle Smith was not hired as the Cal coach.

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Kyle Smith wanted the WSU job over the Cal job. Some people here don't want to believe that, but it was true.

He had been in New York (Columbia) and San Francisco (USF). His wife is from Lake Chelan WA, and wanted to be closer to her parents and family. In fact, she still holds a scoring record for most points in a WA State High School tournament game. Some people like a more rural lifestyle. And evidently, this was known by Knowlton that Smith was going hard for the WSU job. He was not interested.

The Cal job, and living in the Bay ain't what it once was. It's hard to recruit and win at Cal. Not sure what the answer is.

ClayK said:

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bearchamp said:

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If we assume that the players are being taught to pick and roll, etc., the failure in execution is still a coaching issue. Good basketball isn't like Arthur Murray dance studio: set plays are very limiting. Players need to be taught to recognize situations and move naturally to take advantage of those situations. Cal has a number of players who need to develop their individual skills, but even more so, need to gain understanding and recognition of the game. THAT, is where good coaching makes a huge difference.

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A good point, but the hardest thing to teach is understanding and recognition of the game as it's being played.

You can teach skills. You can teach actions (like pick-and-roll). You can teach plays.

But teaching spatial recognition is another thing entirely. Teaching decision-making -- with the decisions involving 10 bodies moving at a high speed -- is very difficult. Even teaching just one aspect of on-court decision-making, passing, is very difficult.

So here's something I say to our players:

Vision
Decision
Execution

The last is really the only one you can teach. The hardest one is the first one, and I tend to think it's something that develops (or doesn't develop) differently for every person. We had a player who saw the court perfectly in eighth grade, and she made us look like very smart coaches (she was second in the nation in assists at the D-1 level) but we didn't teach her anything. And I don't know any way of teaching what she had before she got to us.

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This is an old thread, but since it got a little traffic recently, I thought I'd propose a question here to ClayK and others. You mention "vision" and "decision" above and the difficulty in teaching these and I agree. Given the progress of gaming technology, has anybody developed a software package for coaches that contains various interactive players-eye-view scenarios so they can learn to recognize and react to situations? Ideally, it would include maybe six players (offense and defenders) show the impact of both good and bad decisions as the players made them and players could use VR headsets. Like Doom for basketball, but with a library of scenarios to be run. It's not a substitute for on-the-floor practice, but rather a way of repeating scenarios so players can more quickly learn to recognize and react. Do packages like this exist? The market wouldn't be in the millions, but between high schools, colleges, and club teams around the world, it would surely be in the thousands.

ClayK said:

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I still fail to understand why Kyle Smith was not hired as the Cal coach.

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Because Smith's resume was even less impressive than Fox's. Fox had at least finished higher than 4th in any conference and had been to the tourney. IIRC, Fox has also won an award for player development.

Smith certainly has had some recruiting success at Wasu. Do we know if those kids would have gotten into Cal?

Key calumnus with how Smith turned around Columbia on...

HearstMining said:

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ClayK said:

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bearchamp said:

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If we assume that the players are being taught to pick and roll, etc., the failure in execution is still a coaching issue. Good basketball isn't like Arthur Murray dance studio: set plays are very limiting. Players need to be taught to recognize situations and move naturally to take advantage of those situations. Cal has a number of players who need to develop their individual skills, but even more so, need to gain understanding and recognition of the game. THAT, is where good coaching makes a huge difference.

---

A good point, but the hardest thing to teach is understanding and recognition of the game as it's being played.

You can teach skills. You can teach actions (like pick-and-roll). You can teach plays.

But teaching spatial recognition is another thing entirely. Teaching decision-making -- with the decisions involving 10 bodies moving at a high speed -- is very difficult. Even teaching just one aspect of on-court decision-making, passing, is very difficult.

So here's something I say to our players:

Vision
Decision
Execution

The last is really the only one you can teach. The hardest one is the first one, and I tend to think it's something that develops (or doesn't develop) differently for every person. We had a player who saw the court perfectly in eighth grade, and she made us look like very smart coaches (she was second in the nation in assists at the D-1 level) but we didn't teach her anything. And I don't know any way of teaching what she had before she got to us.

---

This is an old thread, but since it got a little traffic recently, I thought I'd propose a question here to ClayK and others. You mention "vision" and "decision" above and the difficulty in teaching these and I agree. Given the progress of gaming technology, has anybody developed a software package for coaches that contains various interactive players-eye-view scenarios so they can learn to recognize and react to situations? Ideally, it would include maybe six players (offense and defenders) show the impact of both good and bad decisions as the players made them and players could use VR headsets. Like Doom for basketball, but with a library of scenarios to be run. It's not a substitute for on-the-floor practice, but rather a way of repeating scenarios so players can more quickly learn to recognize and react. Do packages like this exist? The market wouldn't be in the millions, but between high schools, colleges, and club teams around the world, it would surely be in the thousands.

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As a youth coach -this would have been real cool to have. But in its absence - one of the best ways to teach 'court sense' was also one of the hardest. That is to get your defensive scrimmage unit to play at 75% or 50% speed/intensity in order for the offense to grasp situational awareness. Lots of hilarious anecdotes of spending soooo much time teaching kids to play defense at 110%, then ask them to tone it down a bit.

VR could be a great teaching aid -- but I'm pretty sure it would be like any other technique: It will work a lot better for some people than others.

Some players can read a scouting report and take that intellectual knowledge and make it physical knowledge immediately; others could memorize every written word and still have to figure it out on the court.

The other issue would be technical, and I have no clue if simulations exist that can run three or four separate NPCs as high-level AIs.

I'm pretty sure I've read about this for football

HearstMining said:

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ClayK said:

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bearchamp said:

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If we assume that the players are being taught to pick and roll, etc., the failure in execution is still a coaching issue. Good basketball isn't like Arthur Murray dance studio: set plays are very limiting. Players need to be taught to recognize situations and move naturally to take advantage of those situations. Cal has a number of players who need to develop their individual skills, but even more so, need to gain understanding and recognition of the game. THAT, is where good coaching makes a huge difference.

---

A good point, but the hardest thing to teach is understanding and recognition of the game as it's being played.

You can teach skills. You can teach actions (like pick-and-roll). You can teach plays.

But teaching spatial recognition is another thing entirely. Teaching decision-making -- with the decisions involving 10 bodies moving at a high speed -- is very difficult. Even teaching just one aspect of on-court decision-making, passing, is very difficult.

So here's something I say to our players:

Vision
Decision
Execution

The last is really the only one you can teach. The hardest one is the first one, and I tend to think it's something that develops (or doesn't develop) differently for every person. We had a player who saw the court perfectly in eighth grade, and she made us look like very smart coaches (she was second in the nation in assists at the D-1 level) but we didn't teach her anything. And I don't know any way of teaching what she had before she got to us.

---

This is an old thread, but since it got a little traffic recently, I thought I'd propose a question here to ClayK and others. You mention "vision" and "decision" above and the difficulty in teaching these and I agree. Given the progress of gaming technology, has anybody developed a software package for coaches that contains various interactive players-eye-view scenarios so they can learn to recognize and react to situations? Ideally, it would include maybe six players (offense and defenders) show the impact of both good and bad decisions as the players made them and players could use VR headsets. Like Doom for basketball, but with a library of scenarios to be run. It's not a substitute for on-the-floor practice, but rather a way of repeating scenarios so players can more quickly learn to recognize and react. Do packages like this exist? The market wouldn't be in the millions, but between high schools, colleges, and club teams around the world, it would surely be in the thousands.

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I'd love to see simulator testing for drivers' licenses.

Civil Bear said:

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ClayK said:

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I still fail to understand why Kyle Smith was not hired as the Cal coach.

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Because Smith's resume was even less impressive than Fox's. Fox had at least finished higher than 4th in any conference and had been to the tourney. IIRC, Fox has also won an award for player development.

Smith certainly has had some recruiting success at Wasu. Do we know if those kids would have gotten into Cal?

Key calumnus with how Smith turned around Columbia on...

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Depends how superficially someone looks. 9 years at P5 Georgia with one of the best recruiting locations, zero academic standards, but with only two one and done appearances in 9 years is just bad. Smith was going up against Tommy Amaker's Harvard at their height, a ranked team pulling in top 100 talent. Ivy League academic standards, roster limits and lack of scholarships. One year Columbia under Smith went into Kentucky and lost by less than Fox's Georgia team did that year.

Smith is considered by many of his peers to be "the smartest man in college basketball." His methods are called "Nerd Ball" because of his reliance on advanced statistics and analytics instead of accepted wisdom. I want that edge for Cal.

As for the recruits he has brought into WSU, they seem similar in background to guys on our roster. Jakimovski is a small forward from Macedonia and had offers from BC, Georgia Tech, Minnesota and Utah. Abogidi is a center from Nigeria by way of Australia. Gueye is the center from Prolific Prep that we offered and wanted. They have a transfer from UC San Diego.

We most likely get Mahaney with Smith as our coach.

We will see where the two schools end up in the standings this year.

And for the record, I never said we should have hired Smith, just that he was a much better candidate for Cal than Mark Fox.