(12-01-2017 10:17 AM)bricksnivy Wrote:  The Roy Williams that I see in CB is with his bench. Roy notoriously plays a deep bench, especially early in the season and he gets it from Coach Smith. There are benefits to doing this and it takes a while to get used to. There are those moments when you’re wondering why in the hell he’s playing a certain rotation and losing a lead or a deficit is increasing. Hopefully, we enter late February and early March with battle-tested guys that we can count on. Even with a tightened rotation, foul trouble and injuries happen. I’m less concerned with the rotations than I am the defense. If we can’t keep guards from penetrating, we’re going to continue to struggle. ECU was certainly playing inspired after Lebo resigned, but there’s really no excuse for allowing a bad team to be that efficient offensively. That has to be corrected.

I'm definitely patient when it comes to rotations and trying different personnel. That part doesn't bother me at all, because it shows there's a "bigger picture" in mind for how this season will play out. If he had already reduced things to where he's only playing 8-9, it would mean he's placing a heavy focus on "winning now" and not the long play. So I don't mind at all seeing 10-11 guys playing early in the season.

But yes, the defense is something that shouldn't be impacted much at all by the rotations. The effort, intensity, and communication needs to be solid no matter who is on the court. Whatever we need to do to get there needs to happen immediately. Even playing at a fast pace, allowing 80+ ppg every night just is not sustainable in the CAA, both in the short term and long term.

Coach McGrath needs to find a way to buck the trend of a lot of coaches off the Roy Williams coaching tree. Coach Shaver's Tribe teams still give up a lot of points long into his tenure there, and it's something they've just had to kind of "live with", because it's a tough place to recruit. But here, we don't have a lot of those issues, and need to see Coach McGrath adapt the "Carolina style" to winning basketball here. He needs time to do this, but the hope is we start seeing little steps in progress even here in his 1st year. It would be tough to accept that our team would stubbornly stick to a style that hasn't proven to work great at this level. We have to "think differently" with both style and recruitment philosophy.