Quote:
Originally posted by tomegun
Jbduke, I forgot I even opened this can of worms. 
I have argued this over and over with guys I know and their argument is way better than yours. How do you feel sorry for someone who cries all the time and has back surgery when his team is obviously going nowhere? Low blow, I apologize, but you get my point. I will open up a little more and tell you my side of the argument. Keep in mind, I'm from Indiana. Name 10 players of Bobby Knight's. The real fan will have no problem with that but I can tell you it will not start with Jordan, Worthy, Perkins, Dougherty, Wallace, Stackhouse, Fox, Carter, Smith...If you know what I mean. All that and two championships. The last time I checked, they played for the trophy at the end; ask Dean if he would trade 5 20-win seasons for one more championship and see what he says.
The colleges with the most talent of all time are UNC, Duke, UCLA and Kentucky. Compare that to championships won and tell me what you have. Roy Williams is running a close third in this argument to me because of the team he finally had to win it all. And you say talent doesn't win championships? Duke's three teams had major talent. UNC's three championships had major talent. Indiana's three championships had a couple of major players, a few coaches and some nice guys. In some ways Knight has put Texas Tech on the basketball map. Coach K's back would get hurt somewhere along the line if he tried that. Another low blow, I'm sorry. Why aren't Jim Harrick, Nolan Richardson, Tubby Smith and Calhoun in the same league with Smith and coach K? They won it all when they had talent. They didn't win it all when they didn't have talent. Year in and year out Duke and UNC stacks the talent up and make it to the final four. What about winning it all? UNC will probably be a #2 seed during a "down" year; they have the best freshman in the country and they are getting 3 more freshmen next year (at least two of them will start).
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T,
I actually spent thirty minutes yesterday composing a response, looked up, realized that I was maybe 10% of the way there, and decided it wasn't worth it, so I ripped off a couple minutes worth and quit.
My argument was not and never has been that talent doesn't win championships. Part of my argument is that it is terribly myopic to nearly totally discount a coach because he's had outstanding talent.
An interesting question that ties together your post and that of "bebanovic" or whatever, is that you both create false dichotomies between coaches of teams with mediocre talent who play a certain way (the Pete Carrils and Dick Bennetts of the world), and those who play a system utilizing more talented players.
All coaches coach what they know, or based on the knowledge they are developing. If Dick Bennett came to Duke and coached his system with K's players, what do you think would happen? I'll tell you what would happen: they'd win a lot fewer games than they currently do. Why? Because his system would create far fewer possessions per game, which mitigates against the superior talent that he'd have. Coaches like Bennett and Carril are wonderful coaches, but the fact that they do more with less doesn't make them superior, it makes them realists. You're absolutely crazy if you think that Carrill would have become the Carrill we know if he'd spent ten years on Dean Smith's bench and gotten an opportunity at a big-time program like Kansas. My sense is that he would have been extremely successful, but he wouldn't have used the system that he has if he'd had better players.
You pulled a bait-and-switch on me in bringing Knight into the discussion after starting with Calhoun, but it's an instructive example. My knock on Calhoun is that he hasn't been consistently excellent.
My knock on Knight is that he didn't prove to be adaptive at all. He won three titles in 12 seasons, then made only one Final Four in his last what, 13 seasons?
You took a junior-high-school-ignorant, petty swipe at K with the back-injury line. If you'll take a look at the record, Duke was in the top 10 in the country when he went down. Further, without him on the bench and starting three freshmen in a conference where UVA, UMd, UNC, and WF all finished 12-4 in the conference, they lost to all of those teams at home by one or two points, and two of those in overtime. You don't think K's presence on a bench is worth even three points a game? Ignorant ACC fans and other Duke-haters have been taking this potshot for years, but the claim doesn't become any more reasonable with time. You're an a** for even using that line.
You also ignore the total rebuilding job that K did, of his own program, after he came back from his back surgery. After not making the tournament in 1995, Duke struggled through injuries and talent deficiencies in 1996 to get an 8 seed, then managed to win the ACC regular season title in 1997 in a year in which Tim Duncan was a senior with a very good supporting cast. Since 1998, Duke has been a #1 seed 8 times and a 3 seed once. You trivialize what it took from K to get the program back on top, I don't. Okay.
What about 1991, though? Do you remember who Duke beat in the semi-finals? Yes, it was a talented Duke team, but they beat the most talented team in the history of college basketball; no sentient being would reasonably claim that Duke had superior talent that day.
The most important shortcoming in your argument is that you either totally misunderstand, or completely ignore (I suspect it's the latter), the randomness of sport. Does the fact that Dean Smith (who you would presumably concede is at least a "good" coach), only won two national championships with the talent that he had over the years not tell you something about how lucky you have to be, in addition to be really, really good? It had nothing to do with Smith's coaching that Kenny Smith broke his arm in 1984 and was only able to come off the bench for the Tournament. That Carolina team was absolutely dominant before Smith went down with the Heels 17-0 and #1 in the country.
He had even more injuries in 1977, when he still managed to reach the final, only to have injured Phil Ford shoot only 3-10 from the field, Walter Davis play in a splint with a broken finger, and Tommy LaGarde miss the last half of the season with a knee injury.
What about John Thompson? Villanova had to shoot 79% for the GAME against him, and he still only lost by two points. How does the result of that one game have any bearing on him as a coach? Does the fact that Freddie Brown threw the ball to Worthy in 1982 reflect on him as a coach? I don't see how it can.
When you make national titles your only litmus test of coaching greatness, your analysis becomes so narrow as to approach meaninglessness.
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You're right, the ultimate goal is winning on Monday night, but that's not the only goal for coaches. They're all trying to win every time they play; that's part of what makes them great. You posed a question about whether I thought Dean Smith would trade five twenty-win seasons for another title. I think most UNC fans would, but I'm not sure that's true for him (but it might be). Until 2002, UNC had some ridiculous streak of thirty-something consecutive twenty-win seasons (I'm sure Tony can give us the exact figure). They also had a streak of about that many consecutive years finishing in the top 3 of the ACC. That kind of sustained excellence is part of what's made UNC a top program, which is part of what allows them to recruit great players.
In the last six seasons, Duke and UConn both have one national championship. Does that make their programs equal? Does it matter that Duke has three regular-season championships and five ACC tournament championships; and that UConn has only two and two, respectively? That Duke has two Final Four appearances and UConn one? How about this question: which history would you rather be able to claim for your school?
I eaglerly await a response based on highly-selective editing.