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Duke Coaching

Yeah, I don't doubt his conviction but I want to hear him say no first
 
Given that there's no publicly known timeline for K's retirement and the fact that Collins has to exclusively recruit 4 year players with families who value transparency, honesty, and integrity, he has no choice put to appear 100% all in at NW. Maybe the pool of kids he can recruit from would be interested in NW regardless of who the coach is, but if he's trying to build something from the ground up he can't sell his vision in his current role with the appearance of having one foot out the door.
 
Most coaches, when asked, say they are fully committed to their current school, when they're days or hours away from walking out the door.
 
Interesting to see yesterday that NW's #32 defense played a more compact man that sinks off of screens.

I suppose there's always the possibility he'll revert to Duke's proven successful style once he has the elite athletes to recreate our #39 defense, but it gives me hope, at least.

On a related note, tonight feels like a game where we size up an athletic but offensively-pathetic team that is not in the top 200 in any 3PT metrics, and proceed to run them off the line at the cost of letting them drive us at will. Can't wait to suffer through this SEC/UNC schadenfreude for 2 hours.
 


Multifaceted last sentence.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
"Maybe I should have coached them on how to play defense. And dribbling. I wish I could coach them more."
 
The luck has evened out over K's 30+ years, as would be expected over such a long time period.

He failed to win a 70% game for the title in 1999 and failed in 2002 with the only team in kenpom history at #1 offense and #1 defense, with the 2nd biggest efficiency gap ever to the #2 team (Ohio State 2011 had the biggest efficiency gap). He won a title in 2010 when any number of little things could have easily ended the season differently and he won a title in 2015 when he would have been a 5-7 point underdog against Kentucky in the title game.

If you sort the luck out differently, with K winning it all in 1999 and 2002, but losing in the Sweet Sixteen in 2010 and in the title game in 2015, which is all heavily luck-based, then there's quite a different narrative right now. 5 titles in 12 seasons from 1991 to 2002 puts him in the GOAT conversation already, with any intelligent person understanding that it's more impressive than Wooden's run from a probability standpoint.

However, zero titles in the ensuing 15 seasons, and only two Final Fours (2004 and 2015 in this adjusted luck hypothetical), along with an objectively declining ability to coach defense, puts him in Bowden/Knight/Paterno territory: a once-great coach who can muster up a Final Four run once every 5-10 years and win a ton of games each season with the best talent, but is on the decline in major aspects of the job and should step down sooner rather than later for the good of the program in the long run.

The real difference between that awful narrative and the "we just won a national title two years ago, so let's just count our lucky stars we still have K" narrative is at least largely, if not mostly, due to luck. The optimistic narrative in the parallel luck universe would be "the man gave us 5 titles in 12 seasons - he can stay at Duke as long as he wants." I'm fine with that as well. But the reality of decline in certain major areas isn't even argued against with that narrative.

We'll have the best talent or close to it almost every season until K retires. I'm pretty sure of that. But the most miserable sports fans, aside from the fans who simply never have a good team to root for, are the fans who have great players to root for but lack the coach to pilot them to the expectations that come with having great players.
 
SeanMayTriedToEatMe said:
The luck has evened out over K's 30+ years, as would be expected over such a long time period.

He failed to win a 70% game for the title in 1999 and failed in 2002 with the only team in kenpom history at #1 offense and #1 defense, with the 2nd biggest efficiency gap ever to the #2 team (Ohio State 2011 had the biggest efficiency gap). He won a title in 2010 when any number of little things could have easily ended the season differently and he won a title in 2015 when he would have been a 5-7 point underdog against Kentucky in the title game.

If you sort the luck out differently, with K winning it all in 1999 and 2002, but losing in the Sweet Sixteen in 2010 and in the title game in 2015, which is all heavily luck-based, then there's quite a different narrative right now. 5 titles in 12 seasons from 1991 to 2002 puts him in the GOAT conversation already, with any intelligent person understanding that it's more impressive than Wooden's run from a probability standpoint.

However, zero titles in the ensuing 15 seasons, and only two Final Fours (2004 and 2015 in this adjusted luck hypothetical), along with an objectively declining ability to coach defense, puts him in Bowden/Knight/Paterno territory: a once-great coach who can muster up a Final Four run once every 5-10 years and win a ton of games each season with the best talent, but is on the decline in major aspects of the job and should step down sooner rather than later for the good of the program in the long run.

The real difference between that awful narrative and the "we just won a national title two years ago, so let's just count our lucky stars we still have K" narrative is at least largely, if not mostly, due to luck. The optimistic narrative in the parallel luck universe would be "the man gave us 5 titles in 12 seasons - he can stay at Duke as long as he wants." I'm fine with that as well. But the reality of decline in certain major areas isn't even argued against with that narrative.

We'll have the best talent or close to it almost every season until K retires. I'm pretty sure of that. But the most miserable sports fans, aside from the fans who simply never have a good team to root for, are the fans who have great players to root for but lack the coach to pilot them to the expectations that come with having great players.
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I think that K has been very unlucky recently. 2011, 2013, and 2017 all had very serious opportunities for titles that were derailed by injury. Without that bad luck, K could be looking at 5 titles in the last 8 years and the narrative would be that he was increasing his dominance of college basketball as he gained more wisdom and experience.
 
Sure, there has been more bad luck than just the examples I cited, but again, the luck sorted itself out over 30+ years. There was tremendous good luck in Laettner's shot and 10/10, 10/10 in 1992. There was good luck in pulling off one of the most monumental upsets in basketball history in 1991. There was good luck in the Miracle Minute, which - who knows? - may have been necessary to give the 2001 team the confidence to come back from a huge hole against Maryland later, which in itself could be considered good luck.

I would not consider failing to beat Louisville's 2013 team to be bad luck, regardless of who was healthy on that Duke roster.

2017... come on. 2017 is kind of the whole point.
 
K needs to retire. He is no longer setting the team up for long term success. He is trying to get his 6th title and his myopic approach to recruiting is evident of that.
 
SeanMayTriedToEatMe said:
Sure, there has been more bad luck than just the examples I cited, but again, the luck sorted itself out over 30+ years. There was tremendous good luck in Laettner's shot and 10/10, 10/10 in 1992. There was good luck in pulling off one of the most monumental upsets in basketball history in 1991. There was good luck in the Miracle Minute, which - who knows? - may have been necessary to give the 2001 team the confidence to come back from a huge hole against Maryland later, which in itself could be considered good luck.

I would not consider failing to beat Louisville's 2013 team to be bad luck, regardless of who was healthy on that Duke roster.

2017... come on. 2017 is kind of the whole point.
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Yeah. I would actually argue GOOD luck from 2010 on in that we went 4-0 in the F4. So we only created two chances to win it all at the end, and we cashed in on both. I'll make up these odds but I'm guessing the win probabilities on KP were something based on ranks at the time were like

.55 (WVU) * .58 (Butler) = .32

.6 (MSU) * .48 (Wisc) = .29

Probability of winning two national championships when going to those two final fours = .32 * .29 = 9% (And that's without factoring in Butler being a de facto road game, and probably Wisco too honestly, which would knock it down closer to 6/7% I believe).
 
It is worrisome that he keeps counting on multiple OADs each season to be the key players on his team these days, in respect to what is going to happen to the next guy.

I guess we go with Capel, to preserve the recruiting class in whatever season the retirement happens before, and then Capel gets a trial run with the same talent K was working with for at least one season. He's going to fail. I have no doubt about this.

Then we move on to a guy who is no longer afraid of K's shadow, since Capel already took the fall.
 
I would say he kept us in contending title position pretty consistently through 2011. Only twice from 2002-2011 were we not in the top 6 or 7 of Pomeroy, which i'd say is a "title contending" range. Even if we didn't make the FF because of variance -- unless of course you think the Pomeroy rating don't tell the entire story and there was a systematic limiting roadblock in the coaching not reflected in the ratings -- we were at least in position to contend.

2012-2017 we were in contending position just twice (and really, fringe in 2013). Otherwise, not even close. We were fortunate to cash in during that 2015 contending year, but then again like you mentioned, it's balanced out from being unfortunate during those 8 seasons from 2002-2011 only going to two FFs.

It's the only contending essentially 1.5 times in the last six seasons which bothers me.
 
When you create a roster that includes five completely or almost completely unplayable front court players, and zero point guards, is that bad luck? Or a situation you created yourself through poor planning and lack of vision?

True, we don't know all the behind the scenes machinations that have gone on in recruiting these last few years, but it's hard to believe that the only somewhat acceptable point guard we could find since Tyus Jones has been Derryck Thornton. Is it really this hard to find somebody 6' - 6'5" who can dribble, pass, and read and write? It's amazing to me that we can find so many players 6'8"+ who K finds worthy of a scholarship, but not a single player 6' - 6'5" is worth taking a chance on unless he's a scoring guard.
 
Yeah so the main point of this whole parallel luck universe nonsense is not to find one equal example of bad luck for every example of good luck, or vice versa, but to consider that the six seasons starting with 2012 really haven't been good. The best team he had, by far, in this twilight of his career was 2015. He cashed that team in for a title, basically with magic. Magic defense at the end. Magic Tyus whenever he felt like it. Magic Grayson at the most clutch of times. Magic foul trouble for Okafor. Magic Sulaimon sexual assault. Magic Wisconsin doing us the greatest favor. It just hasn't been good lately, and that stroke of luck in 2015 shouldn't distract anyone from this as much as it does.
 
DurhamSon said:
I would say he kept us in contending title position pretty consistently through 2011. Only twice from 2002-2011 were we not in the top 6 or 7 of Pomeroy, which i'd say is a "title contending" range. Even if we didn't make the FF because of variance -- unless of course you think the Pomeroy rating don't tell the entire story and there was a systematic limiting roadblock in the coaching not reflected in the ratings -- we were at least in position to contend.

2012-2017 we were in contending position just twice (and really, fringe in 2013). Otherwise, not even close. We were fortunate to cash in during that 2015 contending year, but then again like you mentioned, it's balanced out from being unfortunate during those 8 seasons from 2002-2011 only going to two FFs.

It's the only contending essentially 1.5 times in the last six seasons which bothers me.
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I'd actually argue that we were contenders in all of the odd years but in none of the evens. I think we were top 5 most likely to win it in 2013 prior to the brackets coming out. We just drew chalk and ended up having to play the #1 contender before the F4. We had a passable defense that year too.

This year, I mean, I'm really upset today so don't get me wrong. And the season was a total mess. But we just won a conference tournament with 4 wins that could've been the same path to the national title from S16 on (prob reordered a bit). And were favorites in Vegas. I really believe that were last night's game in Buffalo, for example, Duke is probably headed to MSG to play two teams that they're better than.
 
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