PDA

View Full Version : "Good Coach, Bad Mentor"



Bay Area Duke Fan
03-18-2007, 08:19 PM
This weekend's Wall Street Journal has an interesting article on big time college basketball coaches' "coaching trees." It discusses how some basketball programs are better than others at grooming good head coaches.

Coach K (along with Roy, Tubby, Lute and Knight) is listed as one of the "worst mentors." The article cites Bender, Snyder and O'Toole as former K assistants that have not been successful as head coaches. The article was obviously written before Amaker was fired by Michigan.

Listed as the "best mentors" are Pitino, Sendak, Calhoun, Boeheim and Izzo.

dukediv2013
03-18-2007, 10:27 PM
Yeah Calhoun is a great mentor...sarcasm... Dave Leitao or how ever you spell it, is one of the most demeaning coaches in the NCAA... he absolutely embarrasses his players in front of one another during the games and doesn't care what people think of him... he is an obnoxious guy to listen to as well... I liked him until I found this out about him

lavell12
03-18-2007, 10:45 PM
Wasn't Mike Brea of Notre Dame a deciple of K?

Snyder was a good coach until Mizzo got put on probation.

throatybeard
03-18-2007, 10:46 PM
This presumes that Coaches spend a lot of time on their offspring in the profession just as they do on their own current players [and asst coaches]. I don't know if that's the case.

Not that this analogy is necessarily apt, but I don't expect my advisor to hold my hand anymore. He's got current grad students whose hands need holding.

I don't know how much time Krzyzewski or any of the other "bad mentors" is supposed to devote to making sure Amaker and Snyder succeed at coaching.

hurleyfor3
03-19-2007, 12:14 AM
The Wall Street Journal... now there's a trusted name in insightful sports analysis.

For those of you who write letters to the editor over this kind of thing, in Friday's Journal an otherwise pedestrian column on page W11 called Duke "the Darth Vader of college basketball."

dukemsu
03-19-2007, 01:40 AM
I don't see how K should be held responsible for what happens at Mizzou, Michigan, Delaware, or Notre Dame. I remember an SI interview with him where he responded to a question about whether or not he consults with Coach Knight on game plans with the classic K quote "C'mon, man.". This just seems like more media piling on K, who's a pretty easy target at the moment.

K may help the assistants get jobs, but from then on, I think it's more about circumstance, the coach's performance, and good old-fashioned luck than anything K is doing. K has his hands full where he is, as do Boeheim, Calhoun, Izzo, and the other reputed Mentors.

dukemsu

SavannahDevil
03-19-2007, 02:57 AM
It's just another boot from the opportunistic, "kick-em-while-their-down" crowd.
Screw 'em.

BluBones
03-19-2007, 09:54 AM
Bob Knight a bad mentor? Gee, I for one think he did a great job with Coach K.

Karl Beem
03-19-2007, 10:00 AM
This presumes that Coaches spend a lot of time on their offspring in the profession just as they do on their own current players [and asst coaches]. I don't know if that's the case.

Not that this analogy is necessarily apt, but I don't expect my advisor to hold my hand anymore. He's got current grad students whose hands need holding.

I don't know how much time Krzyzewski or any of the other "bad mentors" is supposed to devote to making sure Amaker and Snyder succeed at coaching.

How about, none.

wiscodevil
03-19-2007, 10:16 AM
this replaces the k-bashing theory that duke players suck in the pros b/c of K.

next - look for him to be the fall guy for chevrolet(?) or nike when their stocks plunge.

VAGentleman05
03-19-2007, 10:42 AM
Yeah Calhoun is a great mentor...sarcasm... Dave Leitao or how ever you spell it, is one of the most demeaning coaches in the NCAA... he absolutely embarrasses his players in front of one another during the games and doesn't care what people think of him... he is an obnoxious guy to listen to as well... I liked him until I found this out about him

Yeah, the guy really sucks. ACC Coach of the Year, co-regular season championship, and UVA's first NCAA tournament victory since 1995. Oh, and in EVERY published interview with players they rave about how happy they are to play with him.

throatybeard
03-19-2007, 10:47 AM
And he hasn't built any statues to Taymon Domzalski.

jagger
03-19-2007, 01:54 PM
I haven't read the article, but I think when they talk about mentoring, they don't mean currently. In the graduate school analogy someone else used, these coaches are K's former grad students, ones who have benefited (in the past) from working under him, and would have, in theory, developed their coaching abilities at Duke. That's why they were hired elsewhere.

This isn't a new idea. You read about coaching trees all the time. That doesn't mean that K is actively manipulating all these coaches and teams at once.

bird
03-19-2007, 02:44 PM
Yeah, the guy really sucks. ACC Coach of the Year, co-regular season championship, and UVA's first NCAA tournament victory since 1995. Oh, and in EVERY published interview with players they rave about how happy they are to play with him.

Leitao is demanding in the "you have to respect the taskmaster" kind of way -- no way a Duke fan can complain about that. After Gillen, quite a change of pace.

My only knock on Leitao is what appears to be a pattern of problems winning against good teams on the road.

Mal
03-19-2007, 03:42 PM
I think it's easy to be a little oversensitive about this. Sure, K's not actively "mentoring" Tommy Amaker anymore. Nor, however, is Tom Izzo mentoring Tom Crean or whoever else at this point. There's no denying the fact that at the moment, no former Krzyzewski assistants are on the A-list, or probably even the B-list, while other guys' former assistants are. That's certainly disappointing for Duke fans, who've watched many of those guys play at Duke in addition to be assistant coaches there. It also makes us fear for the day when Coach K finally puts down the clipboard. Is Dawkins different? What if we have to go outside the family? Will campus explode?

Regardless, so what? It's much ado about nothing, and the whole idea is pointless unless you're trying to score points against someone or give someone else undue credit. Head coaches are interested in the success of their own team and program, and should be judged solely on that. Their responsibility is not to groom future head coaches. Why should they be graded on something that's not in their job description? It's like grading house paints on their smell, instead of appearance or washability or cost - it's totally irrelevant to what matters about them and goes away when it dries, anyway. Weak analogy, I know.

The success of one's assistants once they leave can vary based on any number of factors, including the system and style of the head coach, how much or little of those is absorbed by assistants, and the jobs and programs at which assistants end up. Those are much more important than the mentoring qualities of the root of the tree. Does anyone think Dave Leitao is doing well at Viriginia mostly because of whatever grooming Jim Calhoun did? Or is it more likely he developed a personal style while working in Storrs, that had little to do any "Head Coaching 101" sessions with Calhoun, that has happened to fit well at the places he's been?

Who cares whose former assistants are doing the best as head coaches? It's meaningless. Not to mention the smallness of the sample size. Obviously the knowledge is there for Duke assistants to soak up, based on the level of success K has had. Whether they soak it up or mimic him successfully or not isn't his concern. Not that he doesn't hope for them to succeed.

Hurleyfor3, I saw that loathsome column, too. I was less upset at his calling Duke the Darth Vader of college hoops than I was at three or four other things that totally discredited the writer. One, he's a huge Illinois fan and almost named his child Robert Montgomery? He's lying on one account or the other. Second, this guy admits to being so into an Indiana-Temple game that he missed witnessing the birth of his son? If that's a joke, it's a dumb one. But he provided way too much detail for it to be a joke, making it simply pathetic. Third, he went out of his way to get in a shot at our "pampered" star JJ Redick for being upset at the end of the LSU game last year. Big freaking deal, first of all, but more importantly, it continues to irk me how so many people fixate on Redick putting his face in his shirt after the game as if it says something about his character, while everyone seems to have forgotten that, if I remember it correctly, Adam Morrison laid down at midcourt and actually started crying before the buzzer even went off in Gonzaga's loss last year. Finally, not to move this off-topic, but he used the tournament for a political argument, which is thoroughly lame. He presented the NCAA tournament as metaphor for everything that's right with America, where anyone can make it to the top, based mainly on George Mason last year and then some selected first and second round giant killings. I don't know whether it's the lameness of doing this or the fact that the exact opposite could just as easily be claimed based on the same facts that was more off-putting. George Mason didn't make it to the top. They got emphatically put back in their place by Florida and the other two big money programs in the Final Four, and didn't even make it back in the field this year. Their success, and the accompanying excitement, is the exception that proves the rule. The "haves" win it all pretty much every year in the NCAA tournament, and they will again this time. When was the last time a power conference didn't take the title home? You could just as easily make the case that the NCAA tournament is a perfect symbol for a rotting arisotcracy taking root in America. Talk to me when a 16 beats a 1 seed!

VAGentleman05
03-19-2007, 03:45 PM
Leitao is demanding in the "you have to respect the taskmaster" kind of way -- no way a Duke fan can complain about that. After Gillen, quite a change of pace.

My only knock on Leitao is what appears to be a pattern of problems winning against good teams on the road.

You're right about that...winning big road games (or ANY games outside the state of Virginia) is a huge problem at UVA. It's actually gotten somewhat better under Leitao, though, with big wins this year at NCSU, Clemson, & MD. But yeah, we're still a totally different team at home than on the road.