Agree he had some shot selection issues but this team is still not better without him and especially when there is no legitimate replacement at this time.
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Man come on, people were taking shots at his play all season.
He has a lot of individual skills and no feel for the game of basketball. His dad’s (and presumably his) take on JB’s offense was “go stand in a corner”.
Eli or DDJ last year of course couldn’t do any better. Maybe Eli or DDJ or Cumberland next year can.
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Nice cherry-picking. Of course, Michigan went 1-19 from 3 as a team against Texas Tech, but to you it was on Poole. Livers, for example, scored zero. And Poole was the second best passer on the team. Period. No one else close.
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Too bad about Yak but not all that surprising. Kind of figured Saddi was the assistant coach most likely to stay and I think that’s going to happen.
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We weren’t good enough to beat MSU. A MSU team who lost starters and key players. I am not sitting around wringing my hands over players from last year. I am excited about what w e have on this team going forward. The biggest difference between us and MSU last year IMO was mental toughness and playing as a cohesive team. Hopefully we can improve on both fronts. Need an entire team pulling in the same direction. Not easy to do.
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Mental toughness… and an All american PG
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We have a great PG and he is also the most mentally tough player on the team. He was clearly frustrated at the end of the season. Go back and listen to his interviews after our MSU loss in the Bigten Tourny. Team was not aligned and it was clear
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+1 +1 +1 team panicked in crunch time, mental toughness was indeed lacking
The part I don’t like is where we forget that he was a 19-year-old kid trying (maybe too) hard, start attributing negative traits to the person. The heat always seems out of place coming from presumably grown folks.
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Can we redirect this post into talking about assistant coaches. Don’t have the energy to go back through and split it apart right now.
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We, and I think literally the exact same posters myself included, had this same mental toughness debate a week ago.
So yes let’s move on.
The Poole haters act like Poole chucked up a 35 foot step back every time he touched the ball. Did he hurt the team at times with his shot selection? Sure. But we were a top 5 team when those shots were falling. Not to mention the folks who think that Eli/DDJ are an automatic upgrade - neither has shown that they are a plus player (yet) on the court (and I could get snarky and say that instead of step back 3s next year, we’ll be seeing 30 second shot clock violations all game because of Eli’s hesitancy to shoot).
Just feel that people feel the need to change the narrative about Poole to place blame after the team overachieved the first half of the year, then couldn’t maintain the lofty expectations.
*Edit - I apologize for continuing this debate, like Dylan wrote while I was typing on my phone, let’s get back to the message topic.
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Dylan, do you have a recap of where Coach Howard is with potential assistant coaches? There are various names thrown out there. Any idea which are more legitimately in play? And which are just twitter fodder thrown up as someone’s personal guess (there was a list from a Heat blogger that appeared to be more the blog’s opinion of options than any insight to legitimate options).
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Zero inside information, but my best guess is Saddi, an NBA veteran who coaches guard, and someone who had college HC experience or a great recruiter.
Agree with this
Washingston official.
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Moving on from the Poole debate, it will be really interesting to see how Juwan fills out the rest of the assistants. I would love for him to be able to go the football route and have the money to pay some really good coaches in analyst roles, particularly a former Head Coach that he can lean on for everything off the court.
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Will be interesting to see a) who the guy with HC experience is and b) whether he’s brought in as a special assistant to the HC or an actual assistant.
If someone with HC experience is brought in not as an assistant, I’d expect “special assistant to the HC” to be their title rather than analyst. That would also imply that their work will predominantly be administration focused IMO because they won’t be on the court or on the road.
A former HC as a full-time assistant would have a significantly bigger role in shaping the product on the floor and on the recruiting trail.
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