re: Pat Forde rips John Calipari in latest column

quote:

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Calipari is an elite recruiter, a good motivator, and an average gameday coach... not sure why anyone would really dispute these.

It's not like he's teaching some amazing system to kids... he's all about man-to-man defense (which plays into his teams' strength, as his teams are usually more athletic than the competition) and guard oriented dribble-drive offense. He's mixed in more zone defense of late, but but he's far from a great tactitian.

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That pretty much sums him up. Nobody gets to multiple Final Fours without at least some gameday coaching, but you can see the difference in teams coached by him and teams coached by certain other top recruiters. Coach K, for instance, may be a rat-faced a-hole, but nobody questions his ability to mold a bunch of highly-ranked recruits into a fundamentally sound and energetic team. Thus far, Calipari hasn't really impressed anyone with his penetrating insight into the Xs and Os of basketball or his ability to ensure his players can function optimally when their talent and athleticism alone aren't doing the job.

What UK fans should be concerned about -- I'd be if Cal coached Vanderbilt -- is the fact that a great recruiter generally has at least three major pitches: 1) a chance to get to the NBA; 2) a chance to play for a top team, one in perennial contention for the title; and 3) a chance to play for that coach specifically. So when the team is underperforming for multiple seasons in a row, the coach better not get a reputation for publicly throwing his players under the bus (whether they deserve it or not is immaterial -- most kids, and most older adults, for that matter, don't care for it, and a prominent coach should know better than to air the dirty laundry in public) because UK is hardly the only team that sends players to the NBA. Cal's mistake here is not keeping it in the locker room. He's under no obligation to tell the media anything other than boilerplate "we have issues we need to deal with and we'll be looking into that at every single practice between now and our next game." He can then tear his players a new one in private if he feels that's the best approach.