calumnus said:
Civil Bear said:
calumnus said:
Civil Bear said:
calumnus said:
Civil Bear said:
calumnus said:
Civil Bear said:
stu said:
calumnus said:
One of the many criticisms of Fox at Georgia was that he didn't recruit shooters and when he had one, he didn't play him.
Maybe Fox should be coaching track & field. Or defense in football.
If only he had given more minutes to Ryan Betley.
The guy with the 6th best 3 pt % on the team at .327 (just behind Klonaras)? As you know, he lead the team in minutes played despite his poor shooting. Maybe if Fox set him up for more catch and shoot he'd have shot better, but you'll have to come up with a better example to refute my premise.
Cal PAC-12 Rank in 3 pt FGs made:
2019-20 #12
2020-21 #7
2021-22 #12
Who are the shooters this year?
Klonaras and his 1 made 3? Seriously? I guess you think he should have gotten more minutes because he was a better shooter.
Betley was a career 38.3% 3pt shooter coming into Cal. Fox and any other reasonable person would have considered him a pretty good shooter. Bradley and Anticevich ended up with better numbers from outside, but they also averaged more minutes per game, so your premise really doesn't fly. Who on the roster was potentially a better shooter than Betley that should have gotten his minutes? Possibly Celestine, but then Fox still gave the most minutes per game to 3 of his 4 best shooters.
Well we did finish #7 in threes that year as opposed to #12 his other two years, so I'll give you that.
So throw out Klonaras, though he was .375 over his Cal career (3 of 8), I was not arguing for Klonaras.
I just don't think you can give a player the most minutes of anyone on the team throughout a long season based on what he did in the Ivy League, in a different system when he is not producing here against PAC-12 competition. Or, set him up for open looks with off the ball screens or inside out play with Kelly.
Celestine was absolutely outplaying him from early on and should have played a lot more.
Cal 2020-21 3P% (20 attempts minimum)
1. Celestine (.414)
2. Brown (.387)
3. Grant (.366)
4. Bradley (.364)
5. Betley (.327)
6. Foreman (.317)
7. Hyder (.227)
Cal 2020-21 3PA
1. Betley 159
2. Foreman 139
3. Bradley 110
4. Grant 82
5. Hyder 44
6. Brown 31
7. Celestine 29
So three of our worst shooters: Betley, Foreman and Hyder = 342 attempts
And our three best: Bradley, Grant and Celestine = 221 attempts.
The three poor shooting transfers shot 55% more threes than our 3 best shooters.
It is a simple premise: get your best players on the court and get your best shooters shots by freeing them up with screens.
You leave out that your three best missed 18 games between them.
I have no issue with the premise that a coach should get his best players on the court, just the silly one that Fox doesn't play shooters when he has them.
Here is my original quote:
"One of the many criticisms of Fox at Georgia was that he didn't recruit shooters and when he had one, he didn't play him.
One of the keys to Monty's success was his early recognition of the value of the 3 point shot, recruiting players who are dead eye shooters even if little more, and then using off ball screens and/or inside out play to get them open looks."
To which your refutation was Ryan Betley?
1st. My statement was about Fox's nine years at Georgia, I said nothing about Cal, though admittedly there was an implication about his time at Cal.
2nd. The statement is primarily about recruiting. I believe great shooters exhibit the skill early and need to be recruited. A one year grad transfer who was supposed to be able to shoot well but didn't at Cal and played anyway hardly counters all the other players that Fox has recruited. A couple of whom can shoot, but not primarily. Mostly Fox, for the last 12 years of coaching clearly looks for athletic players with length, even if relatively new to the game and low skill, to play tough man to man defense. His teams have always been near the bottom of the conference in 3 pt shots made and that has continued at Cal. His best shooters, Bradley and Grant, were inherited from Wyking Jones. However, he did recruit two freshmen that can shoot some: Celestine and Alajiki, I thought both should have played a lot more when healthy.
3rd I gave the example of Monty, whose even earlier Stanford teams often lead the conference in three point shooting and emphasized good shooting at Cal. His offense got open looks for 3 pt shooters, often lightly recruited shooting specialists. I said nothing about Fox, but admittedly the implication was Fox's offense does not get good open looks for 3 pt shooters.
Ryan Betley, an Ivy League grad transfer missing a bunch of forced threes for one season, does not refute the fact that under Fox we make the fewest threes in the conference and he is the one that assembled the team and coaches them.
1st. I agree regarding the implication.
2nd. I had nothing to say about the recruiting. Just the assertion that he didn't play his shooters. You going on and on about how Betley got too many minutes is just an example that your assertion was hyperbole.
3rd. Nobody is arguing that Fox = Monty or anything close to that. My Betley comment only had to do with your Fox doesn't play his shooters comment. You can argue other stuff, but I haven't engaged or refuted any of it.
"The complaint at Georgia was that Fox didn't recruit shooters and when he had one he didn't play him"
1. I am relating what was said by Georgia fans and media observers, and of course it was hyperbole. Most people understand that. Obviously he had to play his best shooter some or no one would know he was the best shooter. Most people understand that to mean he did not play him enough.
2. Again, Betley was not our best shooter, not by a long shot. That year Celestine was. In my opinion he did not play Celestine enough. Rather than refuting my premise, his playing Betley over Celestine supports my position.
Instead you quibbled with my saying Betley was our 6th best, which I conceded. The point was, 6th or 5th he was not our best, right? Statistically, our best was Celestine, 9th in minutes played.
And if you were not trying to refute my overall observation that Fox's teams are generally last in 3 point shooting because he does not emphasize three point shooting in his recruiting or strategy, then what was the point?
The case for firing a coach should be made on whether he has done his present job well enough, and not based on anything he did in a prior job, and certainly not on what some fans and media in Georgia said about his coaching there. Their statements don't appear to show much understanding of what the job of a basketball coach entails, and I am surprised you would hitch your wagon to that kind of criticism.
I liked Ryan Betley. I liked the effort he gave on the court, and I think he played as hard as any of our players that season. Your conclusion on Betley seems to rely on your desire to make Fox look bad for playing him too many minutes, and you present for evidence Betley's final end-of-season 3-point percentage, stating it was 6th best on the team, even including Klonaras (with his one basket in three tries) in your argument. You were so intent on painting an ugly picture of Betley as not a very good shooter, that you completely left out how he arrived at that final percentage. Let's look at the early season, the first 15 games (a tough schedule which included 9 PAC12 teams plus USF):
Betley: 15 games, 34-89, 0.382
Foreman: 15 games, 35-96, 0.365
Brown: 15 games, 6-17, 0.353
Grant: 11 games, 11-33, 0.333
Celestine: 8 games, 3-9, 0.333
Bradley: 9 games, 14-44, 0.318
How could you neglect the fact that Ryan Betley was Cal's
BEST 3-POINT SHOOTER OVER THE FIRST 15 GAMES, shooting 0.382? After the first 15 games, Betley hit a wall, and his 3-point average fell to 0.257 for the next 14 games. Fox himself said, looking back, that Betley was exhausted, and that he probably should not have played him so much in the first half of the season. Betley has not been a very durable player in his career. At Penn, he arrived as a freshman with an injury and missed the first 9 games of his freshman season with it. As a soph, he played 33 games and was the leading scorer for Penn, when they won the Ivy League championship for the first time since 2007. As a junior, 5 minutes into his first game, he ruptured his patella tendon, a very serious injury, and had to have surgery to reattach it. His rehabilitation took an entire year. He said that he injured it trying to jump. He had no lift, and the leg collapsed under him. He returned to play his senior season, and had a good year (although he missed 5 games), but not nearly as good as his sophomore season. I suspect he may have aggravated the patella tendon injury at Cal, and it hampered him on the floor. In any case he looked exhausted for many of the last 14 games. Mark Fox is close-mouthed about injuries, like many coaches, so we'll probably never know what might have caused the exhaustion.
If you followed the games, you would have noticed that Betley fell into a horrendous shooting slump after game 15, which continued to the end of the season. He shot threes at only 0.257 for the 2nd half of the season. For the 2nd half of the season, Mark Fox cut Betley's playing time from an average of 32.1 minutes to an average of 22.2 Most of Betley's lost minutes went directly to to Jalen Celestine, which were increased in the same period from 8.4 minutes per game to 15.3. So you can see that Fox did as you wanted, let Celestine play in Betley's place, though maybe not as much as you would have liked.
You said, "I just don't think you can give a player the most minutes of anyone on the team throughout a long season, based on what he did in the Ivy League." Honestly, do you have any actual evidence that Fox was playing Betley based on what he did in the Ivy League? It is clear to me that Fox was playing him in the first 15 games
because he was the best 3-point shooter we had over that period.
As long as he shot well, Fox kept playing him, and when his shooting dropped off, he gave some of his minutes to others, like any good coach would. BTW, Betley's 27 minutes per game at Cal was the fewest minutes per game that he played in any of the three full seasons of his career.
Remember Darius McNeill? In his first season at Cal, in the first 16 games, he lit up the scoreboard with threes, making 36 of 78 attempts, or 46%, during a tough early season, a percentage up there with Theo, Randle, and Bradley. Then Darius too, hit a wall. In the second half of the season, the last 16 games, he shot his threes at 31 out of 112, or 27%. Please note that Wyking Jones allowed McNeill to put up EVEN MORE threes in the 2nd half of the season, than he did in the first half of the season, even though he was not making many of them. That is what a bad or inexperienced coach does, isn't it?
You stated, "Celestine was absolutely outplaying him (Betley)
FROM EARLY ON, and should have played a lot more." This is ABSOLUTELY UNTRUE. If you had looked at box scores or game logs, you would have seen that Celestine played very little in the first half of the season. He missed 7 of the first 11 games, and did not make his first three of the season until game 12 of the season, against Washington. That was a very small sample size.
By that time, Betley had already made 26 threes for Cal. I have nothing against Celestine. I like him. He can score, has good anticipation, makes some good plays, and is a good defender (better than Betley). But that frosh season, he arrived unable to play much, due to injury or recovering from injury. Now he is injured again, which is pretty sad.
In another post you accuse Betley of "missing a bunch of forced threes." Then in a later post, you state that "Bradley and Grant were our tightly-guarded players," not Betley. So if Betley is not being tightly guarded, so when did he put up a forced shot? Do you think that, instead of taking the wide open shot, he ran toward the nearest defender to get closer to him, so he could force a shot? You can't have your cake, and eat it too, as the saying goes. If Betley was lightly guarded, then it would have been more likely to happen in the last 14 games, when he was not shooting well, wouldn't it?
Fox has done little good at Cal, and I understand the calls for his head. His teams have won little, his recruits have not been stellar, but the players do play hard for the most part. The team just does not play good-looking basketball on the floor, except for short stretches of minutes, and an occasional win. But what you seem to be doing in your passion for Cal, is almost like character assassination of Fox, and now of a player, Betley, all to get a coach fired. You've already got a good case against Fox, so let's try not to make up stuff to bolster the case.
SFCityBear
