Quote:
Originally posted by jbduke
Wow. Dean Smith didn't impress you with tactics and strategy. Just...wow.
Seriously. That may be more ridiculous than putting Calhoun on the same plane as Dean and K.
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Dean definitely had his day as an innovator but much of what he did still required superior athletes. I think the 4-corners is a great example. Try running some clock using anything resembling the 4-corners when your athletes are not equal to superior. I have used and sometimes adapted his Point Zone ideas with a fair amount of success.
I have seen a lot of mediocre teams adapt NC strategies and they are . . . well, mediocre teams. No knock against Dean as his teams never had mediocre athletes.
I attended one of his coaching clinics when I was a pup and it was about the biggest waste of school money I could imagine. Alternatively, around the same time, I spent about 30 minutes casually talking with a disciple of Dick Bennett and it has provided me with a career's-worth of perspective.
I'll let others debate K v. Calhoun v. Boeheim, etc. because my public school teams will really never resemble their teams in terms of relative athletic dominance and I won't borrow much from them in terms of x's and o's. I will admit that Dean is in another class but he has never been much of a mentor for me either. I'm not satisfied with mediocrity even when my athletes are mediocre so I'm generally not content to copy coaches who have strategized for top athletes.
It's hard to separate recruiting and all of the other elements of college coaching but I still use teams like Wisconsin-Green Bay and Princeton as a measuring stick - could K, Calhoun, Boeheim or Dean (with the possible exception of a small window when he may have had a trick or two up his sleeve) have coached them to the big dance? I have never seen evidence convincing me that they could have. But then they've never really had to do that either.
Sat Mar 11, 2006, 10:42pm
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