I have just one question

[OldAlum]

I wonder if some of the starters are staying on the floor as Geno plays with different combinations off the bench. It seems that only in the last few minutes does he have all bench players on the court - possibly because until the last game it just hurt him to watch them play together! First a bench player or two gets to play with a number of starters. Still some good structure for the newbies and a chance to see how they can mesh in a game situation with starters. Then he keeps a starter (or Z) or two in with more benchers to keep things going. Finally he takes off the "training wheels" and lets the benchers play together. Previous to the last game, they tended to wobble and fall over a lot. Now they have a fairly successful trip under their belts!

Lou only played 22 minutes and I suspect that Geno is having her practice playing with fouls. Perhaps left her in towards the end to prove she could avoid another. I was more concerned about her ankle when she was leaping on the sidelines celebrating the benchers' plays!

 

[UcMiami]

OldAlum - you are describing Geno's pattern of substitutions since I began watching many years ago, and it never seems to change much year to year. (Nor do we ever change much in the number of posts and threads complaining that _____ should be getting more minutes, and the starters should be getting more rest! ) It is extremely difficult to have consistent good integration of more than 7 players on a team - the variation in skills and 'game' between players is too great to get comfortable with too many different variations of 5 players on the court together.

What you see in hockey is the solution best capable of dealing with that issue - groups of three forwards and separate groupings of two defenders learning to play together and being substituted as discrete sets throughout a game.

And we hear the 'hockey line' description used in basketball when coaches like Doug have a long bench with fairly even talent. Geno as the USA coach did quite a bit of that as well - he had 12 supremely talented players and found it better to have two general groupings of six or seven players that could get comfortable with each other. And you see the same in the pros, especially the men, where the 'bench' rests the starters as a fairly complete group for maybe five minutes each half.

At Uconn the talent/experience disparity is just too large to consistent do the hockey line even when the bench is long enough. And forcing three or four of his starters to play with a bench player not ready for prime time tends to throw them off more than it helps the bench player - and that is what practices are for.