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Message: [QUOTE="UcMiami, post: 2511074, member: 199"] 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! :rolleyes:) 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. [/QUOTE]

Verification: First name of men's bb coach