barsad said:
Pretty sure the "passing coach" was a joke, though I would love for someone to prove me wrong and find someone who's getting paid for passing.
BCA, if it's not specialists, what's your solution to the substandard coaching problem?
I don't think we necessarily have a substandard coaching problem. I think the jury is still out on that. I think we have:
1. A recruiting problem. We plain and simple don't have shooters on this team. It is very hard to take guys that weren't shooters in the first place and coach them up to be by the end of the year to be shooters. Do some guys significantly improve with coaching? Yes. They are rarer than people think. You can't take a bunch of 25%-30% three point shooters and expect a shooting coach is going to yield 3 or 4 40% three point shooters. Beyond the shooting, our recruiting has been meh despite the plaudits which seemed to be unwarranted at the time of signing and proved to be so on the court. Unlike last year, we have had some success with a couple young prospects that we should expect to return, but the benefit has just not impacted game day at this point.
2. A scheme problem, which is different from substandard coaching. IMO, and I hope I'm wrong, Madsen has chosen entirely the wrong scheme on both sides of the floor for the circumstances of the Cal program. Those are choices that he can change and I hope he does because the scheme is not putting this team at its best for where it is right now. I assume he has thought he can recruit into the schemes, but I don't see that happening without interim steps that bring out the best in the personnel that he has right now. I think the jury is out on the quality of his coaching within this scheme or another one, but it is very possible that he is fine at teaching all of the elements of successful basketball and if he changed the scheme a lot of the problems that look like issues with fundamentals would go away.
Very hypothetically speaking, if I agreed that we had a substandard coaching problem, there is an obvious solution to that. It means the head coach needs to be replaced or you should not expect significant improvement. Basketball is not like football where the head coach is more of an administrator and relies on assistants to do the day to day coaching. Basketball coaches coach. That is kind of my point here. It seems odd to me that people who think the coaching is substandard don't lay that on the feet of the coach. Wyking didn't get that deference. Fox didn't. I don't think Cuonzo even did. Or, now that I think of it, Braun or Bozeman or Campanelli. Madsen is paid a lot. Certainly picking assistants that complement his skill set is important, but if that means offense and defense and shooting, then I would wonder what his skill set actually is. (again, hypothetical because I don't agree that is the issue).
It's good to just shoot the s-t and let off steam, but within the bounds of real basketball talk instead of "flames-R-Us". If we knew what we were talking about we wouldn't be tapping away on our keyboards, we'd be on the opposite side of the court from Madsen.