UCGrad1992
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RE: Hiring the next hoops coach
Here's one from 2018 that goes in to a lot of his coaching and recruiting philosophy [only copied relevant sections]...
Quote:Miller, who at 35 is still the seventh-youngest coach in Division I, realized he had to work on himself as much as his fledgling program. He had to change his identity before he could change the Spartans.
“I’d had staff for years say, ‘Coach, we’ve got to play zone,’ or, ‘Coach, we’ve got to make changes.’ Well, I was trying to be stubborn like the guy I knew,” Miller says. “What I realized as I developed as a head coach is I’m not going to be as good at being stubborn as Roy Williams is. That’s his gift, not mine. I’ve got to find better ways to defend and win in this league that fit who we are.
“That’s when we started playing a little zone, and I realized if we played more than two possessions of it, it could be successful. And then we started to toy with three-quarter pressure.”
If you’ve seen a UNCG game in the last two seasons, you’ve seen the Spartans' calling card.
They defend. They still play half-court man-to-man, but they mix in half-court zone defenses, too. And after made baskets, when their opponent inbounds the ball, the Spartans play a relentless 1-2-2 zone press.
Miller had tinkered with the idea of pressure defense. And then, by happenstance, he ended up on the same jet plane in a seat next to Oregon coach Dana Altman.
“I was fortunate,” Miller says. “I’d studied his 1-2-2 zone press, but I didn’t know him at all. I think he was as ready to get off that plane as anyone I’ve ever seen because he was ready to get away from me. I wore him out for two hours on a flight from Dallas to New York during the recruiting period.
“I was able to come away with some of his principles and teaching points. That gave me some confidence to put it in. That’s evolved. It’s become who we are.”
It’s not a true full-court press. UNCG picks up the pressure about three-quarters court, trapping with two defenders when the ball moves away from the middle of the floor.
Sometimes, the Spartans will force a turnover. But the goal is simply to make it hard for the opponent to get the ball across midcourt and set up its half-court offense. They want to take time off the shot clock and force a hurried shot.
Hurried shots are almost always bad shots.
Since installing the press and changing UNCG’s defensive philosophy, Miller’s teams are 52-17 with a pair of Southern Conference regular-season titles, an NIT berth and now an NCAA berth. He signed a contract extension in September, good through June 30, 2022, that is paying him a base salary of $233,450 this season and $242,788 next season.
The best defensive schemes in the world cannot make a team win without players.
There, too, Miller has evolved. He knows exactly what he’s looking for when he’s on the recruiting trail.
“You need kids to dig in, work at it year to year, understand the values in your program and then instill those values in the locker room on the guys who come behind them,” Miller says. “ … The young guys have guys to look to and say, ‘That’s how we’re supposed to do it.’ That’s a really hard thing to achieve in 2017-18 in college athletics: four-year guys who dig in, especially when things aren’t going well.”
The seniors on this year’s team, led by 6-foot-6 guard-forward Marvin Smith and 6-9 Jordy Kuiper, embraced the defense-first mindset. They’re passing it down to 6-10 shot-blocker James Dickey, junior point guard Demetrius Troy and athletic freshman guard Isaiah Miller.
And Francis Alonso, the team’s leading scorer the last three seasons, plays hard on the defensive end.
Miller saw the same thing in every one of his players when he recruited them: willing defenders.
“The first thing we’re looking for is basketball guys,” Miller says. “… We value academics tremendously. But you’ve got to know coming in that I live, eat, sleep, breathe basketball. And I do better coaching guys with the same mentality. So if you’re not a gym rat, who really wants to work, I’m probably not the right fit as a coach.”
Realizing that, and being honest about it on recruiting visits, has cost him some players, Miller says. But he also believes it’s cut down on bad fits and transfers.
“The second thing we look for is kids we think can defend the way we’re trying to defend,” Miller says, “and that’s changed a lot in the last two or three years. Because we’ve changed the way we guard. We need kids who can fit into our pressing schemes and our man-to-man schemes and are versatile defenders. We love multi-positional players. Look at our frontcourt right now. I love James Dickey and Kyrin Galloway, because I can do so many things with them defensively. We can switch on ball screens, because they can guard five positions.”
There’s one more intangible Miller seeks, something he himself had as a player, something that makes him a taskmaster in practice.
Something that has kept him in coaching even when things were rotten.
“The last thing we’re trying to find, and it’s the most important if we can check those first two boxes, is we want tough, competitive dudes,” Miller says. “You have to have a DNA of winning when I watch you play. And if I don’t see that, we go in another direction. Sometimes we miss because of that. Sometimes a kid doesn’t show me he cares about winning the next possession and we misevaluate. Maybe he does have those characteristics, and he goes on to be a great player for someone else.”
If he does, and he runs into Miller’s UNCG team, the Spartans will defend the heck out of him.
Playing Style and Recruiting Philosophy
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Hiring the next hoops coach
