Reply to thread

Message: [QUOTE="LStudfellow, post: 2455843, member: 5436"] Honestly, Calhoun was not a great offensive coach. My father, god rest his soul, who coached for 20 years and was quite successful at the junior high school travel team level (his teams won over 80% of their games) used to comment on that all of the time. Interestingly, my father did follow a significant amount of what coach K taught over the years, including his famous match up zone. But my father would also say that Calhoun was a brilliant defensive coach (the big-to-big double team strategy we used on Elton Brand in the 1999 National Championship game was a perfect example) and a master at getting most of his guys to play with his fire, passion and intensity. He was THE BEST at imposing his will on his players and on games. As good if not better than practically any coach we have ever seen. That is the biggest single secret of his coaching success, and an absolutely underrated part of his greatness. The big difference (unfortunately) between Calhoun and Ollie are not on the offensive end... they are on the defensive end, and the willingness to pull out a guy - any guy, even the best player - who was not giving full effort on defense and get in his grill, and sit him for awhile, if need be. Ollie is showing all of us that he does not believe that style works. Except that after 3 years and 8 more games after losing Shabazz to graduation, the proof that he is wrong is obvious, and right there for us all to see. Fact is, Calhoun would have pulled Terry Larrier's lazy butt off the court multiple times by now... and Jalen's butt also, when he is being lackadaisical. Ollie's unwillingness to impose his own steel will on the players and during the game (he does not get in the referees' faces enough, either... I agree with the multitudes of you who comment on that) leads to the uneven play, all-too-often slow starts and extended runs by the other teams that we witness in practically every game. Calhoun never put up with it and for that reason it hardly ever happened, even when we were under-manned. If Ollie does not come to terms with this aspect and adjust his thinking accordingly, he will end up getting fired from this job at some point, either sooner or later. [/QUOTE]

Verification: First name of men's bb coach

Forum statistics

Threads: 164,602

Messages: 4,402,945

Members: 10,217

Latest member: Peter8122