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Message: [QUOTE="Bone Dog, post: 4412591, member: 12088"] I love Geno's habitual understatement. His answers have this rambling "stream of consciousness" feel to them. They're sometimes quite tangential to the question he was asked. To the question "how did she [Azzi] look?" with the implied qualifier "as a point guard," he answers like this: 1) He begins by praising Azzi generally, but in such a way as to deflate our notion of what a point guard does ("you know, she can go from here to there"). 2) Then he reminds us that he doesn't trouble himself about having rigidly defined positions and roles. Maybe point guard merely means whoever dribbles the ball up the court, thereby ignoring the traditional role of a point guard in half court offensive sets. 3) Then he uses Nika as an example of someone who's good at dribbling the ball up the floor. 4) Then he backs off this thought and imagines "the other guys" doing the same thing. 5) And in the end, he returns to his original thought concerning Azzi: "...if she gets the ball and she goes... something pretty good is going to happen." This is classic Geno. Has he actually announced anything about his lineup thinking? It doesn't look that way. Mainly, he seems to have suggested that Azzi will be encouraged to do what Paige did, namely whatever she wants, and whatever she can get the rest of the team to sync with. This usually meant "the other guys" anticipated her moves and would get open in the appropriate ways. This is the "something pretty good" that usually happens. One other implication: Azzi, like Paige, differs from "the other guys" in that she has something in mind for the other end of the floor -- she dribbles up with something in mind, and not just settling into a half court set. This is how I remember the great point guards, like Rizotti, Bird, Hayes, Doty, MoJeff, Crystal. They always seemed to be threatening something as they dribbled up the court. if the opposing team couldn't get back quickly enough to set up their defensive set, we'd already be attacking the rim. It's a sort of inverse of a full-court press. [/QUOTE]

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