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Message: [QUOTE="Littlemin, post: 4255942, member: 10363"] No matter all the “coach decides“ posts, which of course he does, what does matter is how the team comes out of the gate at the beginning of the game. That was a huge positive for Uconn coming into the NCAA tournament, Muhl’s very positive effect on the team at the beginning of games noted and praised publicly by Auriemma on more than one occasion. For whatever his reasoning, he abandoned that obvious advantage two games ago, IMO, to the detriment of the team. Mercer was more difficult to gauge, but the effect of the change against UCF was apparent; instead of taking the fight to them, UCF completely dictated in the 1st quarter who was the aggressor and then coming out of the locker room at half time. Uconn had great chemistry going into the NCAAs and Auriemma chose to gamble away that advantage to potentially create another one by playing his “best” players more minutes, changing his starting line-up and shortening his bench. My opinion, through my experience with basketball and business, is it is extremely risky to ”fix” what isn’t broken, to mess with a successful formula. It is absolutely Auriemma’s prerogative, in fact responsibility, to do what he thinks is best for the team but I think he got this wrong big time and in the UCF game, again IMO, that was apparent. Was it the wrong move long term? We shall see. Last point, not only did the line-up change take away the Uconn advantage at the beginning of the game but the tremendous benefit of having a player like Bueckers coming in off the bench was lost. Now, in fairness, I thought Muhl’s insertion in the 2nd quarter had a profound change in the game, but rather obviously, Auriemmma felt otherwise. [/QUOTE]

Verification: First name of men's bb coach

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