Hello, posting for the first time after decades (?) of lurking. Anyway, as some of you have mentioned, Caldwell's system has three (3) defining components:
1. Forty min. of full court press
2. Volume shooting from behind the arc
3. Hockey line substitutions
Successfully running this system intrinsically requires assemblage of a team with the following characteristics, at minimum:
1. Ten players who are equally capable of shooting the 3
2. Two equally capable players at each of the five positions
3. That the players can be split into two units of five, one at each position, both of which have the chemistry to play as a stable, cohesive unit throughout the season, as well as the ability to seamlessly maintain the momentum of the players it is replacing on the court
For obvious reasons, no school at the highest D1 level can assemble a team that fulfills each of these conditions--not even UConn which, of course, has one of the deepest teams in the NCAA tournament this year. But as at least one poster has pointed out, none of the players on Tennessee's team (despite all of them being Caldwell's recruits with the exception of Cooper, Boyd and the departed Wynn) is a 3-point specialist. Indeed, of the team's best players, Talaysia Cooper owns the team's best 3-pt make percentage (34.2
NCAA College Women's Basketball DI current individual Stats | NCAA.com) which is respectable but nowhere near Azzi's percentage. Nor, as someone else mentioned, does Caldwell play two consistent platoons of five. Well, not only are the rotations themselves changeable, but quite damningly, Caldwell apparently has no understanding of the relationship between substitutions, strategy and game flow. When, in Friday's game, the players on the floor finally had managed to get themselves within 3 points of tying up their game against NC State late in the third quarter, Caldwell did one of her hockey substitutions, thus breaking all momentum and catalyzing what would eventually become an insurmountable Wolfpack lead. Worse, many of the players she subbed in are amongst the less skilled on the team.
Many posters, both on this board and on Volnation, have observed that the success of this system relies upon forcing turnovers and wearing out the opposing team which doesn't work against Power 4 caliber teams capable of breaking the press and playing 40 min. of basketball at full intensity. I'd also suggest, based upon what I've just outlined, that at least one factor underlying the ineffectiveness of this strategy on Tennessee's part is Caldwell's own incompetence in applying it in the first place. According to one poster on Volnation, "apparent willful ignorance of the obvious problems with her system at this level certainly makes her LOOK like a " ( Post #18,
https://www.volnation. com/forum/threads/nc-st-post-game-press-conference.382254/). Like others, I surmise that one motivation for the doubling down is that she doesn't have the knowledge or experience to coach any other system, but perhaps unkindly, I also suspect that she doesn't have the analytical ability, critical thinking skills and/or flexibility of mind to learn any other strategies and/or integrate elements of different ones and apply them judiciously--at least, that is what I deduce from her own response in the postgame presser to the question of what she learned over the course of the season that she'll apply to next season which was that it wasn't the appropriate moment to list all of the issues to be addressed but that the overriding lesson she'd absorbed was to "keep your character when your prayer doesn't match God's plan" (Post #1,
https://www. volnation.com/forum/threads/nc-st-post-game-press-conference.382254/). I have no idea what that means, but anyone who would ever attribute this season's results to some deific intention rather than to Occam's razor (which in this case means a failure to prepare and also to adjust in real time during games) is likely someone incapable of logical thought. It's not a coincidence that the most successful coaches in women's bball--Geno, Tara, Dawn and (despite her complete lack of class and character) Kim Mulkey--all have considerable brains.
