re: UGA Basketball Season Long Thread (19-15, 10-10) // Season Complete

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Next year we should show much improvement as a whole.

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Why? What reason has Fox given you to believe that the team will show marked improvement as a unit? Do you feel better about his ability to put the best lineup on the floor? I do not. Do you feel better about his ability to coach a team that doesn't fold against the press? I don't. Do you feel better about his ability to analyze what went wrong in one game and potentially address those issues going forward? I do not... the answer is almost always "we just need to slow it down more"...

It's not like he has some massive history of fantastic player development here. How many guys would you say that he's transformed their play significantly from the time they got on campus? Most of the time, we're pointing to the same kinds of player mistakes for them for 3-4 years.

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What about Yante

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Not really development as much as identifying underrated talent. Credit where credit is due but he's largely the same player this year that we saw last... for better or worse he's somewhat easily taken out of the game when the other team decides to do so.

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KCP, Gaines, Thompkins

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What did Fox do for these guys' game that wouldn't have happened literally anywhere else? These guys made fairly typical jumps from their freshman season to their sophomore season as their playtime increased and their understanding of the system increased. From sophomore to junior year, they were all pretty flat statistically.

Let's just look at Gaines for example:

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12-13 - 10.3 min/game - 3.7 ppg
13-14 - 28.3 min/game - 13 ppg

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12-13 - 0.36 points/min played
13-14 - 0.46 points/min played

So more or less when the minutes per game nearly tripled, the points per game went up at a pretty similar pace and he had another years worth of experience against higher level talent. If you want to credit that strictly to Fox, more power to you...

(Note: similar performance for Ogbeide and to an even lesser degree Juwan Parker)

KCP did have a nice jump independent of playing time, but he's also the only 1st round NBA talent that has played under Fox (pretty much a known quantity even after year 1) and the offense largely was run through him in year 2.

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Next should be much better with the development of two freshman guards, plus the addition of another guard, a small foward, and a 4th big man. Then maybe another front court player.

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I'll try to remember to bump this post next season. I mean you could change the names or the specifics here and it would be a carbon copy of what's been said about Fox's teams each of the past 3-4 seasons.

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It's not like he has some massive history of fantastic player development here. How many guys would you say that he's transformed their play significantly from the time they got on campus?

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I mean, I think most people would argue that's the one thing Fox is really good at. He's incredible at developing big men.

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We won't really be that great next year but we will be pretty fricking good. It will be the best roster 1-12 we have had in a long time.

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This is potentially true on paper. However, we've seen it time and time again that Fox simply doesn't like playing freshmen and even when we do, their leash is incredibly short. Look at crump this year as a prime example. Highly rated recruit at a position of need...hasn't gotten more than about 2 mpg all season until UT where he finally gets significant minutes and responds with significant production. The next game he played about 5 minutes and was benched after committing a turnover and was barely seen again. That's the Fox Way.

And for everyone pinning our hopes next year on an incoming freshman, that just doesn't inspire a lot of confidence IMO. Look at this year. We lost Mann and Gaines so the only legit guard we had on the roster coming back was JJ. We had Turtle who was supposed to make big strides in his sophomore season and 2 4* highly ranked incoming freshmen, so we should be pretty darn ok at guard this year. But are we? No, we still only have 1 guard that fox has full confidence in and only 1 guard that we can actually count in to make a basket. Why should we expect different in year 9 from another incomign freshman?

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the guy has developed players very well over his tenure.

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He has developed a FEW players very well, yes to be sure.

For every 1 player he has helped show moderate to great improvement there's 2 or 3 more that haven't improved a lick

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He has developed a FEW players very well, yes to be sure.

For every 1 player he has helped show moderate to great improvement there's 2 or 3 more that haven't improved a lick

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This... Thus my comment. I didn't say he's failed to develop any players. I said specifically:

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It's not like he has some massive history of fantastic player development here. How many guys would you say that he's transformed their play significantly from the time they got on campus?

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I mean that... how many players would you guys say that he made significant improvement to their games? In 8 years, how many?
Let's say Thornton is one. I'd agree with his development being rather significant. Let's even add Gaines in even though I don't agree and the math I provided largely proves it out. Ogbeide this season is marginally better than he was last year statistically. I'd say his impact on the court might not always show up on the stat sheet, but we're not talking about big strides still. Juwan Parker has had a nice uptick in FG and FT percentage, but his actual per game contributions this year haven't been eye popping by any means. You could maybe point to a couple more guys, but we're talking about essentially 1 guy each year making marked improvement and 3-4 other guys not...

Every year, the story is the same... with the incoming recruits we'll improve depth and players X, Y, and Z are going to take big strides and this will be the difference. Except it doesn't actually happen. The incoming recruits don't earn Fox's trust because he dislikes playing freshmen. X might make progress but Y & Z are still the same players making the same mistakes so X is taken out of the game and the team struggles in tight ballgames. I mean the shite writes itself.

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I mean, I think most people would argue that's the one thing Fox is really good at. He's incredible at developing big men.

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He's a basketball coach. His job is to develop a *team* of players... not strictly one position/type of player... If he's great at developing big men but as others have pointed out he's lousy at surrounding those big men with a complete team that has also been sufficiently developed, it doesn't matter *how good* that big man is.

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The year after that, we will likely be pretty bad unless hammonds is an absolute stud

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Don't we owe it to ourselves then to get a coach who can potentially get more out of young players rather than play this shite out to find out what we already know... that Fox will have similar struggles next season, only to leave the next coach with a rebuilding project rather than taking the success that Fox *has had* (keep in mind I'm not saying his tenure here has been shite, just that he's hit his ceiling) and building on it?

Ultimately, it's pretty clear that Ears and Co don't have the desire or the stones to do it, but the whole "we need to give him more time" argument is played out. I even bought into it last season to a small degree. But at some point you have to take your head out of the sand and say "wow... this guy has peaked".

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And for everyone pinning our hopes next year on an incoming freshman

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i am most definitely not doing that fwiw. he will come off the bench. i am pinning my hopes on the freshman to sophomore improvement for harris and crump.

harris/turtle
crump/turtle
parker
maten
ogbeide

wilridge, diatta, edwards

then you have the freshmen vying for minutes with those 9. again, it's not some stacked roster, but it's not bad and hammonds will probably be the only freshman to get significant minutes if he's close to as good as advertised. i also think ogbeide is fricking awesome and will be a 10/10 guy next year

Wilridge shows potential at times and then has brain farts that make you think he will get there. Diatta is a really good athlete and perhaps it will click next year. Edwards shows flashes as well.

Hopefully one of them will take a large step forward next year. I'd bet most on Diatta because he is most inexperienced in the SEC but Edwards contributes the most of the three now.

Big game tonight....hopefully we fair better then our baseball team the last 2 days

That's impressive for our students. Should be a great atmosphere