Reply to thread

Message: [QUOTE="nelsonmuntz, post: 4510265, member: 833"] Sanogo and Clingan are without question 2 of the 4 best players on the team. To win a game, historically teams have tried to get their best players on the court as much as possible, even if coaches need to adapt their strategy to do it. Also, as anyone who has so much as played a pickup game at the YMCA knows, size is an advantage in basketball. But many on the Boneyard do not agree. On this board there is a large contingent (many of whom jumped in this thread with generic internet memes) that argue that spreading the court with everyone out at the 3 point line is the best strategy because a few talking heads who don’t understand statistics and only moderately understand basketball told them so. And bigs are apparently unsuited for this kind of offense. Well, Butler played a 5 out, heavy cutting and attempting to penetrate to the basket while attempting to launch 3’s strategy, and they were literally (using that weird correctly) helpless. The same team that beat Kansas State with its center, got annihilated without him by a UConn team that had lost 5 of 6 coming into this game. We have listened to literally years of these same posters telling us that spreading the court with all 5 players was better, only to watch Butler have one of the worst performances by a major conference team in a league game in years trying to do exactly that. Maybe there is a reason that no major conference team plays 5 guards by choice. Maybe, playing a team’s best players and playing an offense that actually maximizes the expected value of each possession is a good idea. Or we can throw more mediocre 3 point shooters on the court instead of high percentage bigs and see where that gets us. So now a few of the smarter posters see the logic gap in their argument, and have switched from “spreading the court and more three pointers is good” to “1 big on the court is the perfect number”, because reasons. Apparently 1 big is good, 2 is unacceptable. I am very interested in the logic behind this, because I suspect that whatever rationale they have for why there should be one big would also work for two bigs. [/QUOTE]

Verification: First name of men's bb coach