Yaklich and Haynes coming up on WTKA at 8am

I’ll try to post some notes here and we’ll have some additional updates as well.

Both coaches talking about their hiring process…

Haynes had his interview in Atlanta before the Peach Jam. Yaklich interviewed down in Atlanta and then was offered the job during a second interview at an oyster bar in Las Vegas later in July.

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As expected, Haynes will coach the guards. Sounds like he will be very focused on skill development with that group. Raved about some of the physical improvement from guys he knew around Ohio (Ibi, X, Jaaron, etc.).

Yaklich is going to fill that defensive specialist role. His two biggest points on defense: the help can never get beat and contest every shot.

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We improved last year, but this was one of my biggest Michigan basketball pet peeves for a lot of Beilein’s tenure. After a bad rotation they’d have an open shot and the man who was late would stay where he was instead of contesting.

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More here:

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Hmm, maybe I just need more coffee but I’m feeling skeptical about the defense stuff I’m hearing/reading from Yaklich. I’d much rather we improve on defense because of scheme (e.g. run guys off the 3 point line) rather than the cliche “more effort”. For one, it will be interesting to see where “contest every shot” ends and “don’t foul” takes over, unless maybe we’re going to worry about that less with a deeper bench. Also…can someone explain the “help can never get beat” line? Help defense by definition involves leaving another guy open, who can most certainly beat you, and particularly at the rim…

What I believe he’s saying is that when the help defense comes, it stops the ball. Say Player X beats Duncan Robinson off the dribble to the baseline and draws help defense from Moe Wagner. Wagner has to stop the ball and not allow Player X to get all the way to the rim with a spin move or something like that.

Contesting every three will by definition run guys off the line. Billy Donlon also wasn’t giving interviews talking about allowing fewer threes last summer when he was hired either. It was just a radio segment that was pretty casual here.

My bigger concern is that Yaklich noted all of the length and help side shot blocking that he had at Illinois State last year… There’s not a lot of that on the roster here.

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Well, right, but then an easy dump off to Wagner’s vacated man gets us a dunk on our heads. It’s obviously all in the coaching and the buy-in level from the team. Fingers crossed.

I assumed this meant that the help defender doesn’t get beat by the man he’s rotating to. If the ball goes to the man he just left, now it’s the job of the next defender to rotate to that open man and so on. If you left your man to stop the ball and still didn’t stop the ball, I imagine that all the coaches would get upset about that.

I’m with you about “more effort” as an answer. Sure, it’s part of any defensive improvement but it doesn’t speak to a specific philosophy. Maybe he’s being coy about it, maybe it hasn’t been worked out yet.

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Wait, maybe I understood it incorrectly. Maybe he was saying “we can’t let the help defender also get beat” instead of “it’s impossible to beat help defense”?

Anyway, I’m going to stop overanalyzing now. Carry on :slight_smile:

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I think part of it is that he is just giving initial general statements that he thinks people want to hear around his new work place.

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