Yup. The unknown there is what if Ward doesn’t get hurt? Plan A was an offense built around his rimrunning, and he was good at that, but he took other things off the table. I don’t think they’d have gone 3-0 against us if Ward’s healthy and starting the whole time.
Izzo is a heck of a coach whose teams always have an extremely high floor, but you can’t say he ALWAYS hits the ceiling either. We don’t know enough about Howard to compare, but I felt like Beilein was better at reaching the ceiling but worse at ensuring a high floor.
Sorry you’re absolutely right. Not taking anything away from MSU or Izzo on their hardware during the Winston era. Should have been more specific, I think Izzo/MSU lucked into the “chemistry” between Winston & Tillman.
I think I see your point about floor/ceiling but I think it depends on your metric by which you judge the programs. Izzo has had so much talent that you would think he would have more final fours or championship games…but yet he has had more than most and also has plenty of banners in the rafters. Beilein maybe recruited a notch lower than Izzo, but the only “bad” year he had in the last decade was when his two best players got hurt. I think both were high floor/ceiling guys. Izzo just blew that one season with two lottery picks where he couldn’t figure out how to maximize them on offense.
I sometimes wonder about the Ward injury too. Him being hurt and forcing them to play more Tillman and then go ball screens was like unlocking a chest code for them.
Izzo’s got 8 FFs, so you really can’t ding him there. I do agree that he’s wasted some talent, and you can’t say that about Beilein. But, also, Beilein has two lost years there and Izzo never does (injuries are part of the game). JMO but the floor/ceiling analogy is pretty tight and expresses it well.
Stephen Bardo drinking game:
When he says “in my opinion”, drink.
When he says “I see you, young man (or player’s name)”, drink.
When he says “For those young players out there… (then proceeds to analyze a dunk)”, drink.
I just googled to figure out what happened to Jon Crispin. Looks to be full-time ESPN now, but no one bothered to update his wikipedia page to reflect that!
Everyone’s perception is different. Tom Izzo will always come with three caveats that I just don’t overcome in evaluating him: Being abusive to players and tolerating repeated ugliness toward women on his watch are the first two–both at this stage more or less indisputable. The third is that we gave him his opening with our own corruption and will simply never know how much more he would have struggled had we not done so. I think we can assume that he would not have reached the heights he has. . .
Bobby Knight is almost inarguably a basketball genius. He’s still a bum. A lot of people have talent. For me, whether you’re a good person carries the most weight.
And since we’re going down that road: To me his classic teams did not, for the most part, play a pretty brand of ball.