How important is practice?

[Wander]

Ryan Kelly has the best game of his career after nearly two months of injury. Curry was probably our best player through most of February, despite being able to practice very little.

I guess I'd propose something like this: for young players, practice is very important to learn specific plays and screening techniques and whatever. Mason in 2010 and Marshall this year were both supposed to be really good, but lost a lot of practice time in the beginning of their freshman seasons due to injury, and ended up with pretty minor roles. For seniors who know the "system," losing physical practice time doesn't matter nearly as much, so long as they aren't also sleeping through film sessions to learn about their opponents.

At the risk of sounding like Allen Iverson, is there something to be learned here, perhaps about how much/how intense we conduct our practices late in the season on heavily experienced teams? Or am I reading too far into things with Curry and Kelly and a relatively small sample size? I've never really bought into the "more minutes=tired legs" argument, but since minutes in practice probably vastly outnumber minutes of game time, I guess I could be convinced of an analogous argument there. Maybe someone who sees more of the inner workings or how our practices are run can comment.

[uh_no]

honestly, how the hell they [seth/ryan] gonna make their teammates better by practicin'



in all reality, though, I would guess that by this point in the season, not a lot of work goes into US, but a lot of our work goes into THEM, and what I mean by that is, with only a few days game to game, I would imagine much of that time is spent prepping for the next opponent. I'd imagine today and tomorrow we'd prep for VT (given we've already played them once...same with UNC), as well as work on anything that went particularly poorly in our last games (inbounds plays anyone? some defensive rotations perhaps)

with respect to individual players, you could kelly or mason or seth on any team in the country, and they'd be productive, they're just really good players, and to some extent that allowed ryan to pop back so quickly (not to mention the 15 games he's played with the team...)...though i'm sure K can pick out offensive and defensive issues that stemmed from not being used to kelly on the floor for 2 months

so i guess ultimately, while individual players may not need the practice, there are almost always things the team as a whole could be working on (just don't tell AI)

[Duke 81 LA]

"Practice? Practice? You talkin' practice?"
Allen Iverson had it right!

honestly, how the hell they [seth/ryan] gonna make their teammates better by practicin'



in all reality, though, I would guess that by this point in the season, not a lot of work goes into US, but a lot of our work goes into THEM, and what I mean by that is, with only a few days game to game, I would imagine much of that time is spent prepping for the next opponent. I'd imagine today and tomorrow we'd prep for VT (given we've already played them once...same with UNC), as well as work on anything that went particularly poorly in our last games (inbounds plays anyone? some defensive rotations perhaps)

with respect to individual players, you could kelly or mason or seth on any team in the country, and they'd be productive, they're just really good players, and to some extent that allowed ryan to pop back so quickly (not to mention the 15 games he's played with the team...)...though i'm sure K can pick out offensive and defensive issues that stemmed from not being used to kelly on the floor for 2 months

so i guess ultimately, while individual players may not need the practice, there are almost always things the team as a whole could be working on (just don't tell AI)

[Edouble]

Kelly would have had 50 if he had had a full practice.

[nocilla]

At the risk of sounding like Allen Iverson, is there something to be learned here, perhaps about how much/how intense we conduct our practices late in the season on heavily experienced teams? Or am I reading too far into things with Curry and Kelly and a relatively small sample size? I've never really bought into the "more minutes=tired legs" argument, but since minutes in practice probably vastly outnumber minutes of game time, I guess I could be convinced of an analogous argument there. Maybe someone who sees more of the inner workings or how our practices are run can comment.

I can't comment on inner workings, but I do remember this being brought up in 2010 I believe. Of course the issue of our stars playing heavy minutes and eventually wearing down was brought up since Singler, Scheyer, and Smith were playing a lot of minutes. I seem to remember Coach K commenting in a couple post-game pressers about knowing how to rest them during the week and taking it easy on them in practice. They were also upperclassmen that knew the system and their roles in the system.