I'm so sick of writing about this because Jim Boeheim is quite obviously the worst coach in major college basketball, and everyone is finally starting to see it. He costs his team at least 3 victories a year by sticking with his stupid tactics no matter how many times they've been proven ineffective. He refuses to change. He refuses to work on foul shooting (for 20 years Syracuse has been among the worst free throw shootings teams in the nation, and this HOF coach can't figure out a way to fix it), he refuses to ever extend his bench so when you need an extra guy (say after an ejection and a foul out) the only guys left have never played in a game before, and he refuses to ever abandon his zone defense (even in games when man has been working much better).
But most galling is how many leads SU has blown over the years because of the prevent offense that never works. Let me say that again. It doesn't work. They blow every lead because he refuses to try to let them score.
With 5 minutes left he put SU in a no points offense. And yes the players made turnovers, and committed dumb fouls, and missed shots. And yes Boeheim will blame it on them. But the fact is, he took the ball out of their hands while they were playing great and gave Georgetown a chance to get back in the game.
And he's done this a million times before. The same thing happened against Pitt last year, he blew the game by trying not to score, and blamed it one bad turnover, when the real problem was the 5 empty possessions that came at his direction.
So he didn't learn after that debacle that cost SU a tournament berth, but you'd think blowing a 14 point lead (7 points with 45 seconds left) would teach him a lesson.
But there he was in overtime, with SU up 91-89 and a minute and a half left, calling for Jonny Flynn to pull the ball out. And then with 4 seconds on the shot clock Flynn drove the lane and got bailed out. Without that stupid foul SU loses this game.
I understand killing clock, but it can't start until the under 4 minute timeout. And it needs go like this, call a play and start running it with 15 seconds left on the shot clock. You'll still kill 25 - 30 seconds, but you'll give your team a chance to win.
Thankfully for us, SU held on. But they are so poorly coached they're not going anywhere.
Our only hope is that Mike Hopkins will see the error of Boeheim's ways and when he takes over in 20 years, we won't have to sit through the same shit every year.
Here's the biggest problem with Boeheim. At every Celtics practice, they spend most of their time on the court practicing specific situation, nearly all them native to the end of games... Down 2 with the ball and no timeouts, Down 1 without the ball and a foul to give, etc. etc. They don't have them all down, but it's a safe bet that the Celtics know what to do in most situations. Syracuse has absolutely NONE of that. They don't know what to do and when to do it. The foul shooting only compounds the stupidity of the players (who have NO basketball IQ) and the coaches (if Mike Hopkins really knew better, he'd speak up).
ReplyDeleteAgree 100%. The problem is that in Syracuse they think he is some kind of god and unbelievably nobody even dares to criticize him. Unfortunately for the program, i dont think he ll ever be fired as he should be.
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