250 Words For and Against Coach K and Duke

250 words for and against Coach K and Duke

I had a great call with my North Carolina insider last night. As a former UNC teacher he has had first hand accountings of the ins and outs of UNC basketball.

What got me during our conversation was that, by the end, he was defending Coach K.

Read that again: a UNC supporter was coming to the aid of Coach K!

Wow.

I played the antagonist in the conversation, pointing out that the Duke system is archaic and doesn’t adjust for today’s players and game and Coack K’s inability to adjust for his personnel leads to the consistent fallout/flameout in March Madness and in the second half of the year.

Further, I thought that it was less Coach K and more the astounding talent that he had that lead to his two biggest successes: the Olympic Gold (really, who plays Jason Kidd when you have CP3 and Deron on your squad!!!?!? Really? Who does that??) and the national championships (it can be argued that Laetner was one of the best collegiate ballers ever and Grant Hill was a yearly all-star in the L).

If you look at the system he employs, it has a heavy reliance on three’s and defensive continuity. Should either of these things fail, so do the Dukies.

They, yearly, do not have a presence inside (at least not since Elton Brand, and don’t give me that “Landlord” rubbish, he was/is offensively challenged) which costs them when the game slows down and you need to be able to get some easy points in the paint.

Defensively, they can get cut up by small and quick guards like Lawson did in their last UNC match-up and can get bullied by bigger teams. For example, I think they would lose by double-digits if they were to face a team like Pittsburgh and U Dub (Washington) would probably eek out a victory because of their ability to punish down low.

I wondered aloud, if your team's annual ceiling is the second week of March Madness is that good enough?

Teams like UCLA and Memphis have systems that can go full and half courts and that is why they do better than the all out sprint style that Duke employs.

I thought I brought a double-barrelled assault.

The flip side is that the talent that Duke has been getting, while highly rated, is simply not that good. Paulus as a starting guard does not get it done versus top talent. The bigs that they have been getting are just not ready to play.

They need a few years in order to get their games ready to play against the top teams. Further, they have had some early defections from players who (maybe) should not have left.

Josh McRoberts as an example. This has depleted their core and left them scrambling for people to fill in. [On a side, McRoberts would be a great fit with this current squad and would be the exact fit they need to get over their plagues.]

Also, the Dukies enjoy a great home court advantage and a solid fundamental defensive system. Both are effective and time-tested tools that have consistently propelled Duke to the upper-echelon of schools.

You need defense to win the Trophy, and when executed with the proper talent, the system works…and so do the Duke fans which add at least three wins per season. Coach K being the staple and icon of Duke aids in the consistency with the fans and the defensive system.

[He, and I bet no one else, had a defense for how he 'coached' the National Team. ]

Polarizing to be sure…which is one of the things you can expect from Duke. Consistently they are one of the most polarizing teams in the NCAAs. What I did not expect was to hear from a UNC alum the virtues of Coach K.