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Message: [QUOTE="champs99and04, post: 2287212, member: 488"] It's hard to explain, honestly, but the best way I can put it is that a person's strength is often also their biggest weakness. I don't think Kevin Ollie has done a good job coaching over the last three years. The reason I am hopeful that will change is that he now has new players. The guys that comprised the core of those teams - Purvis, Calhoun, Hamilton, Facey, and Brimah - did not have skill sets that jived with Ollie's core philosophies. I believe he should have tweaked his system to fit the personnel better, but he didn't. The flip side to that is when you're stubborn, the basketball universe has a funny way of naturally selecting players that either love the coach or don't. To that end, recruiting is about more than just signing players; it's about making connections and sharing a vision. That tends to be something easier to recognize in the earliest and simplest stages of a recruitment, when the outside noise is lesser and the autonomy of the player is greater. Everything that contributes to a recruitment that isn't about the player/coach relationship is something that threatens the conviction of your vision. That's why Jackson, Durham, and Enoch are no longer here. They didn't believe in the coach or the system. Purvis, Brimah, and Facey were loyal and cooperative members of Ollie's plan who also happened to be good basketball players. But they weren't the right players. They weren't the right players to execute Ollie's vision and I think - either by chance or by a shift in strategy - that the players on the current team are. They're not going to be some dominant team, but I think they'll make the tournament, and after that, who knows? Maybe Adams and Larrier come back and they contend for the crown in 2018-19. Maybe he parlays his newfound job security into another Adams or another Larrier. I just think it's early to write the script on Kevin Ollie at UConn. Maybe the problem isn't that he doesn't know how to coach. Maybe the problem is that he only knows how to coach one way and maybe he's finally realized it and so have the players. And maybe that's not as much of a problem as we think. [/QUOTE]

Verification: First name of men's bb coach

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