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Duke Coaching

I like Collins the best of the Collins/Capel/Hurley/Wojo set, but Collins still needs to grow up a bit. He still gets fucking whiny during the game and the pressers when things don't go his way. Not that Kryzewski doesn't complain -- he certainly does -- but Collins just manages to come across as more petulant.

I like the way Collins has built his program, and that's the most important thing to me. I'm not completely convinced about his coaching skills on either end of the floor, though.

To be honest, even with him being older, I'd probably prefer Mike Brey over any of these guys. He's like a better-coaching Collins with a better temperament for the job.
 
Problem is, Mike Brey will be in his 60s when K retires and is in a perfect David Cutcliffe situation at the moment. Just needs to be good and he'll have a job forever there. He wouldn't want to be the one that replaced K (just as Roy waited after Dean/Gut).
 
Aside from coaches currently working in the NBA, not really sure who I am big on outside the Duke 'family'
 
If we wanted to go the youth route, I think Will Wade is the real deal. Tommy Amaker hired him to his first full-time assistant job, so there's a tiny connection there. He's been on the move a lot, but I think he has one more move left in him, and that's to a Top 5 - Top 10 job.
 
The BC game is a master troll job by K. Fans/media had been complaining more and more about his 3pt focused layup line allowing defense so he just let us see what he already knew - that focusing on stopping layups would result in losses. Now he can return to winning by stopping teams from going 15-26 from 3.
 
I enjoy the heavy traffic this thread gets after losses, once people realize bad defense can indeed result in losing games. I hope this thread isn't used for this purpose for more than another 2-3 years.
 
It's very concerning, and doesn't seem coincidental, that none of these K acolytes has shown conclusive signs of being able to coach defense at a high level in today's game.

Collins comes the closest, by getting one of the least talented power conference teams to play top 100 defense in four of his five seasons. However, his best seasons were #23 and #32 defensively, and this season is a big step back. We can assume he'll do better with much better talent, which would come naturally at Duke (or really just about any other power conference team that's not Northwestern), but that assumption is getting weaker and weaker with each passing season of bad defense by Duke's elite talent.

Wojo's history as a defensive coach at Marquette is awful. Buzz Wililams had them in the 40-60 range consistently. Wojo took over and they slipped to #69, worse than any season under Buzz, and the worst at Marquette in 9 years, dating back to the Tom Crean days. The Marquette defense got progressively and rapidly worse under Wojo, from 69 to 88 to 165, and is sitting at 162 this season. This is not good at all for Duke fans hoping Wojo can be a viable candidate to come in and improve Duke's defense while maintaining the offense.

Brey's best defenses at Notre Dame have been in the 40-60 range, and the defense has slipped to 100 or worse 6 seasons out of 17 in Kenpom. His talent has been better than either Collins or Wojo's talent, in the aggregate, though I'd expect Marquette to have talent down the rotation on par with Notre Dame in the near future.

Amaker hasn't been a bad defensive coach, and given the relative talent level of his teams, I would say he has the best defensive history of all these guys. However, I don't think he'll be given any serious consideration, for plenty of other reasons, so I'll leave out the numbers.

Hurley has the least known defensive track record out of these guys, which is a good thing for him, because what we know so far is not great. What he did at Buffalo was borderline miraculous, but now he has had three bad-to-terrible defensive teams at Arizona State. We'll be able to conclude that he is also a bad defensive coach once he has a full roster of his players in 1-2 seasons.

It seems that any coach who learned from K is likely to be behind the curve on defense now, and both common sense and objective evidence would bear this out. Dawkins is arguably an exception, as he did fairly well at Stanford on defense and is doing exceptionally well at UCF now. Unfortunately, he's 54 years old.
 
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Capel will be our coach at least for a few years. He had some decent defense at Oklahoma but also some absymal ones. Ranged from 22 to 181. Average of 85.
 
I would have Nova first, personally. Not only did they stomp Gonzaga but their Kenpom numbers are ridiculous.
 
Collins has been following this thread all day and is putting all his effort into holding an admittedly abysmal Chicago State team to 5 points in the first 13 minutes tonight.
 
Collins obviously walked into the locker room before the game and told his players "Play Pack Line" and voila.
 
6-49/0-20/20-25 is quite the shooting split.
 
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