Originally Posted by
Music man55
Talking about the 2011 team, I don’t think it mattered much what would have happened. Yes, Williams had a career night for Arizona and all that, but I remember we nearly lost to a Michigan team on OT the weekend before, a Michigan team that we were easily more talented than. It could be that the 2011 team peaked just a little too soon.
That 2011 team was firing on all cylinders when it went through the ACC tournament and won. The first game in the NCAA tournament was against Hampton, if I remember correctly. They offered little to no resistance, but also little chance of really learning how to reintegrate Kyrie.
Yes, Kyrie was a transcendent player; perhaps a once-in-a-career player for a coach to have on his team. But to put him on the floor meant taking somebody else off the floor; somebody who had spent the entire season building up cohesion with his teammates.
Would we have lost to Arizona with Kyrie on the bench? Who knows? Maybe. Perhaps even probably. There is no way to go back in time and find out. But to this day I still think there is something to the team identity and comfort that the team had built playing without him that might have been a little lost when he came back.
Our best chance to win the title that year was for Kyrie to stay healthy and play the entire season; no question about that. And if I were coaching, I would undoubtedly have put him back into the lineup as soon as he was ready to play, even if that was the first game of the NCAA tournament, just like Coach K did. It's all water under the bridge now, anyway.
"We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world." --M. Proust