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Message: [QUOTE="nelsonmuntz, post: 4489168, member: 833"] PAHusky - Basketball is not played today at its apex. Also PAHusky - there is no way that these coaches are wrong because they are the smartest (and by extension basketball must be getting played at its apex). I will bring the NBA into this. Look at the Knicks and Rockets from the 90's. The Knicks had a backcourt of athletic guards (Starks, Anthony, Rivers) that could occasionally shoot. The Rockets had a slow, weak defensive guard in Kenny Smith, a young project in Sam Cassell, and a lunatic in Vernon Maxwell. All 3 of them could shoot from outside. Which team was more successful? Pat Riley is one of the smartest and most successful coaches in NBA history, and he had assembled a team that had no chance of winning a championship despite having a great center and good frontcourt, and penetrators who played a style popular at the time. Rudy Tomjanovich and Houston assembled a team of oddballs that perfectly complemented Olajuwon, and they won two titles. Riley didn't understand the math, and Tomjanovich did, at least on some level, in the pre-analytics era. I promise you that, in the 90's, at bars and dinner tables all over the New York metro area, nerds like me were pointing out that the Knicks roster did not make a lot of sense, and people like you were saying "are you saying that you are smarter than Pat Riley?" Basketball was changing, and Riley missed it while coaches like Tomjanovich and Popovich were building champions. I am not the only person that thinks there is a way to incorporate bigs into an analytics offense. Sean Miller and Doug McDermott play a style that I think a lot of college teams will play 5 years from now. Are you saying that you are smarter about basketball than Sean Miller and Doug McDermott? [/QUOTE]

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