Yeah I'm not much for Ollie's 'eye for talent' either. I mean while Hurley seems to be getting every drop out of these guys that he possibly can - they're almost all deeply flawed players. Carlton can't finish at the rim and just refuses to realize that he is, in fact - a very large man. Vital is a super plucky, fun shooter who can get into lanes, steal and generate turnovers with a high motor. But he's also got the basketball IQ of a grapefruit (I weirdly love him for that, too). Polley's a good spot shooter - but he's not that athletic and completely disappears at times. Whaley has evolved into an ok-ish bench piece, but I really don't know what else is in there and rough stuff is that it'd be hard for him to make a really good UConn team.
Gilbert was a McDonald's All American, so I'm not sure i'd count that.
Ollie's real flaw though - was just a general inability to manage the nuts and bolts of a program and deal with the administrative/management of the program. Surrounding yourself with good assistants and trusting in them. Connecting with alumni. Leveraging assets like Calhoun. Round-the-clock attitude towards recruiting. Having support pieces in place to help develop guys. Keeping an eye on compliance stuff. Like w/ his NCAA violations - I never looked at them as him ever doing something intentionally sinister but rather him just being a disorganized, aloof mess. All the other problems directly stemmed from that
Countless guys totally plateau'd under him and there were guys I feel like - that even when they were good - I couldn't help but feel like we could have gotten more out of them. The 2015 team should have been much better. 2016 should have been much better. I always think and wonder what life would be like had Dan Hurley had guys like Facey, Calhoun, Purvis and Gibbs.
Then there was the day-to-day doting over the guys that you kind of have to do. "Hey dummy, did you get into the weight room today?" That kind of stuff. Just so many little things that I feel like just got away from him.
Then from a mental approach, I heard a lot from people that we was too much like the brawny NBA journeyman vet taking rookies under his wing than he was as the father figure/tough love figure that you usually need at the college level. Too much 'lets be friends' than 'let me teach you.' But. That's what he knew, so it's not surprising.
But overall the guy just wasn't really ready to lead a program of this caliber. Lacked the management skill, didn't really understand the energy and effort it took behind the scenes, didn't have much of a taste for details of the day to day, and generally lacked the feel for managing college kids. He was just a bad fit.
A bad person? Eh - the lawsuit pissed me off. But whatever. I think he's a pretty good dude. Just in no way ready for this level of basketball. Had enough to fake it and even contribute in year-1 and year-2, but the further we got away from JC, the more layers of the onion peeled back and we got what we got.
