Rothstein: "UConn’s struggles shouldn’t be a massive surprise"

[FfldCntyFan]

The 2014 regular season, after the Florida win, was pretty mediocre if you're being objective. Brimah salvaged what would have been a fairly forgettable year.

I think a new hobby would serve you well.

 

[Robertelamin]

People moving the bar and trashing National Championship seasons to prove Kevin Ollie sucks.

Especially when people bring up the Brimah play to take something away from the championship like it was a bad thing.

 

[FfldCntyFan]

Especially when people bring up the Brimah play to take something away from the championship like it was a bad thing.

Of course it was a bad thing. If we didn't win it that year it would be easy to get rid off no right now.

Imagine how they'll act if KO wins another title. They will lose their minds because they will know that at that point we will never be able to get rid of him.

 

[Fishy]

And thats been my thing.

Absolutely hold Ollies feet to the fire for player retention. and the off the court stuff that effects it. I get it. And if last April happens again I will be the first one in line donating to the buyout. Fool me once shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

But with the pieces gone and the injury to Alterique (and even stretching back to last year with the injury to Alterique and Terry) I can't muster up the hatred for the floor game we have shown. I obviously like everyone else wish it was better, and Im sure KO couldve paddled through some of these turbulent waters a bit better on the game floor (for example the worst sub patterns in the country for my money) , but he is still a young coach in that manner... I just can't judge him fully on his actual full coaching ability, and I still think there may be something to work with. It's not like he is losing with a loaded squad. We are severely, severely undermanned. He gets a pass from me for last April ONCE.

I get it - I’m just much further down the road.

 

[Tenspro2002]

Its amazing isn't it? The Ollie haters move the bar around so much on here. I have seen time and again people saying " I want to be competitive and compete for tournament berths"

and then as soon as you bring up times where we have done that you get posts like this:



People moving the bar and trashing National Championship seasons to prove Kevin Ollie sucks.


If you ever need to look any further on why there is a big group of Men's fans that will NEVER be happy unless we are the UConn Women, look no further than that post.

Talk about moving the goalposts.

Would I take, today, a regular season on par with 2013-14 or even 2015-16? Absolutely.

At the time, the 2014 team was good early, so-so in the middle, and generally good towards the end of the regular season (non-competitive games against Louisville aside). On the whole they performed about to expectations, maybe a little below, until the Villanova game.

Does the fact that we won the championship somehow make awful performances against Stanford, Houston, and SMU better? Why can't we objectively appraise these things?

 

[FfldCntyFan]

Does the fact that we won the championship somehow make awful performances against Stanford, Houston, and SMU better? Why can't we objectively appraise these things?

Do you really need to devote any energy to the shortcomings of a regular season that ended with a trophy?

That would be like dating a Brazilian super model and complaining about her accent.

 

[August_West]

I get it - I’m just much further down the road.

I get that too.
Scares me a bit.

 

[BigErnMcCracken]

Does the fact that we won the championship somehow make awful performances against Stanford, Houston, and SMU better?

YES. It's astounding to me that you actually have to ask this question, and it's Exhibit A as to what an entitled fan base looks like. 2014 should be remembered for one thing: a national championship. There are adults who root for storied programs who have not seen a national championship in their lifetime. Have a modicum of perspective.

 

[Tenspro2002]

Do you really need to devote any energy to the shortcomings of a regular season that ended with a trophy?

That would be like dating a Brazilian super model and complaining about her accent.

When you're evaluating the overall performance of the head coach, it absolutely matters, particularly when many of those same warts showed up in subsequent years and continue to the present.

I'm not taking any credit away from KO for that championship. He owns that as much as he owns everything that has come after.

But if we're evaluating the entirety of his tenure, that means November 2013-February 2014 is relevant.

 

[intlzncster]

Player recruitment, Player retention, Player growth- do we have any semblance of this at all? It's not like we've had some sort of fluky string of out of the blue injuries. Gilbert and Durham were hurt before they even arrived here. - As Head Coach he's responsible for all of these choices. - "If they want you to cook the dinner, at least they ought to let you shop for some of the groceries.”- Our restaurant needs a new cook imo.

Durham was a flier on a Top 20 level player who had injury history.

Gilbert hurt his should for real late in the year at the McD's AA game, long after he'd already committed.

Didn't recruit players with 'injury histories' as a pattern.

 

[Dream Jobbed 2.0]

Hot take: Ollie derailed Jalen’s development as a point guard and overall career trajectory with the Gibbs situation in 2015-16. I feel like Gibbs was told he could come here and it’d be a 30 game NBA tryout as a point guard. That didn’t go so well. He sold out his career to make it to the tournament that year.

 

[intlzncster]

Hot take: Ollie derailed Jalen’s development as a point guard and overall career trajectory with the Gibbs situation in 2015-16. I feel like Gibbs was told he could come here and it’d be a 30 game NBA tryout as a point guard. That didn’t go so well. He sold out his career to make it to the tournament that year.

I think the concept was the right move. Bring in a vet whom Adams can learn from as a frosh. Most of UCONN's best PGs had that. Bazz had Kemba, Kemba had AJP, AJP had MW and Taliek, and so on. The only guy who got hung out to dry was Taliek. KEA stepped in right away, but he still had Ricky and Jones.

The only problem is that Gibbs, through no fault of his own, couldn't fulfill that role. It didn't work out, but based on the situation at the time, it was the right move. As to how it affected Jalen's overall development, idk.

 

[Tenspro2002]

Hot take: Ollie derailed Jalen’s development as a point guard and overall career trajectory with the Gibbs situation in 2015-16. I feel like Gibbs was told he could come here and it’d be a 30 game NBA tryout as a point guard. That didn’t go so well. He sold out his career to make it to the tournament that year.

Regardless of what was best for Adams's development, KO failed the team by not recognizing until the season was practically over that Gibbs had no business running his offense as a ball-dominant guard.

Gibbs needed to be used as a spot-up 2-guard, either with Adams at the 1, or with Hamilton as point forward. Gibbs shot a solid 39% from 3 (meaning he could shoot), but also a horrible 39% from inside the arc (meaning he struggled to finish on drives to the rim). Somebody else needed the ball in their hands, and the head coach was the last person to acknowledge it.

 

[SouthBayHusky]

Wow. This is true, I hadn’t thought of it that way. It feels like we’ve been terrible for ever. This last year and a half has been brutal

We have. Making the tournament 1x out of 4 seasons, and that was as a “bubble team” is terrible for a program like Uconn. 1x out of 4 seasons as a bubble team. Let that sink in. Then, ask yourself when Larrier and Jalen are missing from lineup next year and replaced by 3 freshman (only 1 being a 4*) and KO at helm, what will be more likely - making tournament; or missing again for a record of 1 tournament appearance in 5 seasons?

We can’t afford another rerun. Chances are his performance will be similar to his performance in the last four seasons, minus season number three when we had a lot of talent and experience (pre-season Top 15) and still limped into the tournament.

 

[AdamaNation]

Player recruitment, Player retention, Player growth- do we have any semblance of this at all? It's not like we've had some sort of fluky string of out of the blue injuries. Gilbert and Durham were hurt before they even arrived here. - As Head Coach he's responsible for all of these choices. - "If they want you to cook the dinner, at least they ought to let you shop for some of the groceries.”- Our restaurant needs a new cook imo.

Did rique get hurt AFTER signing his LOI? I can’t for the life remember.

 

[Dream Jobbed 2.0]

Regardless of what was best for Adams's development, KO failed the team by not recognizing until the season was practically over that Gibbs had no business running his offense as a ball-dominant guard.

Gibbs needed to be used as a spot-up 2-guard, either with Adams at the 1, or with Hamilton as point forward. Gibbs shot a solid 39% from 3 (meaning he could shoot), but also a horrible 39% from inside the arc (meaning he struggled to finish on drives to the rim). Somebody else needed the ball in their hands, and the head coach was the last person to acknowledge it.

That Offense needed to be run through Miller and Hamilton. Open looks for Purvis and Gibbs as a bonus. The dude is definitely on UConns all time missed layup team. He was a great shooter and that team was doing nothing without his shooting but he probably should have been just catch and shooting not running the team.

 

[SubbaBub]

That was a strangely kind take.

 

[Stainmaster]

Its amazing isn't it? The Ollie haters move the bar around so much on here. I have seen time and again people saying " I want to be competitive and compete for tournament berths"

and then as soon as you bring up times where we have done that you get posts like this:



People moving the bar and trashing National Championship seasons to prove Kevin Ollie sucks.


If you ever need to look any further on why there is a big group of Men's fans that will NEVER be happy unless we are the UConn Women, look no further than that post.

People want the peaks of the Calhoun years. If they say otherwise, they’re lying through their teeth.

 

[Stainmaster]

YES. It's astounding to me that you actually have to ask this question, and it's Exhibit A as to what an entitled fan base looks like. 2014 should be remembered for one thing: a national championship. There are adults who root for storied programs who have not seen a national championship in their lifetime. Have a modicum of perspective.

I spent much of my Saturday afternoon dealing with a buddy who’s a diehard Arizona fan and doesn’t understand how UConn fans can be upset at anything given the championships.

 

[jibsey]

Vance Jackson hurt bad. He was a starter with big minutes coming. Easily good for 12-16 ppg. I still don’t know what happened with KO. My guess was that he wasn’t played enough, mouthed off, and his father got pissed and things went downhill. KO probably torched his defense and effort. You don’t make 18 year old kids walk the plank, got to use psychology and get them to buy in because they are young and immature. Enoch the same.

 

[SouthBayHusky]

I spent much of my Saturday afternoon dealing with a buddy who’s a diehard Arizona fan and doesn’t understand how UConn fans can be upset at anything given the championships.

Cool story

 

[Javjudah]

We wouldn’t be better if Jackson was in Polley’s roll, Durham was in Whaley’s roll and Enoch was in DO’s roll?

I never said we wouldn't be better if Jackson was in Polley's role. I like Durham and think he is talented but he thought that he should have played more last season when he really should have been redshirted to work on his body and health. Now Enoch never improved. He was terrible on defense and everytime he touched the ball on offense it was a turnover. I wish him luck at Louisville, hope he improves.

 

[Javjudah]

Vance Jackson hurt bad. He was a starter with big minutes coming. Easily good for 12-16 ppg. I still don’t know what happened with KO. My guess was that he wasn’t played enough, mouthed off, and his father got pissed and things went downhill. KO probably torched his defense and effort. You don’t make 18 year old kids walk the plank, got to use psychology and get them to buy in because they are young and immature. Enoch the same.

His father thought he was as good as Paul George and wanted the ball in his hands. He could have been really good had he played his role.

 

[uconnbill]

Maybe I am missing something but they don't play as a team. The offense is ragtag to say the least and on defense, they have good moments but more bad moments. How do you not get out of shooters when you know they can shoot. Communication is poor as well and this starts at the top. Losing Gilbert hurt, but so did losing Mal.
This is on Coach Ollie and his staff.

 

[Towney007]

Again the record is just so secondary to me with this team. 10-9 doesn't bug me given the roster, given the schedule, all of it. What i'm worried about is how absolutely out of our depth we look. How totally matched we always look. How the same problems persist year after year. I mean if we're 10-9, and 2-3 of em are blow outs, 2-3 of them are competitive and 2-3 we lose in close contests and whatever... well then we're having a totally different conversation. If we're 10-9 now and push Nova and Wichita hard on the heels of what was a really good effort until the last few minutes of the Arizona game.. hey, things aren't good but we're getting better.

But we're not. We're just getting worse. And it's the same story every year. They give you 10 minutes every game where you go 'wow, we ight be figuring it out' or a great game against a bad to middling team where everything looks really great... they give you JUST ENOUGH to kind of hold onto a little bit of hope before they go out immediately thereafter and absolutely get blown out of their shoes. And then it's the same body language, it's the team just going through the motions behind...

It's the same offense that's literally leading nowhere. We're honestly not THAT BAD defensively. We can stop good teams and our guard defense is actually really good. But we're outsized, get brutalized on the boards. We don't run.

And No - I don't think it's the talent. We're not at mid 00's recruting levels, but we mostly never were before or after and were good. And there's enough talent on this team to warrant playing above the crappy roster construction. We shouldn't have been a losing team in any sense last year - and def. shouldn't be this year either.

Then there's just the mind boggling turnover, the inability to develop core players past a point, the rumors of silliness with the coaches off the court, there jsut being heaps of analogies and yeah ra ra without ANY semblance of substance as to what's wrong.

And it's all snowballing and taking a bad situation - and uninteresting, albeit underrated conference that fans don't want to come watch... the P5 pressure, the changing landscape, financial constraints, etc... It's all there and just melding into an awful cocktail where what's been going on can't continue. It just can't. Even if it's not as much Ollie's fault as myself, or others on the board think it might be.

The buy out sucks, but it won't be as big an obstacle as it appears up front. The issue with it to me is it just severely limits (even more) the program's upward mobility and margin for error. They have to absolutely freaking NAIL the next guy. They 100% can't miss. Because if they do - it's probably over. That to me is more the risk in the buy out than the dollars up front. And I think Benedict is a massive upgrade over previous administrators, but the fact remains even if they get a big name and a better fit (like they did with football) it's stil not a guarantee and they're on the clock. But they are even if they stick with Ollie, if not moreso.

So it's not a good option, but it's certainly the least bad one. But they've gotta tee it high and let it fly at this point.